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Public Space--Urban Spaces Of Multiple And Diverse Publics, Antti Moelsae

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shopping centers, hotel lobbies and - as was recently reported - McDonald's restaurants have been appropriated as social and political spaces by the public, but then encounter resistance by the owners of those spaces. Shopping centers, which have come to replace urban public space around the world, are notorious for limiting the modes of use and actively prohibiting forms of political expression. The legal status of commercial spaces that substitute for traditional public spaces is still unclear. Much of the critique of privatization of public space has been directed towards these enclosed spaces, the ownership of which is unambiguously private. …