Occupying the Marketplace

Author(s):  
Katie Jarvis

This chapter analyzes the economically crucial and conceptually volatile debates over public space in the marketplace. It traces how the king’s public domain became national domain and how this transformation affected the ways that citizens pursued particular interests in les Halles. During the Old Regime, the king had issued an edict that permitted some especially indigent Dames to secure market spots before other retailers. He had also granted one company the privilege of renting shelters to these qualified Dames before others. However, when the private company attempted to renew its royal contract during the Revolution, clashes arose over the right to and regulation of public domain. During the disputes, the Dames who were not advantaged by the king’s edict seized new practices of citizenship to claim shelters and trading places. They harnessed revolutionary discourses to mark the earth as national property, attack monopoly-holders as privileged leeches, and secure economic exemptions based on their work’s public utility. As they justified their personal profits on public space, the Dames staked out their place in the body politic.

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 520-536
Author(s):  
Katie Jarvis

Abstract Most studies of socio-economic rights in the French Revolution have focused on how officials and other deliverers of aid struggled to redefine assistance, rather than on how recipients themselves contributed to the idea. In contrast, this article centres on poor Parisian market women called the Dames des Halles to bring to light the voices, discourses, and actions of individuals demanding rights and assistance. The Dames had relied on charity and privilege to conduct their commerce during the Old Regime, but the Revolution upended their advantages. Balancing discourses of humanity and utility, the Dames sought to recalibrate their place in the body politic in order to maintain occupational exemptions, favourable commercial positions, and exceptional access to public space. Their battles reveal how everyday citizens and the National Assembly first struggled to reinterpret socio-economic assistance as corrupt privilege, as the state’s civic duty, or as exemptions earned by poor working citizens.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hegarty

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.


Author(s):  
Tong-Keun Min

I attempt to look into the issue of the ranks of values comprehensively and progressively. Anti-values can be classified into the following six categories by ascending order: (1) the act of destroying the earth-of annihilating humankind and all other living organisms; (2) the act of mass killing of people by initiating a war or committing treason; (3) the act of murdering or causing death to a human being; (4) the act of damaging the body of a human being; (5) the act of greatly harming society; (6) all other crimes not covered by the above. Higher values can be classified into the following five categories in descending rank: (1) absolute values such as absolute truth, absolute goodness, absolute beauty and absolute holiness; (2) the act of contributing to the development and happiness of humankind; (3) the act of contributing to the nation or the state; (4) the act of contributing to the regional society; (5) the act of cultivating oneself and managing one's family well. Generally, people tend to pursue happiness more eagerly than goodness, but because goodness is the higher value than happiness, we ought to pursue goodness more eagerly. In helping people to get the right sense of values and to internalize it, education and enlightenment of citizens based on the guidance of conscience rather than compulsion will be highly effective.


Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (159) ◽  
pp. 23-51
Author(s):  
Richard A. Lee Jr.

In Defensor Pacis Marsilius of Padua grounds the legitimacy of the kingdom, or the state (civitas), on the peace that rule provides the citizens. Looking at Aristotle’s claim that the civitas strives to be like an animal in which all parts in the right proportion for the sake of health, Marsilius argues that ‘the parts of the kingdom or state will be well disposed for the sake of peace [tranquilitas].’ Marsilius goes on to define peace as the agreeable ‘belonging together’ of all members of the kingdom or the state. In this way, Marsilius moves away from a theological ground of the legitimacy of the state towards one that is entirely secular. However, the ground is an unstable one in that it acknowledges the fact that the ‘members’ of the body politic are characterised by difference. As such, the ground of legitimate authority will be characterised as much by force as by peace or by the relation of force to peace.


1907 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wilford Garner

The right of the people, acting within the bounds of the law and through organs constituted in conformity with the prescriptions of the existing constitution, to alter, amend, or abolish their form of government whenever they deem it necessary to their safety and happiness is, in effect, declared by practically every American bill of rights to be not only fundamental but inalienable and indefeasible. The phraseology differs in some of them but the substance is the same in all. Without such a right the mistakes and errors of the past could not be eliminated from the body politic nor the accumulated wisdom and experience of other States utilized. Without it, the fundamental maxim that constitutions grow instead of being made would be meaningless and political development impossible. An acute thinker has well observed that no constitution can expect to be permanent unless it guarantees progress as well as order. Political conservatism is a virtue too often trampled upon by statesmen, but it has its limits, and, in its exaggerated form, becomes a source of revolution. The amending power has been aptly compared to a safety valve which ought to be so adjusted as not to discharge its peculiar function with too great facility lest it become an escape pipe for party passion and political prejudice, nor with such difficulty that the force needed to induce action will explode the machine.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (SI) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Hei Ting Wong

Singapore is known to have a citizenry loyal to its one-party dominated government. Cherian George refers Singapore as the “Air-conditioned Nation,” wherein free speech is sacrificed for economic stability in this metaphorical or virtual greenhouse and fostered a controlled and docile politic. Dissent from members of registered opposition parties or ordinary citizens, however, has been voiced during “illegal gatherings” in public places. Many of these attempts, both purposeful and accidental, challenge rules designed to limit the citizenry’s ability to voice publicly. In this paper, I examine these civil disobedient acts under the framework of construction and politics of socially- and mentally-constructed space in connection to the laws of Singapore. Utilizing the ideas of space as defined by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, I analyze three separate accounts of assembly and/or procession. I identify the relevant laws of Singapore and examine how these laws are interpreted and applied by law enforcement, revealing a tension between space and the body politic. Politics of space is a concept usually connected to social class; yet, class consciousness is what the Singaporean government strives to eliminate through the control of ideology and by limiting the freedom of speech in public spaces. My contribution examines the relationship between space and politics, reflecting the conflicts between the government, which has the power over the use of places and citizens who would like to express ideas differently from governmental-led ideologies physically and publicly in these places, and the opposition’s actions in this virtually-caged public space named Singapore.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Christopher James Cox ◽  
Mirko Guaralda

It could be argued that architecture has an inherent social responsibility to enrich the urban and spatial environments for the city’s occupants. However, how we define quality, and how ‘places’ can be designed to be fair and equitable, catering for individuals on a humanistic and psychological level, is often not clearly addressed. Lefebvre discusses the idea of the ‘right to the city’; the belief that public space design should facilitate freedom of expression and incite a sense of spatial ownership for its occupants in public/commercial precincts. Lefebvre also points out the importance of sensory experience in the urban environment. “Street-scape theatrics” are performative activities that summarise these two concepts, advocating the ‘right to the city’ by way of art as well as providing sensual engagement for city users. Literature discusses the importance of Street-scape Theatrics however few sources attempt to discuss this topic in terms of how to design these spaces/places to enhance the city on both a sensory and political level. This research, grounded in political theory, investigates the case of street music, in particular busking, in the city of Brisbane, Australia. Street culture is a notion that already exists in Brisbane, but it is heavily controlled especially in central locations. This study discusses how sensory experience of the urban environment in Brisbane can be enriched through the design for busking; multiple case studies, interviews, observations and thematic mappings provide data to gather an understanding of how street performers see and understand the built form. Results are sometime surprisingly incongruous with general assumptions in regards to street artist as well as the established political and ideological framework, supporting the idea that the best and most effective way of urban hacking is working within the system. Ultimately, it was found that the Central Business District in Brisbane, Australia, could adopt certain political and design tactics which attempt to reconcile systematic quality control with freedom of expression into the public/commercial sphere, realism upheld. This can bridge the gap between the micro scale of the body and the macro of the political economy through freedom of expression, thus celebrating the idiosyncratic nature of the city.


1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-703 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Overacker

In The Politics of Equality, Leslie Lipson points out that modern party organization has “exorcised some of the old devils from the body politic but has invoked others that are new and, as yet, untamed.” Applying to parties John Dewey's statement that“Individuals can find the security and protection that are prerequisites for freedom only in association with others—and then the organization these associations take on, as a measure of securing their efficiency, limits the freedom of those who have entered into them…. We have now a kind of molluscan organization, soft individuals within and a hard constrictive shell without.…,”Lipson adds: “How to harden the individuals and to soften the shell, both to the right degree, remains one of the outstanding political problems of our century.”American parties are extremely soft-shelled mollusks—if, indeed, they have any shell at all. In contrast, the Australian Labor party has as hard a shell as any mollusk in the political zoo.


1961 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-140
Author(s):  
H. J. Rose

When, at an unknown but manifestly early period, speculation regarding the duration and destiny of the world began, the thinkers of those days had two analogies to guide them, and consequently two divergent conclusions were reached. The first was the recurrent cycle of the seasons; the second, the growth, maturity, decay and death of the human and all other animal bodies. Reasoning from the one, some arrived at the conclusion that the world, at least the earth and mankind, had passed and would always continue to pass through a series of epochs, limited in number, which when they had ended would recommence, and so on indefinitely. From the other datum the result was reached that as a man dies and does not come to life again (for even the fairly wide-spread and early doctrine of reincarnation supposed only that the soul would be given a new earthly body of some kind, not that the whole individual would return), so the earth, or the universe generally, would grow old and die and that would be the end of it. It is the purpose of this paper to examine these two ideas and one or two offshoots of them as they are known to have appeared in the two classical civilizations of Europe, and especially in Greece, and if possible to draw some tentative conclusions as to which, if either, can be found more characteristic of native thought.


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