Judit Bodnar

Reconfiguring Private and Public: State, Capital and New Housing Developments in Berlin and Budapest

This article explores how new planned housing developments have contributed to the restructuring of public and private space in contemporary Berlin and Budapest, two cities whose globalisation was complicated by major political and economic transformation during the past two decades. It draws on and extends research on gated communities to develop a relational approach that more adequately captures international variations of this housing form and the interplay of public and private space, actors and strategies, a new configuration of which defines the latest wave of these developments. Through this perspective, it is demonstrated how and why planned housing developments in Berlin and Budapest are different from the cases most frequently discussed in the gated community literature, and also from each other. The comparative case study highlights how housing offers an excellent research site to grasp the reconfiguration of the state and the complexity of private and public at the local level.

Reclaiming public space

Public space is partly what makes cities, and as such it has been at the core of urban studies and many disciplines ranging from sociology, geography, political science, anthropology to planning, architecture, design and philosophy. As one of the most multidisciplinary journals in the field, Urban Studies has been instrumental in exposing the controversies of public space during its 50 years of publication. A careful search through the archives of the journal, however, reveals that this interest has been rather uneven. While in the period before the 1990s a mere six articles dealt with aspects of public space, there has been a remarkable upsurge since then, which resulted in close to 300 articles. Somewhat paradoxically, the widely pronounced death of public space in the early 1990s thus marked the beginning of an extended debate on the topic of public space itself. This Virtual Special Issue (VSI) sets out to reinvigorate the debate once more in a critical synthesis of the important points that set the terms of the discussion and still reverberate in urban studies, by hoping to inspire new directions which touch on many disciplines. Using the death of public space as a counterpoint, the introductory article by Judit Bodnar reflects on the ‘life’ of public space, its cycles, forms and locations. It reviews the intellectual history of the main controversies that have kept discussions of public space alive, and further argues that attention to tensions, variations and comparisons can both reorient some of the fundamental questions of the debate itself and suggest research agendas for the future. The collection of 15 articles reflects first on the nature and specificity of public space, its historicity, its relationship to democratic politics, and then continues with the discussion of the most contested issues in the contemporary transformation of public space – privatisation, commercialisation and securitisation. Geographical diversity in the collection is not a mere gesture of politeness in a confessedly Western/Northern-dominated urban scholarship; nor is it simply driven by a desire to state that there are differences in the way public space is conceived of and operates in various places. Thinking about informality in Latin America, state and class in India, commercialisation in Vietnam, or security in other than North American ‘Western’ cities is meant to disrupt general urban theory and the public–private distinction.

Roquefort vs Big Mac: Globalization and Its Others

Being an ‘antiglobalizationist’ comes easy as a political label but as a theoretical endeavor, it is more difficult. Globalization encompasses a bundle of meanings. The paper disentangles some of the multiple implications of globalization and its purported enemies through the Big Mac-Roquefort opposition; it examines the taste differential of the two products, their symbolism and their stakes in the construction of ethnic, cultural and class identities. The simplistic opposition between globalization and its enemies is reinterpreted in the context of commercialization, Americanization, democratization, high-and massculture and-consumption, only to be cast in the age-old tensions of modernity.