Margaret Crawford

Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles over Public Space in Los Angeles

This article, in response to architectural “narratives of loss” lamenting the disappearance of public space, argues that urban residents are constantly remaking public space and redefining the public sphere through their lived experience. Following Nancy Fraser, this article questions the insistence on a unified public, the desire for fixed categories, and the rigid concepts of public and private space that characterize the bourgeois public sphere and proposes contestation, competing “counter-publics,” and the blurring of private and public as equally significant aspects of the public sphere. In Los Angeles, the struggles of two “counter-publics,” street vendors and the homeless, over use of the streets and public places reveal the emergence of another discourse of public space, suggesting new forms of “insurgent citizenship” and offering new political arenas.

Bertram Goodhue, Walter Douglas and Tyrone, New Mexico

Bertram Goodhue is well known for his important public and ecclesiastical buildings, but his project for the company town in Tyrone, New Mexico, abandoned shortly after construction and eventually swallowed up by mine pits, is surely one of the most intriguing. Reactionary politics and public relations led Walter Douglas of Phelps-Dodge to hire Goodhue to design a company town for miners in New Mexico, and politics and declining copper prices led him to abandon it only five years later, despite the merits of the architecture and planning.