Grounding Citizenship: Toward a Political Psychology ofPublic Spacepops_866 123..143Andrs Di MassoUniversity of Barcelona

This article considers the political nature of public space and explores its psychological relevance as a naturalarena of citizenship. Drawing on literature in social psychology, environmental psychology, and politicalgeography, the article addresses how common understandings of normative behavior in public are often basedon particular constructions of place and people-space relations. In so doing, it shows how such culturallyshared locational notions are essentially contested in relation to their political significance and ideologicalorientation within a particular public socio-spatial context. It is argued that claims for and demands on publicspace are enshrined in broader struggles over the psychological boundaries of belonging, identity, and civicentitlements which are central to the contentious issue of citizenship. This is illustrated through the analysis ofan emblematic struggle over a public space located in the Old Town of Barcelona between 1999 and 2007,triggered by the social appropriation of an undeveloped urban lot. The article pinpoints how considering thematerial dimension of public space may also enrich existing psychological approaches to citizenship.KEY WORDS: public space, psychological significance, citizenship, right to the city, territoriality

Recent research in social psychology has stressed the fundamental role of space, place, andenvironmental categories in the constitution of subjectivity and the regulation of social interaction(Aiello & Bonaiuto, 2003; Bonaiuto & Bonnes, 2000; Dixon & Durrheim, 2000). Mostly assuminga discursive epistemological framework (Billig, 1987; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell,1987), this emerging trend encompasses a varied set of approaches interested in the social construc-tion of space. The main topics investigated include the normative meaning of morally connotedspatial discourse regulating neighborhood relations (e.g., Stokoe & Wallwork, 2003); the languageof place as a system of rhetorical warrants reproducing ideologies of racial exclusion (e.g., Dixon& Durrheim, 2004; Dixon, Foster, Durrheim, & Wilbraham, 1994); the role of place-discourse inwomens narratives of identity (e.g., Taylor, 2005); or the value of landscape rhetoric in theconstruction of nationhood (e.g., Wallwork & Dixon, 2004). Building on a well-known idea inenvironmental psychology and human geography, according to which personal experience isunavoidably located (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983; Tuan, 1977), the main point made bythe bulk of these studies is that our individual and shared interpretations of space and place-behaviorare also culture-bound discursive resources that accomplish functions in larger sequences of social(inter)action, often echoing broad ideological processes.

A particular strand within this set of studies has more recently been concerned with the politicalsignificance of peoples psychological representations of space, accepting that these shape peo-

Political Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2012doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2011.00866.x

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ples understandings of who belongs, the rights and freedoms that people may claim and exercise,decisions where we feel at home and out of place, where we may move to, or avoid, and muchmore besides (Hopkins & Dixon, 2006, p. 174). According to these authors, places are relevant notjust because they afford and shape psychological experiences, but also because such psychologicalconstructs may be socially deployed to provoke particular political effects aligned with peoplesindividual or collective interests and demands. This justifies Hopkins and Dixons claim for politicalpsychology to recover the micropolitics of peoples everyday constructions of place and space (p.174). This task involves both acknowledging the representations of place which imply psychologicalnotions of who we are, where we belong, and to whom we are committed, as well as the discursiveprocesses that make place-representations work as symbolic devices with a political value.

This twofold political and psychological value of place representations is particularly clearwhen applied to the public space, the stage upon which the drama of communal life unfolds(Carr, Francis, Rivlin, & Stone, 1992, p. 3). Public spaces are the natural arena of citizenship,where individuals, groups, and crowds become political subjects. They are sociophysical settingswhere public life occurs on the basis of open visibility, scrutiny, and concern, supporting publicinterest and citizens well-being (Brill, 1989). In streets, squares, parks, and loose urban spaces,society renders itself visible as citizenship finds in them a place to be enacted and demanded(Borja & Mux, 2003).

On a psychological level, citizens behavior in public is regulated by normative representationsthat tell us what actions are (in)appropriate, which spatial uses are (not) expected under specificcircumstances, and who is (not) a legitimate public within the confines of normal coexistence(Cresswell, 1996; Dixon, Levine, & McAuley, 2006). Ordinary understandings of normal anddeviant behavior in public are psychologically relevant at least for two reasons. First, they inform andorient the ways in which we perceive and perform everyday sociospatial behavior in the public realm.Second, they can be rhetorically used and contested in order to warrant specific spatial claims andactions which may be politically controversial (e.g., legitimizing the exclusion of social groups,justifying socially unwanted urban development programs, transgressing a by-law regulating inci-vilities, etc.). This way, public space shows its vocation as a politically and psychologically mean-ingful place in the ordinary lives of citizens.

These opening comments support Hopkins and Dixons (2006) proposal to seriously considerplace, and particularly public space, a relevant topic in political psychologists research agenda. Thisarticle contributes further arguments by exploring the political-psychological significance of publicspace with regard to matters of citizenship. Existing psychological approaches to citizenship haveneglected the study of public space as its primary setting, as much as the scarce psychologicalperspectives on public space have downplayed its fundamental significance in the personal and socialexperience of being a citizen (or not). The article broaches this conceptual gap, analyzing thepsychological assumptions and political implications of public space discourse as related to citizen-ship enactments and demands. In this frame, public space is tackled as the primary place wherecitizenship status and space-discourse become materially embodied and performed.

The Political Nature of Public Space

The idea that public space has an intrinsically political significance seems to be widely sup-ported. Following Carr et al. (1992), it is impossible to understand public life and the spaces inwhich it takes place without recognising the political nature of public activities (p. 45). Public lifeimportantly depends on social and political contexts that make public spaces work for the commongood. The public space reflects social exchanges between individual and collective affairs, featuringpersonal rights that are both politically and spatially grounded, such as the right to the city(Lefebvre, 1968; Mitchell, 2003) and freedom of action in the urban open space (Rivlin, 1994).

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However, freedom and rights in public space are limited by safety requirements, private inter-vention, and cultural standards of moral order and decorum (Dixon et al., 2006). Hence social life inpublic spaces is informed and regulated by a value-loaded political tension between liberty andcontrol. This tension frames democratic life in the city, both enabling and constraining the citizensexercise of free right to the city.

This last term complicates the truism according to which public life must be at the service of anelusive common good. While accepting that ideally democratic public spaces must be responsive tothe citizens needs, rights, and demands (Carr et al., 1992), in practice different sectors of thepublicusers, urban managers, private owners, public authorities, designers, civic organizations,social movements, etc.often hold contested views of what is expected and what can be claimed inthe public territory (Francis, 1989; Zube, 1986). Spatial conflicts may therefore be related toopposing conceptions of who has right of use, occupation, control, management, and transformationof one public space under disputed criteria of legitimacy (Burte, 2003).

One structural friction has been theorized by critical studies in urban geography and urbansociology alerting us to a steady decline of public space due to its progressive privatization.According to this view, contemporary city-making processes in Western cities tend to createhighly commodified urban environments that look like public spaces but are constrained by thegoals of private capital (e.g., shopping malls, private open plazas, theme park-neighborhoods, etc.;Low & Smith, 2006; Sorkin, 1992). Rules of free access and public use in these spaces aretransformed into restrictive criteria of admission by strict surveillance devices (Fyfe & Bannister,1996), territorial markers leading to militarized landscapes (Davis, 1992), and social segregationof the undesirable to protect the middle-class citizen (Boddy, 1992; Mitchell, 1995). On aneighborhood level, the creation of dead public spaces (Sennett, 1974) is represented by design-led urban regeneration programs and gentrification processes attracting high-income dwellers andentrepreneurial activities to the detriment of lower-class local inhabitants (e.g., see Hamnett, 1991;Harvey, 2005; Smith, 1996; Zukin, 1995). Adding to, but also criticizing, this terminal diagnosisof public space, another strand of empirical studies has highlighted the irreducible dimension ofcontestation and political resistance that frequently accompanies the domestication guidelines ofdominant public space making (e.g., Atkinson, 2003; Jackson, 1998; Staeheli & Thompson,1997).

Ultimately, these studies that stress the political significance of public space have neverthelessneglected at least two psychologically related dimensions of life in public. A first issue relates to thenature of space as a psychological category of representation, whose embedded meanings and valuesare often socially and politically contested. To the extent that such spatial meanings and values areidentity-related, locational disputes in public spaces will be both politically meaningful andpsychologically consequential. A second underspecified issue points directly to psychologicalassumptions of belonging, civic entitlements, and normative behavior shaping social life in publicspaces, which lie at the very core of citizenship matters. The following sections address this doubleneglect.

The Psychological Significance of Public Space

Public spaces are shaped by urban policies, economic forces, and cultural trends in contexts ofpolitical power enabling and constraining specific forms of human interaction (Cresswell, 2004;Gieryn, 2000). However, public spaces are psychologically significant because they are geographicalspots involving complex patterns of material aspects, meanings, values, social activities, and evenprofound existential experiences (Canter, 1977; Relph, 1976; Stokols & Shumaker, 1981). Environ-mental psychology has accounted for how people and space become mutually constituted andregulated, affording some concepts that are useful in order to study public spaces.

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First, public spaces can be central to peoples self-definitions, both individually and collectively,so individuals know who I am or who we are just by locating themselves and others. Place-identity has been referred to as a specific subidentity in its own right, and urban-place identity asa pattern of beliefs, feelings, and expectations regarding public spaces and places and, even moreimportantly, a dimension of competence relevant to how adequately the individual uses thesephysical settings as well as the appropriate strategies for successfully navigating through thesettings (Proshansky, 1978, p. 167). Urban-place identity therefore refers to a part of the self that isderived from socialization in city life, including social attributes, skills, differentiated public socialroles, and ways of solving problems in public spaces.

Second, belonging to different social groups and having different social roles influence howpublic space and identity relate to each other. Lalli (1992) referred to an urban-related identitywith the psychological function of providing positive self-evaluations for the residents (or, wecould add, the users) of a place. He argued that urban environments have a social image, or a setof symbolic meanings (embodied in social presences, spatial features, cultural celebrations, etc.)that makes them singular and unique, socially differentiating residents and users from the rest ofthe people and providing a subjective feeling of place-based selfness and otherness. Therefore,peoples senses of self can derive from their identification with a social category whose membersbelong to a certain urban area. This view treats place-identity as a social identity (Tajfel & Turner,1986) and implies that urban-related identities will be motivated by the general goal of maximiz-ing positive self-distinction compared to place-based outgroups (Bonaiuto, Breakwell, & Cano,1996).

A third psychological notion which is deemed important to public space dynamics is territo-riality, a pattern of behavior and attitudes (. . .) based on perceived, attempted, or actual control ofa definable physical space (. . .) that may involve habitual occupation, defense, personalization, andmarking of it (Gifford, 1987, p. 120). Public spaces may work as territories whenever people try toexert control over it, eventually leading to spatial conflicts that shed light on the two main functionsof territoriality: regulation of social interaction and the display of identity (Brower, 1980). Inneighborhood and community spaces territorial behavior primarily indicates and reinforces aningroup sense of who belongs to the place (i.e., Lallis urban-related identities). Also, competition fora public site as the only space available for carrying out incompatible activities might lead tostruggles over the uses of that site, sometimes involving occupation, eviction, aggression, andviolence (Bell, Fischer, Baum, & Greene, 1996). Political violence will appear via territorialitywhen all other means have been exhausted, when an individual is unaware of alternatives, or whenan individual is denied other meanssuch as when some groups, through poverty or discrimination,are denied equal access to the justice system (Gifford, 1987, p. 131). Similarly, Merelman (1988)underlines this political facet of territoriality asserting that territory is an important resource in thestruggle for power and status (. . .) liable to political manipulation (p. 579).

Hence, both psychologically and politically speaking, through territorial behavior space reifiespower and organizes the identities of, and social interactions between, the controlled and thecontroller (Sack, 1986). Power imbalances become visible in public spaces whenever sociallydisadvantaged individuals (e.g., homeless, squatters, drunks, etc.) are sanctioned and removed fromthe urban territory for using it in ways that defy the dominant conception of order in the city-space,breaching a micropolitics of the urban environment that calls for disciplined sociospatial behavior(Foucault, 1986). Power reveals itself then as an imposed or self-applied restriction of freedom ofaction in the public space (Lukes, 2005). Conversely, sociospatial resistance (e.g., against urbandevelopment programs perceived as exclusionary) may embody a challenge to dominant powerarrangements of the city space via territorial occupation of the public space. As Mitchell (1995) andSibley (1995) have noted, the demands of social justice by the socially disadvantaged in the cityrequire a subversion of its dominant geographies of exclusion.

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Altogether, territorial behavior, urban place-identity, and urban-related identity are psycho-logical constructs that organize peoples ordinary relationships with public spaces. That peopleidentify themselves with their urban spaces (e.g., streets, quarters, suburbs, etc.), developing asense of collective belonging to them and sometimes claiming ownership when faced with out-siders, are culturally familiar situations. These psychological assumptions may be eventuallyinvoked in particular circumstances to explain, justify, or discount space-related behaviors (e.g.,urinating in my street, vendors invading our neighborhood, etc). Far beyond their cognitivesignificance for the individual, the language of place-identity and accounts of territoriality mayresonate with broader debates about the sociospatial order in the city. The focus of analysis inthese cases may conveniently shift to the rhetorical uses of place-related psychological states thatwarrant or discount spatially organized power arrangements. Psychological representations ofbehavior in public can therefore become politically connotated discursive devices that persistentlydemonstrate citizenship concerns.

Locating Citizenship: Political-Psychological Significance

Given that public space is a natural arena of citizenship, it is striking how psychologicalapproaches to citizenship have generally disregarded this material location. There seems to be noplace for public space in these studies: citizenship appears essentially dislocated.

General approaches to citizenship tend to emphasize social, cultural, and political dimensions(Marshall, 1950), the rights and duties implicated in community-based political practices(Bellamy, 2008), the qualities and conditions of equal membership in a given political community(McKinnon & Hampsher-Monk, 2000) and (in)equity in the allocation of resources (Turner,1993). Social-psychological studies have stressed social identification processes and membershipdynamics, together with cultural representations and their mobilization through discourse (Condor& Gibson, 2007; Haste, 2004; Sanchez-Mazas & Klein, 2003). More specifically, Barnes, Auburn,and Lea (2004) provide sensitive psychological concepts that usefully examine citizenshipbeyond trait theory, social learning theory, and justice-based models (Tyler, Rasinski, & Griffin,1986). In their view, citizenship is a constant enactment of membership defined by a negotiationof status as a legitimate occupant in the public sphere. Issues of rights and identity articulatepractices of citizenship in which categorization, identification, and feelings of belonging to thepolitical community, together with normative entitlements and social recognition, become corepsychological notions. Crucially, citizenship is conceived as a social construction that becomesrealised through contestation. This justifies the analysis of the complex formations of belonging(Barnes et al., 2004) that are permanently claimed, warranted, and rebutted through citizenshipdiscourse.

However, as Shotter (1993) states, it is the politically contested nature of the concept ofcitizenship what defines the psychological experience of being a citizen. In his terms, citizenshipis a status which one must struggle to attain in the face of competing versions of what is properto struggle for. Its definition is a part of a practical politics in which psychologically, whatwould seem to be important is the way in which ones placement or positioning (in relation tothe others around one), not only give rise to feelings which motivate and guide one in thatstruggle, but also give one access (or not) to the ontological resources required to be able toproperly participate in that struggle (pp. 115116). Hence, psychological feelings of citizenshipbelonging are enmeshed in politicized struggles whereby the conditions of the citizens identityare actively negotiated and contested.

Despite Shotters psychological account being explicitly embedded in the micropoliticsof citizenship, it is not sensitive to the everyday stages in which symbolic struggles to attaincitizen status become more apparent, namely, public spaces. Likewise, Barnes et al.s (2004) focus

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on contestation, claim making, and negotiation of membership to the legitimate categoryof citizenship unfairly fails to notice citizenships most prominent locations. On the whole,psychological approaches to citizenship have treated membership, belonging, identity, entitle-ments, legitimacy, and recognition of rights as displacedwhether cognitive or discursiveentities.

Exceptionally, Dixon et al.s (2006) recent study of everyday attitudes towards street drinking asa morally connoted incivility sheds light on a number of topics that are pertinent in the study ofpublic space from the perspective of citizenship. These authors interviewed 59 Lancaster citizens inthe towns most central public space, exploring attitudes towards drinking in public in light of arecently introduced ban on such behavior. The results of their discursive analysis showed howpeoples responses constructed street drinking as an infringement of civic entitlements and as a formof visual defilement, breaching the established meanings of the place and generally supporting anideological tradition of public space that promoted sanitization or purification (Sibley, 1995),meaning the removal of certain kinds of people not conceived as legitimately belonging to thepublic category (e.g., people drinking in the streets). The study highlighted also an ideologicalopposition (Billig et al., 1988) between freedom and control in public spaces and contradictions inthe category of admissible publics.

Dixon et al.s study instructs us on how psychological understandings of behavior in public maystrongly depend on particular constructions of place-meaning that may be invoked to warrantdifferent arrangements of social order in the public realm. The study reveals how public spaces(dis)orderliness involves psychological assumptions about (il)legitimate memberships to the publiccategory, threats to civic rights and normative spatial entitlements, that shape, warrant, and contestpeoples statuses and identities as citizens.

This last question has been precisely and directly addressed by urban sociologists and politi-cal geographers who consider the right to the city a fundamental right defining citizenship status.The right to the city necessitates direct involvement in the production and transformation of theurban territory (Gilbert & Phillips, 2003; Lefebvre, 1968) and is often achieved through loca-tional conflicts (Mitchell, 2003) between different social actors. In this frame, citizenship statusis defined as a practical achievement that involves geographical commotions: the right to the cityis the right to be in and to produce city spaces in order to make them public. A core idea here isthat both citizenship and public space structurally involve processes of social exclusion (e.g.,Clarke, 2008; Kofman, 1995; Mitchell, 2003; Momen, 2005; Staeheli, 2008). The urban openspace becomes public when subaltern groups (Fraser, 1990), counterpublics (Crawford, 1995) orinformal actors (Groth & Corijn, 2005) appropriate it in order to become admissible citizens. AsStaeheli and Thompson (1997) have argued, groups of people who are seen as problems for thepublic may display territorial strategies of transgression and resistance as a way of claiminglegitimate membership to citizenship, but without belonging to the mainstream community ofpublics. Challenging the normative categories of social life in the public realm (Crawford, 1995),uncomfortable presences in public space demand positive recognition of their community mem-bership and citizen status through the legitimate exercise of their right to the city. Clearly, thefocus on the interface between the right to the city, spatial production, and social exclusionextends classical studies on bottom-up models of citizenship based on social protest and publicrepresentation (e.g., Tarrow, 1998).

Taken together, these sets of studies show that the normative entitlements, identity claims, andpolitical struggles for social belonging that define citizenship status are primarily located in publicspace. This entails that if people cannot be present in public spaces (. . .) without feeling uncom-fortable, victimized and basically out-of-place, then it must be questionable whether or not thesepeople can be regarded as citizens at all (Painter & Philo, 1995, p. 115, quoted in Hopkins & Dixon,2006, italics added).

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Research Context: The Hole of Shame Struggle in Barcelona

The conceptual framework presented above is discussed in this article analyzing a conflict overpublic space located in the old city center of Barcelona (Spain). This conflict dates back to 1985,when a local program of urban development (the so-called PERI) promised to improve urban lifeconditions in Santa Caterina, one of the old medieval neighborhoods in Barcelonas historical center(Busquets, 2004). The program would involve new housing, civic facilities, and public spaces for thelong-time impoverished population of the neighborhood (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 1989). However,the works started as late as 1999 amidst an atmosphere of suspicion on the part of the localinhabitants, who argued that the Town Council had deliberately left Santa Caterina to deteriorate inorder to gentrify the area, thus forcing the traditional lower class inhabitants to leave (Mas & Verger,2004). Gathered against a city model perceived as a threat to local residents, a group of neighborsfollowed by social movements and groups of squatters claimed for a green public space such as theone foreseen in the original 1985 proposal.1 To do so, they occupied an empty space in the middleof the neighborhood that remained following the demolition of buildings. Through territorial appro-priation they planted trees, laid flower-beds, and installed self-made benches and urban furniture.This first space was called the Hole of Shame, a symbolic name that denounced the institutionalidleness towards the place, and was destroyed by the diggers after a violent police raid in 2002. Oneyear later, neighbors and social movements literally knocked down a wall of concrete built by thelocal administration to impede access to the space. The Park of the Hole of Shame was created in2004, embodying a political neighborhood strategy of resistance to gain a public space for the localcitizens. From that moment, the institutional powers (the Town Council and the developers), on theone hand, and the occupants of the space, on the other hand, struggled for the territorial control ofthe place (see Codina, 2005). The former aimed to redevelop the space, whereas the latter weredetermined to maintain the place as a self-managed public space protected from institutionalcommandeering and urban speculation. Adding to this tension, a third party in the dispute was aplatform of local entities opposing both the official development plan and the spatial appropriation.Finally, after a participatory process the occupants of the space were evicted by the police and theHole of Shame was redeveloped in 2007 according to official standards of public space design.

During the eight years of open conflict, the Hole of Shame case became a paradigmatic protestagainst local development programs in Barcelonas urban scene broadly perceived as benefittingprivate investments and tourism, against the needs and demands of the local citizens. For researchpurposes, the case was selected for three reasons. First, it gathered in one single urban setting themain politically connoted controversies linked to contemporary public space making (e.g., Jackson,1998; Mitchell, 2003; Smith, 1996; Sorkin, 1992); second, it provided rich empirical evidence toexplore the role of space discourse in shaping psychological representations of citizens normal anddeviant behavior in public, along with their rhetorical value (Dixon et al., 2006); and third, it was aunique opportunity to examine embodied enactments of the right to the city linked to politicallycontested views of citizenship belonging and status (Shotter, 1993; Staeheli & Thompson, 1997).

Data and Analytical Framework

The Hole of Shame conflict is approached here as an instrumental case study (Stake, 1994).Therefore it does not confine its value to a full description of the conflict, and it is not the aim eitherto demonstrate broad representativeness. Its instrumental function resides in its capacity to provide

1 The information about the process of spatial occupation derives from successive personal interviews to representatives ofsocial movements, the spokesman of the urban developers responsible for the development of Santa Caterina, politicians ofthe District, and leaders of neighborhood associations. Details of the interviewing process appear in the analytical frameworksection.

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insight into how some possible psychological representations of public space can be connected torelated understandings of citizenship (Silverman, 2005). Since the Hole of Shame created a discur-sive context persistently reconstructed using a locational language, i.e., discursive uses of publicspace meanings and behaviors, these discourses were chosen as the main focus of analysis, payingattention to the ways such discursive practices and related embodied actions could shape, warrant,and contest different normative conceptions of citizenship.

The exploration of locational constructions of citizenship justifies the use of a discursive andrhetorical framework (Billig, 1991; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987). As Haste(2004) has noted, there is a need in political psychology to examine how justifications of the citizenare reworked in dialogue, which brings the analysis of discourse and narrative to the fore. Accord-ingly, a first step in the research was to collect as much textual information about the case as possible.A total of 208 documents were gathered, including newspaper articles, official technical documents,institutional announcements, social movements leaflets, and manifestos and reports from neighbor-hood assemblies. Sixteen in-depth interviews were then conducted as primary sources to examine thecase, covering the totality of social groups and organizations directly and explicitly involved in theconflict, including politicians, developers, occupants, and other organized local inhabitants. Under-stood as a purposive sampling strategy (Silverman, 2005), the spokespeople of these organizationswere considered to represent those subjects for which discourses about the public space at stake weremost neatly expressed and polarized, that is, they were approached as critical cases (Flick, 2006).Interviewees were contacted by the author personally or via telephone. Interviews took place in theorganizations premises in/around the Hole of Shame and lasted between 30 and 120 minutes.Questions ranged from general opinions on the causes of the struggle (e.g., How do you explain theHole of Shame conflict?) to detailed questions on the users, activities, and specific conflictingepisodes (e.g., Who uses the space?, How was the concrete wall knocked down?).

Interviews were fully transcribed and the analysis comprised identifying those excerpts in whichthe interviewees signified the Hole of Shame using spatial language (e.g., here, the space isdeteriorated, etc.), and particular constructions of people-space relations (e.g., it belongs to us,they behave as if the space was theirs, etc.). Special attention was paid to membership formulationsand allusions to citizenship linked to those spatial meanings, being sensitive to their normativeconnotations and their implied psychological assumptions (e.g., see Dixon et al., 2006; Stokoe &Wallwork, 2003). The analysis then focused both on the social actions performed by such spatialformulations in the context of the conflict (e.g., accusation, justification, exclusion, etc.; see Edwards& Potter, 1992) and on their rhetorical orientation (i.e., how they are embedded in argumentsdesigned to undermine alternative spatial meanings, refracting ideological tensions; see Billig,1991). Finally, the implications of such locational constructions for citizenship status were con-sidered. The discursive analysis did not focus on the fine-grain details of turn taking and themicrolinguistic features of the texts, but rather on the broad rhetorical patterns mobilized throughspatial discourse together with the most prominent psychodiscursive maneuvers displayed in theaccounts (e.g., Wetherell & Edley, 1999). The extracts in the analysis below were selected from atotal of 143, representing recurrent patterns of arguments linking public space discourse to citizen-ship concerns.

Analysis and Discussion

The result of the analytical process is discussed below in two main subsections that correspondto the recurring discourses above mentioned: (1) citizenship entitlements in public space constructedusing place-belonging criteria; and (2) normative behaviors in public constructed via a rhetoric ofspatial manners. The analysis is then linked to issues of materiality and embodiment in a thirdsubsection.

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Place-Belonging and Citizenship Entitlements in Public Space

The discourses about the Hole of Shame revealed that universal access to public space, freedomof use, and appropriation (Francis, 1989; Lynch, 1981; Rivlin, 1994) are in practice quite contro-versial. The accounts given by the agents involved in the conflict show that the spatial entitlementsthat define the right to the city are often constrained by place-based categorizations with normativeeffects. Extracts 1 to 3 are discussed in three successive subsections, each warranting the three mainpositions in the Hole of Shame conflict. The rhetorical organization in the three accounts is effectivebecause it draws on shared understandings of the kinds of spatial entitlements attributed to twosubcategories of citizens: neighbors2 and the rest of the city.

Neighbors Entitlements Prevail

Extract 1F: The original idea, lets say, was to transform what was a busy road such as Via Laietanainto a space for the people that live there (. . .) at the same time, a space that can generatemovement from the city to Ciutat Vella, I mean, that facilitates access by the rest of the cityto all the good things that one can find in that part of Ciutat Vella: palaces, easy access fromthe city to La Ribera, with the Picasso museum and all the stories that one can find there,as an area that leads towards Barceloneta, an open space, a space open, where the first toenjoy it are the neighbors, but that the city can enjoy globally, and that stops being aproblematic space, where social or human problems are concentrated, let it be a space morefor the city, no?(Interview with the representative of the developers).

The urban developer in extract 1 justifies that the Hole of Shame must be transformed by arguing thatmaking it accessible to all the citizens will solve social problems seemingly located in that (lockedup) area. To do so, he appeals to the culturally familiar image of public space as the highest degreeof social inclusion and accessibility, an enjoyable space for the city globally which is open toeverybody and not exclusive of some groups of people (i.e., the occupants). However, the developeradds further arguments so as not to overlook another common assumption, namely, that localinhabitants have special rights over their local spaces (a space for the people that live there,where the first to enjoy it are the neighbors). This tension about a public space being open toeverybody, albeit with a slight privilege of use by the local inhabitants, allows the urban developerto manage a dilemma of inclusion (Wallwork & Dixon, 2004): he had to defend the local inhabitantsright to public space in a way that did not exclude the rest of the citizens, and vice versa. In doingso, he introduces a first boundary within the right to the city. Put differently, rights to public spacepresent a graduation that locates one category of citizens (the neighbors that live there), by virtueof spatial closeness and place-relatedness, on the top of a hierarchy of citizenships spatial entitle-ments. Public spaces are places more for its nearest neighbors, its primary beneficiaries, than forother citizens. Also handling a dilemma of stake (Edwards & Potter, 1992), this discourse protectedthe institutional position of the developers from accusations that the Hole of Shame was beingcommandeered to gentrify the area (i.e., to the detriment of local inhabitants).

2 I will use the term neighbors in the analysis as a synonym of local inhabitants, to preserve the connotation of the originalword in Spanish (vecinos), which implies belonging to the neighborhood, and not just individuals leaving next door to eachother.

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Outsiders Lacking Place-Identity are Less EntitledThe hierarchy of citizens spatial entitlements was also rhetorically useful for the local inhab-

itants who rejected the spatial occupation:

Extract 2G: The process that, well, a little bit, lets say super-large that the PERI triggered and all itschanges, of course, a thing that can be done in 4 or 5 years, you do it in 19, it creates conflict(. . .) and the years of load that this entails for the neighbors, then it causes that, lets say thatmore external agents of the Casc Antic surroundings also intervene, then there are occupiedbuildings, there are more alternative collectives that also get into this dynamic of interven-tion upon this space that has been abandoned by the Ajuntament.

S: And one must say that not all of those who are in the space, not all of them are from theCasc Antic nor do they live in the Casc Antic(Interview with two representatives of neighbors supporting the official development of thespace).

The account in extract 2 works as an accusation towards the City Council (Ayuntamiento) forallowing the spatial occupation, causing the conflict in the Hole of Shame and neglecting the needsof the local inhabitants. This accusation is discursively built by appealing to the arrival of illegitimatecategories of people (more external agents, of the Casc Antic surroundings, who do not live inthe neighborhood). In this narrative of complaint, external agents not belonging to the neighborhoodare rhetorically invoked because they have a disruptive connotation: they breach normative bound-aries constructed around spatial criteria. It is not acceptable that people from outside the neighbor-hood encroach on a space whose assumed propriety is of local residents. Here, neighborhood placebelonging traces a normative line of inclusion and exclusion between publics who are entitled to agreater or lesser degree to be in the Hole of Shame. As in extract 1, neighbors have more territorialrights because they belong to the place. In this case, urban-related identity (Lalli, 1992) becomes adiscursive resource to draw a line between us and them (Clarke, 2008), warranting the exclusionof those lacking legitimate place-belonging status (i.e., the Holes occupants). Moreover, the placetransgression (Dixon et al., 2006) of the latter is underpinned by their participation in squattingpractices (there are occupied buildings), adding an unambiguous nuance of territorial invasion tothe spatial context (Gifford, 1987).

Neighbors Spatial Entitlements Make Occupation ReasonableThe Hole of Shames occupants themselves had to grapple with the accusation of being external

agents or squatters, lacking urban-related identity. This obliged them to warrant the polemic occu-pation of a public space and to vindicate its legitimacy:

Extract 3M: We saw that theAyuntamiento was implementing the same city model here, as in Born andLa Ribera, then the struggle became concentrated in the Hole of Shame because it was theonly remaining place where, where the neighbors identified there could be a square, what wecall the plaza mayor of the neighborhood, yes? The plaza mayor, a space for co-habitancewhere neighbors could really, where the philosophy of space was a philosophy of interactionamong the neighbors, where people could be at leisure, where the elders would have a nursinghome, it could be an intergenerational space for young people, children, elders, people from

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different communities, you know? Then the struggle concentrated on that. Then, by means ofa lot of popular pressure, three years ago now, well, it was achieved.(Interview with the representative of the occupants of the Hole of Shame).

In extract 3 the occupants representative warrants the reasons why, and to what ends, the struggleand the spatial occupation took place. The occupants discourse typically presented two mainrhetorical components, which are illustrated in this extract. First, speaking on behalf of theneighbors capitalized on the cultural assumption that these local-scale citizens had the territorialpropriety, as in extracts 1 and 2. In this case, the Hole of Shame was occupied because the localinhabitants wanted a square there: it was not the exclusionary will of illegitimate outsiders, but thegeneral wish of neighborhood insiders. Furthermore, it was not just any square but strictly a localone, representing the image of the neighborhood plaza mayor, which in Spanish towns is atraditional space for community mingling and local diversity. Second, and most important, theappropriation of a public space by its neighbors, still potentially controversial, is warranted by anarrative of popular pressure in a struggle against the city model insinuated by the developerin extract 1. In depicting a reality of conflict involving threat to a successful plaza mayor, theoccupant in extract 3 naturalizes (Thompson, 1990) an attitude of spatial resistance and protectionfrom its supposed users, the neighbors. Altogether, echoing a cultural narrative (Haste, 2004) oflocal/neighborhood struggle against city/global threat, the occupants warranted the spatial appro-priation also on the grounds of the place identity of neighbors, but rhetorically countering thedevelopers discourse.

The accounts so far discussed illustrate that the right to the city is an aspect of citizenship statusparadoxically organized around a series of unequal spatial entitlements based on psychologicalcategories of place belonging. People lacking neighborhood identity and territorial invaders (squat-ters) are the kinds of out-of-place publics (Cresswell, 1996) with restricted spatial rights, definitelydeserving less political attention than neighbors/local inhabitants whenever plans for creating localpublic spaces are discussed. The rhetorical uses of such psychological categories (see also Edwards,1991) worked in the Hole of Shame struggle warranting both the occupation of the space (extract 3)as well as the eviction of occupants and its official development (extracts 1 and 2).

Normative Representations of Spatial Behavior in Public

Discursive spatial entitlements deriving from place-belonging criteria were not the only way oftracing normative boundaries within the citizens right to the city. Along similar lines, psychologicalrepresentations of the spatial behaviors expected in a public space were drawn on in pursuingpartisan political objectives. Thereby common sense images of citizens rights and obligations werehighlighted through a language of spatial manners and place-embedded behaviors. Extracts 4 to 6 inthe following subsections illustrate this.

Citizens Right to Appropriate Public Space Has Limits

Extract 4Now [the space] its in a situation of impasse, an abnormal impasse, from the point of viewof the citizen. For any reason that one may or may not have, there is not a single citizenallowed to appropriate a space, make it his own, grow his own orchard there, or whateverhe wants. Its evident that the public space is for everyone, and nobody can close it off andmake it his own.(Interview with the representative of the developers).

133Grounding Citizenship

Similar to extract 1, the developer in extract 4 reasserts that the Hole of Shame is a problematicspace, defined here as an abnormal impasse. The deviant character of this situation is clearlydepicted as appealing for an indisputable right to public space of every citizen, namely, universalfreedom of access and use (Its evident that the public space is for everyone, and nobody can closeit off and make it his own). Exclusionary actions of spatial appropriation for restricted usecontravene this common sense assumption in democratic societies, because it impedes other citizenspracticing their equal right to free access in public space. The Hole of Shame is hence depicted as aninadequate public space because it does not meet this fundamental citizens right. As an offensiverhetoric (Potter, 1996) undermining the neighborhood plaza mayor construction portrayed by theoccupant back in extract 3, the developers argument quite clearly calls for the redevelopment of theHole of Shame as an inadmissible public space.

Note here that the developers account makes this freedom-of-use assumption work rhetoricallybecause it evokes a contrary idea: that freedom in public spaces is constrained by requirements ofcontrol and by moral standards (Dixon et al., 2006). Added to their disruptive presence as externalagents or squatters, occupants were out of place also because their territorial behaviors breached theessential meaning of public space: freedom of use and appropriation must unfold only until it reachesthe limits of other citizens rights and freedom. This underpins a dominant ideological tradition ofnegative liberty in the public sphere, pinpointing that freedom in public space depends less on accessand appropriation as such than on the manners or ways these spatial rights are actually exerted. Whenthe freedom of some involves the exclusion of others, it becomes morally wrong and inadmissible(although, as many authors have tenaciously underlined, this is in practice only the case when theexcluded publics are the middle class, its hegemonically assumed natural owners; e.g., see Boddy,1992; Crawford, 1995; Fraser, 1990; Mitchell, 1995).

Normative/Deviant Scripts of Spatial Behavior in PublicRhetorically opposed to the developers account in extract 4 above, the occupants discursive

strategies permanently aimed to justify the spatial appropriation based on the assumption that localinhabitants (neighbors) can spontaneously occupy a free urban allotment, if deemed necessary,in order to struggle for a suitable public space. Back in extract 3, the image of a plaza mayorachieved by means of a struggle against a city model supported this idea. A veni-vidi-vici logic forthe popular conquest of a loose urban space was assumed in extract 3 to be a legitimate spatialbehavior. Framed as a political action, the territorial behavior of appropriation of the Hole (cen-sured by the developer in extract 4) appeared in the occupants discourse as an acceptable strategyto counter the power and authority of local institutions (Gifford, 1987; Merelman, 1988) and toorganize political resistance (Jackson, 1998; Lees, 1998). Moreover, the fact that the occupantsappropriated the only remaining place in the neighborhood worked in extract 3 as an extrema-tization (Potter, 1996), depicting the occupation as stemming not from the occupants will, butfrom critical circumstances of spatial availability. In discursive terms, this protected the occupantsagainst stake accusations.

The do-it-yourself spatial strategy of territorial resistance illustrated in extract 3 obviouslysubverts the dominant logical order of urban development programs, according to which new publicspaces are decided, programmed, and supervised by the political authorities. Extract 5 belowrepresents this institutional stance:

Extract 5I: The space of Figueras Well has become an unresolved issue that has continued for morethan four years. What is the situation? Is there a working line yet in order to resolve theconflict?

134 Di Masso

CM: The demolitions are already finished; the participatory process to determine thedevelopment has started now. I guess that itll be finished in a couple of months and then theworks will start. Before the end of 2006 itll be completely arranged.

I: What will be put there?

CM: We dont know it yet. The development will consider issues related to a green, aplay-area for ptanque, basketball, games for children, public toilets, in sum, all thosethings that can be placed in a public space, depending on what is finally decided in thisparticipatory process.(Interview with the District Councillor 20032007, published in the newspaper Nova CiutatVella, November 2005)

In this extract, the District Councillor exemplifies the correct and appropriate ways of solving thedevelopment of a public space in normal democracies. His account is rhetorically designed as aspace-based script formulation (Edwards, 1994; Stokoe & Wallwork, 2003). First, buildings areknocked down; then a participatory plan takes place; and finally urban furniture is introduced into thenew environment. In this sequential narrative, any popular will is accepted (depending on what isfinally decided in this participatory process), but after that the process is over and the politicalauthority decides a definitive solution.

Scripts allow resetting a familiar normative baseline where exceptional disorderliness rules. Indiscursive terms, the District Councillors scripted account constructs an image of institutionalcontrol that is challenged by the interviewer, who refers to an unresolved conflict. The Hole ofShame situation defied, as in the developers discourse, a dominant arrangement of the sociospatialorder in the city that presupposes institutional monitoring of public space making and does certainlynot include direct spatial appropriation. The right to the city is in this case limited by institutionalauthority upon alternative enactments of citizenship based on direct spatial appropriation (i.e., theoccupants strategy, extract 3).

Citizens Moral-Spatial Manners in PublicImages of social disorderliness in the Hole of Shame were also discursively constructed using

a morally loaded language of spatial bad manners, foregrounding and performing citizenship iden-tities and entitlements. Extract 6 below presents the account of a previous District Councillorregarding the origin of the Hole of Shames occupation. The core idea of the District Councillorsaccount is that of a general situation of anomie in the Hole of Shame, and in the neighborhoodgenerally, during her mandate:

Extract 6C: He [name of a local inhabitant] began to go mad, and started to call groups of squatters,who had never considered living around there, come here, come here, there is an empty flathere!, and he called any social conflict group, conflict, huh? civic conflict, squatters,Algerians, I remember a documentary on television, the rooftops of that environment betternot to, they were jumping from one roof to another, so, they entered one building, came outthree buildings further along, buildings that were already evicted waiting to be knockeddown (. . .) The Algerian delinquent who did whatever he wanted and nobody controlled,because among other things their meeting point was Carders with Allada-Vermell, thosepiles were, the arch of, that was, I mean like their playground, I mean, they lived there, theylived there for as many hours as they were interested.(Interview with the District Councillor 19992003)

135Grounding Citizenship

In this account squatters are again mentioned. As said in the first subsection of the analysis, theyare invoked as an intrinsically out-of-place category of people whose transgressive identity signifiesthe occupied space in negative terms. The arrival of squatters disrupted the spatial order because theywere considered by the Councillor as a civic conflict group. Civic conflict is depicted using alocational sequence: a man incited conflict groups to come here, offered them empty flats,ultimately putting them there. This is certainly not a conventional way for people to move from oneplace to another. There seems to be a breach of an implicit normative sequence that structures the waypeople should move to a place, again a culture-bound scripted sequence. People are normally expectedto choose where they go, they do not usually occupy flats just because they are empty, and they are notput there by the first person who calls upon them (especially if the instigator is a mad man).Altogether, the Councillors account depicts a general situation of urban disorder in the Hole of Shameinvolving illegitimate publics moving beyond the thresholds of correct displacement behaviors.

The Councillor focuses the rest of her account on a particular group of people, the Algerians,who at that time represented an important group of newcomers. Algerians are discursively alignedwith squatters as a civic conflict group occupying empty flats. Therefore, Algerians appear as a socialcategory of publics with various outsider conditions in the Councillors discourse: they are depictedas foreigners, squatters, urban troublemakers and criminals (Algerian delinquent, nobody carriedany kind of document, caught by the police). This makes the attribution of civic conflict in theHole of Shame quite evident, discursively constructing the negative identity of its users as problem-atic citizens.

More interestingly, the Algerians negative identity is rhetorically worked through by reportingtheir ways of being in and moving around the Hole of Shame: they were jumping from one roof toanother; they entered one building, came out of another three buildings further along; theirmeeting point was Carders with Allada-Vermell,3 it was like their playground, and they lived therefor as long as they were interested. The rhetorical value of these descriptions lies in the nature of thesespatial uses also as instances of place transgression. Jumping over the rooftops, coming in and out ofthe buildings, and appropriating a public space as a playground for permanent use is not commonlyconsidered a correct behavior. Common sense dictates that rooftops, buildings, and street corners aremeant to be used differently to be proper spatial practices. The spatial uses reported by the Councillorclearly constitute deviant behaviors as they breach the normative definition of roof use, buildingentrance, and street gathering. Connoting bad manners in public, the capacity of spatial notions toregulate normative social relationships by virtue of their moral significance is confirmed (Stokoe &Wallwork, 2003). Our culture affords citizens much more decent and correct ways of moving throughurban space. The Councillors depiction of a moral panic (Cohen, 2002) comes to the fore as anintense negative feeling caused by inadmissible spatial behaviors in public disrupting the social order.

Also, the Councillors account highlights a public/private distinction when she asserts that thesecriminalized immigrants lived there for as many hours as they were interested. This argumentunderpins the status of these people as inadmissible publics on the basis of an added place-and-timetransgression, namely, that public space is public and (as the developer puts it in extract 4) nobodycan use it as if it were a private space. Living in a public space is clearly an inappropriate behavior.Exclusive propriety and unceasing occupation are certainly adequate at home but not in the openspace of the city. Therefore, occupants were also breaching the moral order of public space by usingit as a private space, impeding access for other citizens.

On the whole, the accounts of the developer and of the two successive District Councillorssupport a stance that defends a version of the sociospatial public order requiring the absence ofcertain categories of people. People external to the neighborhood, squatters, and Algerians were notentitled to be in the Hole of Shame because they essentially impeded the exercise of common civic

3 Eastern border of the area comprised by the Hole of Shame.

136 Di Masso

rights and freedoms by neighbors (extract 2) and by all citizens (extract 4); they disruptedinstitutional protocols of the citys spatial transformation (extract 5); and they breached the publicspaces moral-spatial organization (extract 6). If aptitude for citizenship (is) premised on a mode ofcivility, or on how to behave within the public spaces of the polis (Kofman, 1995, p. 123), thenclearly the accounts discussed in this section confer less citizenship aptitude on certain (counter)publics who are perceived as not belonging to the normal public space. This rhetoric narrows thelegitimacy of occupancy in the public sphere (Barnes et al., 2004), compromises particular socialidentities in public (Painter & Philo, 1995), and draws a line of exclusion (Clarke, 2008) within thepsychological field of citizenship.

Matter Matters: The Physical Grounds of Citizenship

Up to this point, the Hole of Shames analysis could easily lead to the conclusion that the spatialdispute was only bound by the limits of discourse. The rhetorical dispute mobilized a series ofspace-related constructions redefining normative boundaries of citizenship status. However, space-discourses framed, and were framed by, material actions of spatial appropriation, use, and transfor-mation that were also consequential in terms of psychological belonging to the legitimate categoryof citizenship. Discourse and space were mutually enmeshed in ways that redefined the ideationalfield of placeness, the physical grounds of spatiality, and the political contours of citizenship.

This assertion makes explicit an epistemological tension that inevitably arises when approachingthe relationship between the symbolic, the discursive, and the material dimensions of the urbangeography (e.g., see Duncan, 1993; Hastings, 1999; Latham & McCormack, 2004; Lees, 2004).Being aware of (but not overcoming) this tension, the discursive analysis of the Hole of Shameconflict would be somehow incomplete if it ignored that geographically located tangible objects andbodies that moved in space and time structurally embodied the daily practices of citizenship enactedin the Hole of Shame. Recurrent sequences of spatial occupation-and-eviction composed the physicalsetting in which public space discourse redrew the boundaries of social belonging, urban identity,and civic entitlements that shape citizen status.

Consider the following example of spatial events reflecting what actually happened inside theplace, related to rhetorically opposing discursive framings. In extract 4 the spokesman of thedevelopers argued that the space is in a situation of abnormal impasse, from the point of view ofthe citizen, because there is not a single citizen allowed to appropriate a space, since its evidentthat the public space is for everyone and nobody can close it off and make it his own. This normativelimit of citizens right to appropriate the public space led in practice to successive physical actionsby the local authorities. Trees planted by the local inhabitants were removed, there was policerepression, municipal workers built a defensive wall, and policemen finally evicted the occupants toredevelop a new official public space. These actions materially embodied the developers citizenshipdiscourse which warranted, in different moments of the conflict, imminent reappropriation of thespace by the local administration and consequent eviction.

The occupants rhetorical contestation was also consequential in terms of embodied practices ofspatial resistance. Recalling extract 3, the spokesman of the occupants argued that the strugglebecame concentrated in the Hole of Shame because it was the only remaining place where theneighbors identified there could be a square; for this reason, by means of a lot of popular pressureagainst a city model, the space was occupied. This discourse constructed a version of the right tothe city based on citizens struggle and direct appropriation, undermining the normative limits tracedby the developers (extract 4). In this frame, the occupants rhetoric was followed by local inhabitantsreplanting trees, holding hands around buildings in order to impede their demolition and knockingdown the wall erected by the municipal workers. If the developers rhetoric was spatially entrenched

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by eviction, territorial marking, and surveillance, the occupants arguments became embodied inreappropriation and territorial defense.

From this example one does not need to conclude that there is an objective extra-discursiverealm out there in the form of spatial geography that determines place discourse. Rather, itpinpoints innovative approaches to the relationship between the physical space and place discourseneed to be developed, especially when analyses of citizenship practices are grounded in public space.In this sense, together with embodiment (in material objects and environmentally embedded inter-group behavior) and territorial behaviors (appropriation, marking, control, defense, power, andresistance), place indexicality (the reference to the social meanings of the material placement ofsigns; Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p. 4) can be a helpful concept. This implies that some languagepractices and physical markers only make sense when they are materially placed in specific areas andpointing in different directions. This unavoidable dimension of whereness in the discursiveproduction of citizenship status was also clear in the Holes conflict. Graffiti stating that the TownCouncil was neglecting the needs of the local inhabitants, banners demanding a green zone, andverbal accusations against urban developers walking around the area, only made sense insofar as theywere displayed strictly within the spatial limits of the Hole of Shame. Out of this area these signswould have lost their political meaning and would have been as out of place as the occupants in theview of politicians and of the rest of the neighborhood. Words demanding a plaza mayor againsta city model and a space for everybody (extract 3) had their logical emplacement in the publicarena of the Hole of Shame.

By the same token, spatial movements in the Hole of Shame had territorial connotations.Territorial behavior was the only means by which the occupants felt that they could protest over aperceived grievance stemming from an unwanted urban development program (Gifford, 1987).Physical occupation and direct aggression appeared because the activities desired for in the samespace were incompatible among different segments of citizens. Mitchells (1995, 2003) apology oftaking to the streets in order to claim for all citizens right to the city fits in with this territorialbehavior, which was also a political resource for the local administration in the struggle to regainauthority (Merelman, 1988). The Hole of Shame conflict confirmed that territoriality is embeddedin social relations (Sack, 1986, p. 26), regulating intergroup behavior between different sectors ofthe citizenship in their competing attempts of asserting their right to public space. Through spatialactions the occupants in the Hole of Shame gained visibility in the public sphere, eventually leadingto positive recognition of their undervalued social identities and to legitimization of their neighbor-hood problems. Spatial actions became an instrument to express perception of inequity and topromote community empowerment, supporting processes of place-attachment via collective narra-tives of political involvement (Low, 1992).

Conclusion

Positive recognition and acceptance in the public sphere are core aspects of legitimacy shapingcitizenship status. This becomes especially clear in public places, i.e., citizenships spatial grounds.Public spaces can be conceived as the natural arena for the enactment of the right to the city, afundamental citizens right to freely access, use, appropriate, and transform the urban space. It hasbeen argued in this article that public space claims, demands, and conflicts may bring to the forecitizenship concerns, particularly contested matters which are both psychologically grounded andpolitically consequential.

The analysis of accounts involved in a sociospatial conflict in Barcelona has illustrated thatcontested constructions of the citizen can underlie psychological representations of public space.Although one single case study is obviously insufficient to draw a global conclusion on the politicalsignificance of such psychological representations, it is however useful to shed light on some

138 Di Masso

important social-psychological processes that can shape experiences of citizenship located in thepublic space. Specifically, it has been shown that psychological assumptions about membership to aspace-bound community, normative boundaries limiting spatial appropriation rights, and morallyconnoted spatial behaviors in public can be related to varied profiles of citizenship with differentiatedlevels of legitimacy.

The case study discussed also shows the validity of a discursive-rhetorical approach to broachthis link between psychological representations of behavior in public and related conceptions ofcitizenship. Public space discourse can be functional to warrant, as well as undermine, competingsociospatial claims and actions in the public realm that have political resonances. The analysis allowsstating that the discursive uses of place belonging and of normative views of spatial use andappropriation can underpin different versions of citizenship identity and status. Moreover, they canbe at the service of justifying conflicting physical enactments of the right to the city and opposedconceptions of the social order.

At a conceptual level, the case analyzed is deemed useful to continue exploring what has beenreferred to as the micropolitics of everyday constructions of space and place (Hopkins & Dixon,2006). The article has aimed to bring into focus citizenship within psychological studies of publicspace, as well as to introduce public space matters into psychological studies of citizenship. As aresult, it has been shown how some psychological understandings of citizenship can also be workedthrough public space constructions driven by politically contested conceptions of the right to the city(Mitchell, 2003).

Also, the article considers that territorial conflicts in public space can eventually becomematerial versions of symbolic struggles to redefine the psychological boundaries of normativebelonging to citizenship: as a way of reshaping the political ontology of a citizen whose identity isgrounded on the public space. Territorial behaviors in public space can serve to reassert and censureurban-related identities (e.g., neighbors/local inhabitants, squatters, etc.; Lalli, 1992) and to regulateintergroup relations between publics and counterpublics (Crawford, 1995; Fraser, 1990). It has beenargued that considering some physical dimensions of public space enriches psychological under-standings of citizenship because they frame the sense of their embedded discourses, serving as aresource to make visible the identities of social groups and embody the symbolic lines of socialacceptance and censure that construct citizenship as a sociospatial relation.

The study is deemed useful to discuss universal freedom of access to the public space as a basicaspect of citizenship. This normative ideal can be challenged in practice by urban strategies per-ceived to be exclusionary (Smith, 1996; Sorkin, 1992), as well as by counterpublics tenaciouslyasserting their right to the city via direct appropriation and permanent occupation (Mitchell, 1995;Staeheli & Thompson, 1997). In this sense, the analysis of the Hole of Shame conflict supportsShotters (1993) statement that citizenship is a status that one must struggle to attain, also spatially.

However, this single case study has its limitations outside its contextual validity and its instru-mental value. While it serves to illustrate possible significant relationships between public space andcitizenship at a social-psychological level, pinpointing how citizenship is also materially staged inthe city space, its conclusions do not apply to all sorts of public spaces everywhere. For instance,cultural differences may lead to a variety of normative meanings and expectations regarding citizensbehavior in public, as much as particular trends of urban development can afford the citizensparticular uses of public space tied to different understandings of its nature and functions. Discoursesand spatial practices are expected to construct citizenship, public space, and their interrelatedprocesses in many different ways.

In the context of this study, these conclusions point towards a model of citizenship based on apolitics of difference, recognition, and contestation in the public space, rather than of sameness,unity, and peaceful consensus. Being both politically and psychologically relevant, citizenshipinterventions grounded on the public space would benefit from working on the differential entitle-

139Grounding Citizenship

ments to use public space that depend on controversial place-belonging criteria; the normative limitsof citizens universal access to, and appropriation of, the public space, considering their contestednature and ways of re-negotiating these limits; citizens conflicting views of how transformations ofthe public space should take place; and the different systems of values that shape moral-spatialassumptions defining decent and inadmissible behavior in public.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Andrs Di Masso, Social PsychologyDepartment, University of Barcelona, Pg. Vall dHebron, 171, 08035, Barcelona, Spain. E-mail:adimasso@ub.edu

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