Political Psychology, Vol. 33, No.

1, 2012
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2011.00866.x

Grounding Citizenship: Toward a Political Psychology of

Public Space
pops_866

123..143

Andrs Di Masso
University of Barcelona

This article considers the political nature of public space and explores its psychological relevance as a natural
arena of citizenship. Drawing on literature in social psychology, environmental psychology, and political
geography, the article addresses how common understandings of normative behavior in public are often based
on particular constructions of place and people-space relations. In so doing, it shows how such culturally
shared locational notions are essentially contested in relation to their political significance and ideological
orientation within a particular public socio-spatial context. It is argued that claims for and demands on public
space are enshrined in broader struggles over the psychological boundaries of belonging, identity, and civic
entitlements which are central to the contentious issue of citizenship. This is illustrated through the analysis of
an 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 the
material 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, and
environmental categories in the constitution of subjectivity and the regulation of social interaction
(Aiello & Bonaiuto, 2003; Bonaiuto & Bonnes, 2000; Dixon & Durrheim, 2000). Mostly assuming
a discursive epistemological framework (Billig, 1987; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell,
1987), this emerging trend encompasses a varied set of approaches interested in the social construction of space. The main topics investigated include the normative meaning of morally connoted
spatial discourse regulating neighborhood relations (e.g., Stokoe & Wallwork, 2003); the language
of 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 in
womens narratives of identity (e.g., Taylor, 2005); or the value of landscape rhetoric in the
construction of nationhood (e.g., Wallwork & Dixon, 2004). Building on a well-known idea in
environmental psychology and human geography, according to which personal experience is
unavoidably located (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983; Tuan, 1977), the main point made by
the bulk of these studies is that our individual and shared interpretations of space and place-behavior
are 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 political
significance of peoples psychological representations of space, accepting that these shape peo123
0162-895X 2012 International Society of Political Psychology
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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 much
more besides (Hopkins & Dixon, 2006, p. 174). According to these authors, places are relevant not
just because they afford and shape psychological experiences, but also because such psychological
constructs may be socially deployed to provoke particular political effects aligned with peoples
individual or collective interests and demands. This justifies Hopkins and Dixons claim for political
psychology 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 psychological
notions of who we are, where we belong, and to whom we are committed, as well as the discursive
processes that make place-representations work as symbolic devices with a political value.
This twofold political and psychological value of place representations is particularly clear
when 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 settings
where public life occurs on the basis of open visibility, scrutiny, and concern, supporting public
interest 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 representations
that tell us what actions are (in)appropriate, which spatial uses are (not) expected under specific
circumstances, and who is (not) a legitimate public within the confines of normal coexistence
(Cresswell, 1996; Dixon, Levine, & McAuley, 2006). Ordinary understandings of normal and
deviant behavior in public are psychologically relevant at least for two reasons. First, they inform and
orient 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 and
actions which may be politically controversial (e.g., legitimizing the exclusion of social groups,
justifying socially unwanted urban development programs, transgressing a by-law regulating incivilities, etc.). This way, public space shows its vocation as a politically and psychologically meaningful place in the ordinary lives of citizens.
These opening comments support Hopkins and Dixons (2006) proposal to seriously consider
place, and particularly public space, a relevant topic in political psychologists research agenda. This
article contributes further arguments by exploring the political-psychological significance of public
space with regard to matters of citizenship. Existing psychological approaches to citizenship have
neglected the study of public space as its primary setting, as much as the scarce psychological
perspectives on public space have downplayed its fundamental significance in the personal and social
experience of being a citizen (or not). The article broaches this conceptual gap, analyzing the
psychological assumptions and political implications of public space discourse as related to citizenship enactments and demands. In this frame, public space is tackled as the primary place where
citizenship 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 supported. Following Carr et al. (1992), it is impossible to understand public life and the spaces in
which it takes place without recognising the political nature of public activities (p. 45). Public life
importantly depends on social and political contexts that make public spaces work for the common
good. The public space reflects social exchanges between individual and collective affairs, featuring
personal 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 intervention, and cultural standards of moral order and decorum (Dixon et al., 2006). Hence social life in
public spaces is informed and regulated by a value-loaded political tension between liberty and
control. This tension frames democratic life in the city, both enabling and constraining the citizens
exercise of free right to the city.
This last term complicates the truism according to which public life must be at the service of an
elusive common good. While accepting that ideally democratic public spaces must be responsive to
the citizens needs, rights, and demands (Carr et al., 1992), in practice different sectors of the
publicusers, 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 in
the public territory (Francis, 1989; Zube, 1986). Spatial conflicts may therefore be related to
opposing conceptions of who has right of use, occupation, control, management, and transformation
of one public space under disputed criteria of legitimacy (Burte, 2003).
One structural friction has been theorized by critical studies in urban geography and urban
sociology 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 create
highly commodified urban environments that look like public spaces but are constrained by the
goals 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 are
transformed into restrictive criteria of admission by strict surveillance devices (Fyfe & Bannister,
1996), territorial markers leading to militarized landscapes (Davis, 1992), and social segregation
of the undesirable to protect the middle-class citizen (Boddy, 1992; Mitchell, 1995). On a
neighborhood level, the creation of dead public spaces (Sennett, 1974) is represented by designled urban regeneration programs and gentrification processes attracting high-income dwellers and
entrepreneurial 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 diagnosis
of public space, another strand of empirical studies has highlighted the irreducible dimension of
contestation and political resistance that frequently accompanies the domestication guidelines of
dominant public space making (e.g., Atkinson, 2003; Jackson, 1998; Staeheli & Thompson,
1997).
Ultimately, these studies that stress the political significance of public space have nevertheless
neglected at least two psychologically related dimensions of life in public. A first issue relates to the
nature of space as a psychological category of representation, whose embedded meanings and values
are often socially and politically contested. To the extent that such spatial meanings and values are
identity-related, locational disputes in public spaces will be both politically meaningful and
psychologically consequential. A second underspecified issue points directly to psychological
assumptions of belonging, civic entitlements, and normative behavior shaping social life in public
spaces, which lie at the very core of citizenship matters. The following sections address this double
neglect.
The Psychological Significance of Public Space
Public spaces are shaped by urban policies, economic forces, and cultural trends in contexts of
political power enabling and constraining specific forms of human interaction (Cresswell, 2004;
Gieryn, 2000). However, public spaces are psychologically significant because they are geographical
spots involving complex patterns of material aspects, meanings, values, social activities, and even
profound existential experiences (Canter, 1977; Relph, 1976; Stokols & Shumaker, 1981). Environmental psychology has accounted for how people and space become mutually constituted and
regulated, 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. Placeidentity has been referred to as a specific subidentity in its own right, and urban-place identity as
a pattern of beliefs, feelings, and expectations regarding public spaces and places and, even more
importantly, a dimension of competence relevant to how adequately the individual uses these
physical settings as well as the appropriate strategies for successfully navigating through the
settings (Proshansky, 1978, p. 167). Urban-place identity therefore refers to a part of the self that is
derived from socialization in city life, including social attributes, skills, differentiated public social
roles, and ways of solving problems in public spaces.
Second, belonging to different social groups and having different social roles influence how
public space and identity relate to each other. Lalli (1992) referred to an urban-related identity
with the psychological function of providing positive self-evaluations for the residents (or, we
could add, the users) of a place. He argued that urban environments have a social image, or a set
of 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 of
the 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 members
belong 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 maximizing 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 territoriality, a pattern of behavior and attitudes (. . .) based on perceived, attempted, or actual control of
a definable physical space (. . .) that may involve habitual occupation, defense, personalization, and
marking of it (Gifford, 1987, p. 120). Public spaces may work as territories whenever people try to
exert control over it, eventually leading to spatial conflicts that shed light on the two main functions
of territoriality: regulation of social interaction and the display of identity (Brower, 1980). In
neighborhood and community spaces territorial behavior primarily indicates and reinforces an
ingroup sense of who belongs to the place (i.e., Lallis urban-related identities). Also, competition for
a public site as the only space available for carrying out incompatible activities might lead to
struggles over the uses of that site, sometimes involving occupation, eviction, aggression, and
violence (Bell, Fischer, Baum, & Greene, 1996). Political violence will appear via territoriality
when all other means have been exhausted, when an individual is unaware of alternatives, or when
an 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 the
struggle for power and status (. . .) liable to political manipulation (p. 579).
Hence, both psychologically and politically speaking, through territorial behavior space reifies
power and organizes the identities of, and social interactions between, the controlled and the
controller (Sack, 1986). Power imbalances become visible in public spaces whenever socially
disadvantaged individuals (e.g., homeless, squatters, drunks, etc.) are sanctioned and removed from
the 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 of
action in the public space (Lukes, 2005). Conversely, sociospatial resistance (e.g., against urban
development programs perceived as exclusionary) may embody a challenge to dominant power
arrangements of the city space via territorial occupation of the public space. As Mitchell (1995) and
Sibley (1995) have noted, the demands of social justice by the socially disadvantaged in the city
require a subversion of its dominant geographies of exclusion.

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Altogether, territorial behavior, urban place-identity, and urban-related identity are psychological constructs that organize peoples ordinary relationships with public spaces. That people
identify themselves with their urban spaces (e.g., streets, quarters, suburbs, etc.), developing a
sense of collective belonging to them and sometimes claiming ownership when faced with outsiders, are culturally familiar situations. These psychological assumptions may be eventually
invoked 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 cognitive
significance for the individual, the language of place-identity and accounts of territoriality may
resonate with broader debates about the sociospatial order in the city. The focus of analysis in
these cases may conveniently shift to the rhetorical uses of place-related psychological states that
warrant or discount spatially organized power arrangements. Psychological representations of
behavior in public can therefore become politically connotated discursive devices that persistently
demonstrate citizenship concerns.
Locating Citizenship: Political-Psychological Significance
Given that public space is a natural arena of citizenship, it is striking how psychological
approaches to citizenship have generally disregarded this material location. There seems to be no
place 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 membership
dynamics, 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 citizenship
beyond 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 negotiation
of status as a legitimate occupant in the public sphere. Issues of rights and identity articulate
practices of citizenship in which categorization, identification, and feelings of belonging to the
political community, together with normative entitlements and social recognition, become core
psychological notions. Crucially, citizenship is conceived as a social construction that becomes
realised through contestation. This justifies the analysis of the complex formations of belonging
(Barnes et al., 2004) that are permanently claimed, warranted, and rebutted through citizenship
discourse.
However, as Shotter (1993) states, it is the politically contested nature of the concept of
citizenship what defines the psychological experience of being a citizen. In his terms, citizenship
is a status which one must struggle to attain in the face of competing versions of what is proper
to struggle for. Its definition is a part of a practical politics in which psychologically, what
would seem to be important is the way in which ones placement or positioning (in relation to
the others around one), not only give rise to feelings which motivate and guide one in that
struggle, but also give one access (or not) to the ontological resources required to be able to
properly participate in that struggle (pp. 115116). Hence, psychological feelings of citizenship
belonging are enmeshed in politicized struggles whereby the conditions of the citizens identity
are actively negotiated and contested.
Despite Shotters psychological account being explicitly embedded in the micropolitics
of citizenship, it is not sensitive to the everyday stages in which symbolic struggles to attain
citizen 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 category

of citizenship unfairly fails to notice citizenships most prominent locations. On the whole,
psychological approaches to citizenship have treated membership, belonging, identity, entitlements, legitimacy, and recognition of rights as displacedwhether cognitive or discursive
entities.
Exceptionally, Dixon et al.s (2006) recent study of everyday attitudes towards street drinking as
a morally connoted incivility sheds light on a number of topics that are pertinent in the study of
public space from the perspective of citizenship. These authors interviewed 59 Lancaster citizens in
the towns most central public space, exploring attitudes towards drinking in public in light of a
recently introduced ban on such behavior. The results of their discursive analysis showed how
peoples responses constructed street drinking as an infringement of civic entitlements and as a form
of visual defilement, breaching the established meanings of the place and generally supporting an
ideological 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 the
public category (e.g., people drinking in the streets). The study highlighted also an ideological
opposition (Billig et al., 1988) between freedom and control in public spaces and contradictions in
the category of admissible publics.
Dixon et al.s study instructs us on how psychological understandings of behavior in public may
strongly depend on particular constructions of place-meaning that may be invoked to warrant
different 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 public
category, threats to civic rights and normative spatial entitlements, that shape, warrant, and contest
peoples statuses and identities as citizens.
This last question has been precisely and directly addressed by urban sociologists and political 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 the
urban territory (Gilbert & Phillips, 2003; Lefebvre, 1968) and is often achieved through locational conflicts (Mitchell, 2003) between different social actors. In this frame, citizenship status
is defined as a practical achievement that involves geographical commotions: the right to the city
is the right to be in and to produce city spaces in order to make them public. A core idea here is
that 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 open
space becomes public when subaltern groups (Fraser, 1990), counterpublics (Crawford, 1995) or
informal actors (Groth & Corijn, 2005) appropriate it in order to become admissible citizens. As
Staeheli and Thompson (1997) have argued, groups of people who are seen as problems for the
public may display territorial strategies of transgression and resistance as a way of claiming
legitimate membership to citizenship, but without belonging to the mainstream community of
publics. Challenging the normative categories of social life in the public realm (Crawford, 1995),
uncomfortable presences in public space demand positive recognition of their community membership and citizen status through the legitimate exercise of their right to the city. Clearly, the
focus on the interface between the right to the city, spatial production, and social exclusion
extends classical studies on bottom-up models of citizenship based on social protest and public
representation (e.g., Tarrow, 1998).
Taken together, these sets of studies show that the normative entitlements, identity claims, and
political struggles for social belonging that define citizenship status are primarily located in public
space. This entails that if people cannot be present in public spaces (. . .) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically out-of-place, then it must be questionable whether or not these
people 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 over
public 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 life
conditions 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 the
long-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 local
inhabitants, who argued that the Town Council had deliberately left Santa Caterina to deteriorate in
order 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 neighbors
followed by social movements and groups of squatters claimed for a green public space such as the
one foreseen in the original 1985 proposal.1 To do so, they occupied an empty space in the middle
of the neighborhood that remained following the demolition of buildings. Through territorial appropriation 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 institutional
idleness towards the place, and was destroyed by the diggers after a violent police raid in 2002. One
year later, neighbors and social movements literally knocked down a wall of concrete built by the
local administration to impede access to the space. The Park of the Hole of Shame was created in
2004, embodying a political neighborhood strategy of resistance to gain a public space for the local
citizens. From that moment, the institutional powers (the Town Council and the developers), on the
one hand, and the occupants of the space, on the other hand, struggled for the territorial control of
the place (see Codina, 2005). The former aimed to redevelop the space, whereas the latter were
determined to maintain the place as a self-managed public space protected from institutional
commandeering and urban speculation. Adding to this tension, a third party in the dispute was a
platform 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 the
Hole 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 protest
against local development programs in Barcelonas urban scene broadly perceived as benefitting
private investments and tourism, against the needs and demands of the local citizens. For research
purposes, the case was selected for three reasons. First, it gathered in one single urban setting the
main 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 to
explore the role of space discourse in shaping psychological representations of citizens normal and
deviant behavior in public, along with their rhetorical value (Dixon et al., 2006); and third, it was a
unique opportunity to examine embodied enactments of the right to the city linked to politically
contested 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 either
to 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 of
social movements, the spokesman of the urban developers responsible for the development of Santa Caterina, politicians of
the District, and leaders of neighborhood associations. Details of the interviewing process appear in the analytical framework
section.

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insight into how some possible psychological representations of public space can be connected to
related understandings of citizenship (Silverman, 2005). Since the Hole of Shame created a discursive context persistently reconstructed using a locational language, i.e., discursive uses of public
space meanings and behaviors, these discourses were chosen as the main focus of analysis, paying
attention 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 and
rhetorical 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 citizen
are reworked in dialogue, which brings the analysis of discourse and narrative to the fore. Accordingly, 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 neighborhood assemblies. Sixteen in-depth interviews were then conducted as primary sources to examine the
case, covering the totality of social groups and organizations directly and explicitly involved in the
conflict, including politicians, developers, occupants, and other organized local inhabitants. Understood as a purposive sampling strategy (Silverman, 2005), the spokespeople of these organizations
were considered to represent those subjects for which discourses about the public space at stake were
most 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 the
organizations 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 the
Hole of Shame conflict?) to detailed questions on the users, activities, and specific conflicting
episodes (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 which
the interviewees signified the Hole of Shame using spatial language (e.g., here, the space is
deteriorated, 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 formulations
and allusions to citizenship linked to those spatial meanings, being sensitive to their normative
connotations 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 spatial
formulations 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 arguments
designed to undermine alternative spatial meanings, refracting ideological tensions; see Billig,
1991). Finally, the implications of such locational constructions for citizenship status were considered. The discursive analysis did not focus on the fine-grain details of turn taking and the
microlinguistic features of the texts, but rather on the broad rhetorical patterns mobilized through
spatial discourse together with the most prominent psychodiscursive maneuvers displayed in the
accounts (e.g., Wetherell & Edley, 1999). The extracts in the analysis below were selected from a
total of 143, representing recurrent patterns of arguments linking public space discourse to citizenship concerns.
Analysis and Discussion
The result of the analytical process is discussed below in two main subsections that correspond
to the recurring discourses above mentioned: (1) citizenship entitlements in public space constructed
using place-belonging criteria; and (2) normative behaviors in public constructed via a rhetoric of
spatial manners. The analysis is then linked to issues of materiality and embodiment in a third
subsection.

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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, freedom
of use, and appropriation (Francis, 1989; Lynch, 1981; Rivlin, 1994) are in practice quite controversial. The accounts given by the agents involved in the conflict show that the spatial entitlements
that define the right to the city are often constrained by place-based categorizations with normative
effects. Extracts 1 to 3 are discussed in three successive subsections, each warranting the three main
positions in the Hole of Shame conflict. The rhetorical organization in the three accounts is effective
because it draws on shared understandings of the kinds of spatial entitlements attributed to two
subcategories of citizens: neighbors2 and the rest of the city.
Neighbors Entitlements Prevail
Extract 1
F: The original idea, lets say, was to transform what was a busy road such as Via Laietana
into a space for the people that live there (. . .) at the same time, a space that can generate
movement from the city to Ciutat Vella, I mean, that facilitates access by the rest of the city
to all the good things that one can find in that part of Ciutat Vella: palaces, easy access from
the 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 to
enjoy it are the neighbors, but that the city can enjoy globally, and that stops being a
problematic space, where social or human problems are concentrated, let it be a space more
for 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 that
making it accessible to all the citizens will solve social problems seemingly located in that (locked
up) area. To do so, he appeals to the culturally familiar image of public space as the highest degree
of social inclusion and accessibility, an enjoyable space for the city globally which is open to
everybody and not exclusive of some groups of people (i.e., the occupants). However, the developer
adds further arguments so as not to overlook another common assumption, namely, that local
inhabitants 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 to
everybody, albeit with a slight privilege of use by the local inhabitants, allows the urban developer
to manage a dilemma of inclusion (Wallwork & Dixon, 2004): he had to defend the local inhabitants
right to public space in a way that did not exclude the rest of the citizens, and vice versa. In doing
so, he introduces a first boundary within the right to the city. Put differently, rights to public space
present a graduation that locates one category of citizens (the neighbors that live there), by virtue
of spatial closeness and place-relatedness, on the top of a hierarchy of citizenships spatial entitlements. Public spaces are places more for its nearest neighbors, its primary beneficiaries, than for
other citizens. Also handling a dilemma of stake (Edwards & Potter, 1992), this discourse protected
the institutional position of the developers from accusations that the Hole of Shame was being
commandeered to gentrify the area (i.e., to the detriment of local inhabitants).

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

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Outsiders Lacking Place-Identity are Less Entitled

The hierarchy of citizens spatial entitlements was also rhetorically useful for the local inhabitants who rejected the spatial occupation:
Extract 2
G: The process that, well, a little bit, lets say super-large that the PERI triggered and all its
changes, 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 that
more external agents of the Casc Antic surroundings also intervene, then there are occupied
buildings, there are more alternative collectives that also get into this dynamic of intervention 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 the
Casc Antic nor do they live in the Casc Antic
(Interview with two representatives of neighbors supporting the official development of the
space).
The account in extract 2 works as an accusation towards the City Council (Ayuntamiento) for
allowing the spatial occupation, causing the conflict in the Hole of Shame and neglecting the needs
of the local inhabitants. This accusation is discursively built by appealing to the arrival of illegitimate
categories of people (more external agents, of the Casc Antic surroundings, who do not live in
the neighborhood). In this narrative of complaint, external agents not belonging to the neighborhood
are rhetorically invoked because they have a disruptive connotation: they breach normative boundaries constructed around spatial criteria. It is not acceptable that people from outside the neighborhood encroach on a space whose assumed propriety is of local residents. Here, neighborhood place
belonging traces a normative line of inclusion and exclusion between publics who are entitled to a
greater or lesser degree to be in the Hole of Shame. As in extract 1, neighbors have more territorial
rights because they belong to the place. In this case, urban-related identity (Lalli, 1992) becomes a
discursive resource to draw a line between us and them (Clarke, 2008), warranting the exclusion
of those lacking legitimate place-belonging status (i.e., the Holes occupants). Moreover, the place
transgression (Dixon et al., 2006) of the latter is underpinned by their participation in squatting
practices (there are occupied buildings), adding an unambiguous nuance of territorial invasion to
the spatial context (Gifford, 1987).
Neighbors Spatial Entitlements Make Occupation Reasonable
The 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 occupation of a public space and to vindicate its legitimacy:
Extract 3
M: We saw that the Ayuntamiento was implementing the same city model here, as in Born and
La Ribera, then the struggle became concentrated in the Hole of Shame because it was the
only remaining place where, where the neighbors identified there could be a square, what we
call the plaza mayor of the neighborhood, yes? The plaza mayor, a space for co-habitance
where neighbors could really, where the philosophy of space was a philosophy of interaction
among the neighbors, where people could be at leisure, where the elders would have a nursing
home, 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 of
a 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 struggle
and the spatial occupation took place. The occupants discourse typically presented two main
rhetorical components, which are illustrated in this extract. First, speaking on behalf of the
neighbors capitalized on the cultural assumption that these local-scale citizens had the territorial
propriety, as in extracts 1 and 2. In this case, the Hole of Shame was occupied because the local
inhabitants wanted a square there: it was not the exclusionary will of illegitimate outsiders, but the
general wish of neighborhood insiders. Furthermore, it was not just any square but strictly a local
one, representing the image of the neighborhood plaza mayor, which in Spanish towns is a
traditional space for community mingling and local diversity. Second, and most important, the
appropriation of a public space by its neighbors, still potentially controversial, is warranted by a
narrative of popular pressure in a struggle against the city model insinuated by the developer
in extract 1. In depicting a reality of conflict involving threat to a successful plaza mayor, the
occupant in extract 3 naturalizes (Thompson, 1990) an attitude of spatial resistance and protection
from its supposed users, the neighbors. Altogether, echoing a cultural narrative (Haste, 2004) of
local/neighborhood struggle against city/global threat, the occupants warranted the spatial appropriation also on the grounds of the place identity of neighbors, but rhetorically countering the
developers discourse.
The accounts so far discussed illustrate that the right to the city is an aspect of citizenship status
paradoxically organized around a series of unequal spatial entitlements based on psychological
categories of place belonging. People lacking neighborhood identity and territorial invaders (squatters) are the kinds of out-of-place publics (Cresswell, 1996) with restricted spatial rights, definitely
deserving less political attention than neighbors/local inhabitants whenever plans for creating local
public 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 of
tracing normative boundaries within the citizens right to the city. Along similar lines, psychological
representations of the spatial behaviors expected in a public space were drawn on in pursuing
partisan political objectives. Thereby common sense images of citizens rights and obligations were
highlighted through a language of spatial manners and place-embedded behaviors. Extracts 4 to 6 in
the following subsections illustrate this.
Citizens Right to Appropriate Public Space Has Limits
Extract 4
Now [the space] its in a situation of impasse, an abnormal impasse, from the point of view
of the citizen. For any reason that one may or may not have, there is not a single citizen
allowed to appropriate a space, make it his own, grow his own orchard there, or whatever
he wants. Its evident that the public space is for everyone, and nobody can close it off and
make it his own.
(Interview with the representative of the developers).

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Similar to extract 1, the developer in extract 4 reasserts that the Hole of Shame is a problematic
space, defined here as an abnormal impasse. The deviant character of this situation is clearly
depicted as appealing for an indisputable right to public space of every citizen, namely, universal
freedom of access and use (Its evident that the public space is for everyone, and nobody can close
it off and make it his own). Exclusionary actions of spatial appropriation for restricted use
contravene this common sense assumption in democratic societies, because it impedes other citizens
practicing their equal right to free access in public space. The Hole of Shame is hence depicted as an
inadequate public space because it does not meet this fundamental citizens right. As an offensive
rhetoric (Potter, 1996) undermining the neighborhood plaza mayor construction portrayed by the
occupant back in extract 3, the developers argument quite clearly calls for the redevelopment of the
Hole of Shame as an inadmissible public space.
Note here that the developers account makes this freedom-of-use assumption work rhetorically
because it evokes a contrary idea: that freedom in public spaces is constrained by requirements of
control and by moral standards (Dixon et al., 2006). Added to their disruptive presence as external
agents or squatters, occupants were out of place also because their territorial behaviors breached the
essential meaning of public space: freedom of use and appropriation must unfold only until it reaches
the limits of other citizens rights and freedom. This underpins a dominant ideological tradition of
negative liberty in the public sphere, pinpointing that freedom in public space depends less on access
and appropriation as such than on the manners or ways these spatial rights are actually exerted. When
the 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 the
excluded 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 Public
Rhetorically 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 local
inhabitants (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 mayor
achieved by means of a struggle against a city model supported this idea. A veni-vidi-vici logic for
the popular conquest of a loose urban space was assumed in extract 3 to be a legitimate spatial
behavior. Framed as a political action, the territorial behavior of appropriation of the Hole (censured by the developer in extract 4) appeared in the occupants discourse as an acceptable strategy
to counter the power and authority of local institutions (Gifford, 1987; Merelman, 1988) and to
organize political resistance (Jackson, 1998; Lees, 1998). Moreover, the fact that the occupants
appropriated the only remaining place in the neighborhood worked in extract 3 as an extrematization (Potter, 1996), depicting the occupation as stemming not from the occupants will, but
from critical circumstances of spatial availability. In discursive terms, this protected the occupants
against stake accusations.
The do-it-yourself spatial strategy of territorial resistance illustrated in extract 3 obviously
subverts the dominant logical order of urban development programs, according to which new public
spaces are decided, programmed, and supervised by the political authorities. Extract 5 below
represents this institutional stance:
Extract 5
I: The space of Figueras Well has become an unresolved issue that has continued for more
than four years. What is the situation? Is there a working line yet in order to resolve the
conflict?

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CM: The demolitions are already finished; the participatory process to determine the
development has started now. I guess that itll be finished in a couple of months and then the
works 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, a
play-area for ptanque, basketball, games for children, public toilets, in sum, all those
things that can be placed in a public space, depending on what is finally decided in this
participatory process.
(Interview with the District Councillor 20032007, published in the newspaper Nova Ciutat
Vella, November 2005)
In this extract, the District Councillor exemplifies the correct and appropriate ways of solving the
development of a public space in normal democracies. His account is rhetorically designed as a
space-based script formulation (Edwards, 1994; Stokoe & Wallwork, 2003). First, buildings are
knocked down; then a participatory plan takes place; and finally urban furniture is introduced into the
new environment. In this sequential narrative, any popular will is accepted (depending on what is
finally decided in this participatory process), but after that the process is over and the political
authority decides a definitive solution.
Scripts allow resetting a familiar normative baseline where exceptional disorderliness rules. In
discursive terms, the District Councillors scripted account constructs an image of institutional
control that is challenged by the interviewer, who refers to an unresolved conflict. The Hole of
Shame situation defied, as in the developers discourse, a dominant arrangement of the sociospatial
order in the city that presupposes institutional monitoring of public space making and does certainly
not include direct spatial appropriation. The right to the city is in this case limited by institutional
authority upon alternative enactments of citizenship based on direct spatial appropriation (i.e., the
occupants strategy, extract 3).
Citizens Moral-Spatial Manners in Public
Images 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 identities and entitlements. Extract 6 below presents the account of a previous District Councillor
regarding the origin of the Hole of Shames occupation. The core idea of the District Councillors
account is that of a general situation of anomie in the Hole of Shame, and in the neighborhood
generally, during her mandate:
Extract 6
C: 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 flat
here!, and he called any social conflict group, conflict, huh? civic conflict, squatters,
Algerians, I remember a documentary on television, the rooftops of that environment better
not to, they were jumping from one roof to another, so, they entered one building, came out
three buildings further along, buildings that were already evicted waiting to be knocked
down (. . .) The Algerian delinquent who did whatever he wanted and nobody controlled,
because among other things their meeting point was Carders with Allada-Vermell, those
piles were, the arch of, that was, I mean like their playground, I mean, they lived there, they
lived there for as many hours as they were interested.
(Interview with the District Councillor 19992003)

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In this account squatters are again mentioned. As said in the first subsection of the analysis, they
are invoked as an intrinsically out-of-place category of people whose transgressive identity signifies
the occupied space in negative terms. The arrival of squatters disrupted the spatial order because they
were considered by the Councillor as a civic conflict group. Civic conflict is depicted using a
locational 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 one
place to another. There seems to be a breach of an implicit normative sequence that structures the way
people should move to a place, again a culture-bound scripted sequence. People are normally expected
to choose where they go, they do not usually occupy flats just because they are empty, and they are not
put 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 Shame
involving 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 aligned
with squatters as a civic conflict group occupying empty flats. Therefore, Algerians appear as a social
category of publics with various outsider conditions in the Councillors discourse: they are depicted
as foreigners, squatters, urban troublemakers and criminals (Algerian delinquent, nobody carried
any kind of document, caught by the police). This makes the attribution of civic conflict in the
Hole of Shame quite evident, discursively constructing the negative identity of its users as problematic citizens.
More interestingly, the Algerians negative identity is rhetorically worked through by reporting
their ways of being in and moving around the Hole of Shame: they were jumping from one roof to
another; they entered one building, came out of another three buildings further along; their
meeting point was Carders with Allada-Vermell,3 it was like their playground, and they lived there
for as long as they were interested. The rhetorical value of these descriptions lies in the nature of these
spatial uses also as instances of place transgression. Jumping over the rooftops, coming in and out of
the buildings, and appropriating a public space as a playground for permanent use is not commonly
considered a correct behavior. Common sense dictates that rooftops, buildings, and street corners are
meant to be used differently to be proper spatial practices. The spatial uses reported by the Councillor
clearly constitute deviant behaviors as they breach the normative definition of roof use, building
entrance, and street gathering. Connoting bad manners in public, the capacity of spatial notions to
regulate 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 through
urban space. The Councillors depiction of a moral panic (Cohen, 2002) comes to the fore as an
intense 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 these
criminalized immigrants lived there for as many hours as they were interested. This argument
underpins the status of these people as inadmissible publics on the basis of an added place-and-time
transgression, namely, that public space is public and (as the developer puts it in extract 4) nobody
can 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 open
space of the city. Therefore, occupants were also breaching the moral order of public space by using
it as a private space, impeding access for other citizens.
On the whole, the accounts of the developer and of the two successive District Councillors
support a stance that defends a version of the sociospatial public order requiring the absence of
certain categories of people. People external to the neighborhood, squatters, and Algerians were not
entitled 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.

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rights and freedoms by neighbors (extract 2) and by all citizens (extract 4); they disrupted
institutional protocols of the citys spatial transformation (extract 5); and they breached the public
spaces moral-spatial organization (extract 6). If aptitude for citizenship (is) premised on a mode of
civility, or on how to behave within the public spaces of the polis (Kofman, 1995, p. 123), then
clearly 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 the
legitimacy of occupancy in the public sphere (Barnes et al., 2004), compromises particular social
identities in public (Painter & Philo, 1995), and draws a line of exclusion (Clarke, 2008) within the
psychological 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 spatial
dispute was only bound by the limits of discourse. The rhetorical dispute mobilized a series of
space-related constructions redefining normative boundaries of citizenship status. However, spacediscourses framed, and were framed by, material actions of spatial appropriation, use, and transformation that were also consequential in terms of psychological belonging to the legitimate category
of citizenship. Discourse and space were mutually enmeshed in ways that redefined the ideational
field of placeness, the physical grounds of spatiality, and the political contours of citizenship.
This assertion makes explicit an epistemological tension that inevitably arises when approaching
the relationship between the symbolic, the discursive, and the material dimensions of the urban
geography (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 Shame
conflict would be somehow incomplete if it ignored that geographically located tangible objects and
bodies that moved in space and time structurally embodied the daily practices of citizenship enacted
in the Hole of Shame. Recurrent sequences of spatial occupation-and-eviction composed the physical
setting 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 the
place, related to rhetorically opposing discursive framings. In extract 4 the spokesman of the
developers argued that the space is in a situation of abnormal impasse, from the point of view of
the citizen, because there is not a single citizen allowed to appropriate a space, since its evident
that the public space is for everyone and nobody can close it off and make it his own. This normative
limit of citizens right to appropriate the public space led in practice to successive physical actions
by the local authorities. Trees planted by the local inhabitants were removed, there was police
repression, municipal workers built a defensive wall, and policemen finally evicted the occupants to
redevelop a new official public space. These actions materially embodied the developers citizenship
discourse which warranted, in different moments of the conflict, imminent reappropriation of the
space by the local administration and consequent eviction.
The occupants rhetorical contestation was also consequential in terms of embodied practices of
spatial resistance. Recalling extract 3, the spokesman of the occupants argued that the struggle
became concentrated in the Hole of Shame because it was the only remaining place where the
neighbors identified there could be a square; for this reason, by means of a lot of popular pressure
against a city model, the space was occupied. This discourse constructed a version of the right to
the city based on citizens struggle and direct appropriation, undermining the normative limits traced
by the developers (extract 4). In this frame, the occupants rhetoric was followed by local inhabitants
replanting trees, holding hands around buildings in order to impede their demolition and knocking
down 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 in
reappropriation and territorial defense.
From this example one does not need to conclude that there is an objective extra-discursive
realm out there in the form of spatial geography that determines place discourse. Rather, it
pinpoints innovative approaches to the relationship between the physical space and place discourse
need 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 intergroup behavior) and territorial behaviors (appropriation, marking, control, defense, power, and
resistance), place indexicality (the reference to the social meanings of the material placement of
signs; Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p. 4) can be a helpful concept. This implies that some language
practices and physical markers only make sense when they are materially placed in specific areas and
pointing in different directions. This unavoidable dimension of whereness in the discursive
production of citizenship status was also clear in the Holes conflict. Graffiti stating that the Town
Council was neglecting the needs of the local inhabitants, banners demanding a green zone, and
verbal accusations against urban developers walking around the area, only made sense insofar as they
were displayed strictly within the spatial limits of the Hole of Shame. Out of this area these signs
would have lost their political meaning and would have been as out of place as the occupants in the
view of politicians and of the rest of the neighborhood. Words demanding a plaza mayor against
a city model and a space for everybody (extract 3) had their logical emplacement in the public
arena 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 a
perceived grievance stemming from an unwanted urban development program (Gifford, 1987).
Physical occupation and direct aggression appeared because the activities desired for in the same
space were incompatible among different segments of citizens. Mitchells (1995, 2003) apology of
taking to the streets in order to claim for all citizens right to the city fits in with this territorial
behavior, which was also a political resource for the local administration in the struggle to regain
authority (Merelman, 1988). The Hole of Shame conflict confirmed that territoriality is embedded
in social relations (Sack, 1986, p. 26), regulating intergroup behavior between different sectors of
the citizenship in their competing attempts of asserting their right to public space. Through spatial
actions the occupants in the Hole of Shame gained visibility in the public sphere, eventually leading
to positive recognition of their undervalued social identities and to legitimization of their neighborhood problems. Spatial actions became an instrument to express perception of inequity and to
promote community empowerment, supporting processes of place-attachment via collective narratives of political involvement (Low, 1992).
Conclusion
Positive recognition and acceptance in the public sphere are core aspects of legitimacy shaping
citizenship 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, a
fundamental citizens right to freely access, use, appropriate, and transform the urban space. It has
been argued in this article that public space claims, demands, and conflicts may bring to the fore
citizenship concerns, particularly contested matters which are both psychologically grounded and
politically consequential.
The analysis of accounts involved in a sociospatial conflict in Barcelona has illustrated that
contested 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 political
significance of such psychological representations, it is however useful to shed light on some

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139

important social-psychological processes that can shape experiences of citizenship located in the
public space. Specifically, it has been shown that psychological assumptions about membership to a
space-bound community, normative boundaries limiting spatial appropriation rights, and morally
connoted spatial behaviors in public can be related to varied profiles of citizenship with differentiated
levels of legitimacy.
The case study discussed also shows the validity of a discursive-rhetorical approach to broach
this link between psychological representations of behavior in public and related conceptions of
citizenship. Public space discourse can be functional to warrant, as well as undermine, competing
sociospatial claims and actions in the public realm that have political resonances. The analysis allows
stating that the discursive uses of place belonging and of normative views of spatial use and
appropriation can underpin different versions of citizenship identity and status. Moreover, they can
be at the service of justifying conflicting physical enactments of the right to the city and opposed
conceptions of the social order.
At a conceptual level, the case analyzed is deemed useful to continue exploring what has been
referred 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 public
space, as well as to introduce public space matters into psychological studies of citizenship. As a
result, it has been shown how some psychological understandings of citizenship can also be worked
through 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 become
material versions of symbolic struggles to redefine the psychological boundaries of normative
belonging to citizenship: as a way of reshaping the political ontology of a citizen whose identity is
grounded on the public space. Territorial behaviors in public space can serve to reassert and censure
urban-related identities (e.g., neighbors/local inhabitants, squatters, etc.; Lalli, 1992) and to regulate
intergroup relations between publics and counterpublics (Crawford, 1995; Fraser, 1990). It has been
argued that considering some physical dimensions of public space enriches psychological understandings of citizenship because they frame the sense of their embedded discourses, serving as a
resource to make visible the identities of social groups and embody the symbolic lines of social
acceptance 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 basic
aspect of citizenship. This normative ideal can be challenged in practice by urban strategies perceived to be exclusionary (Smith, 1996; Sorkin, 1992), as well as by counterpublics tenaciously
asserting 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 supports
Shotters (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 instrumental value. While it serves to illustrate possible significant relationships between public space and
citizenship at a social-psychological level, pinpointing how citizenship is also materially staged in
the 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 citizens
behavior in public, as much as particular trends of urban development can afford the citizens
particular uses of public space tied to different understandings of its nature and functions. Discourses
and spatial practices are expected to construct citizenship, public space, and their interrelated
processes in many different ways.
In the context of this study, these conclusions point towards a model of citizenship based on a
politics of difference, recognition, and contestation in the public space, rather than of sameness,
unity, and peaceful consensus. Being both politically and psychologically relevant, citizenship
interventions grounded on the public space would benefit from working on the differential entitle-

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ments to use public space that depend on controversial place-belonging criteria; the normative limits
of citizens universal access to, and appropriation of, the public space, considering their contested
nature and ways of re-negotiating these limits; citizens conflicting views of how transformations of
the public space should take place; and the different systems of values that shape moral-spatial
assumptions defining decent and inadmissible behavior in public.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Andrs Di Masso, Social Psychology
Department, University of Barcelona, Pg. Vall dHebron, 171, 08035, Barcelona, Spain. E-mail:
adimasso@ub.edu
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