Negotiating Privately For An Effective Role In Public Space

This book is the outcome of interdisciplinary research investigating female participation in politics in rural India. The participants were all rural and mostly illiterate women who dared to explore the public space by entering into grassroots political institutions as a result of the quota introduced in 1992. This ruling stipulated that ‘no less than one third of the seats’ in India’s rural political units, the Panchayats, were to be filled by women, and created a social revolution in the countryside of India. The book presents an interesting investigation into about how women representatives negotiated their new roles by converting the strong patriarchal set-up in India into a support system for their new endeavour. This is an interesting work on women in local political institutions, and reveals the gradual social and economic empowerment of women through gender quotas in politics.

Urban sidewalks, critical but undervalued public spaces, have been sites for political demonstrations and urban greening, promenades for the wealthy and the well-dressed, and shelterless shelters for the homeless. On sidewalks, decade after decade, urbanites have socialized, paraded and played, sold their wares, and observed city life. These uses often overlap and conflict, and urban residents and planners try to include some and exclude others. In this first book-length analysis of the sidewalk as a distinct public space, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht examine the evolution of the American urban sidewalk and trace conflicts that have arisen over its competing uses. They discuss the characteristics of sidewalks as small urban public spaces, and such related issues as the ambiguous boundaries of their 'public' status, contestation around specific uses, control and regulations, and the implications for First Amendment speech and assembly rights. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples as well as case study research and archival data from five cities - Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle - the authors focus on how the functions and meanings of street activities have shifted and have been negotiated through controls and interventions. They consider sidewalk uses that include the display of individual and group identities (in ethnic and pride parades, for example), the everyday politics of sidewalk access, and larger political actions (including Seattle's 1999 antiglobalization protests), and examine the complex regulatory frameworks that manage street and sidewalk life. The role of urban sidewalks in the early twenty-first century depends, the authors conclude, on what we want from sidewalk life and how we balance competing interests.

Negotiating religious diversity, as well as negotiating different forms and degrees of commitment to religious belief and identity, constitutes a major challenge for all societies. Recent developments such as the ‘de-secularisation’ of the world, the transformation and globalisation of religion and the attacks of September 11 have made religious claims and religious actors much more visible in the public sphere. This volume provides multiple perspectives on the processes through which religious communities create or defend their place in a given society, both in history and in our world today. Offering a critical, cross-disciplinary investigation into processes of negotiating religion and religious diversity, the contributors present new insights on the meaning and substance of negotiation itself. This volume draws on diverse historical, sociological, geographic, legal and political theoretical approaches to take a close look at the religious and political agents involved in such processes as well as the political, social and cultural context in which they take place. Its focus on the European experiences that have shaped not only the history of ‘negotiating religion’ in this region but also around the world, provides new perspectives for critical inquiries into the way in which contemporary societies engage with religion. This study will be of interest to academics, lawyers and scholars in law and religion, sociology, politics and religious history.

In Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations , Anna Snaith explores the centrality of ideas of public and private in Woolf's life and writing. The book offers a fresh understanding of Woolf's feminism, her narrative techniques, her attitudes to publication, and her role in public debate. It draws on new manuscript material and previously unexplored letters to Woolf from her reading public.

This book explores the relationship between architecture and philosophy through a discussion on threshold spaces linking public space with publicly accessible buildings. It explores the connection between exterior and interior and how this creates and affects interactions between people and the social dynamics of the city. Building on an existing body of literature, the book engages with critical philosophy and discusses how it can be applied to architecture. In a similar vein to Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the Parisian Arcades in the nineteenth century, the book identifies the conditions under which thresholds reveal and impact social life. It utilises a wide range of illustrated international case studies from architects in Japan, Norway, Finland, France, Portugal, Italy, the USA, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil. Within the examples, thresholds become enhancers of social interactions and highlight broader socio-political contexts in public and private space. Architecture of Threshold Spaces is an enlightening contribution to knowledge on contemporary architecture, politics and philosophy for students, academics, and architects.

Central to 'Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects' lays the concept of private sector-led urban development projects. Such projects involve project developers taking a leading role and local authorities adopting a facilitating role, in managing the development of an urban area, based on a clear public-private role division. Such a development strategy is quite common in Anglo-Saxon urban development practices, but is less known in Continental European practices.Nonetheless, since the beginning of the millennium such a development strategy also occurred in the Netherlands in the form of 'concessions'. However, remarkably little empirical knowledge is available about how public and private actors collaborate on and manage private sector-led urban development projects. Moreover, it remains unclear what the effects of such projects are. This dissertation provides an understanding of the various characteristics of private sector-led urban development projects by conducting empirical case study research in the institutional contexts of the Netherlands and the UK. The book provides an answer to the following question:What can we learn from private sector-led urban development projects in the Netherlands and UK in terms of the collaborative and managerial roles of public and private actors, and the effects of their (inter)actions?