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Abstract
The scholarly focus on the production of space necessitates a thorough reassessment of the static categories employed in the analysis of spatial processes. Emphasizing space as a process, this essay calls attention to the recent implication of Madrid's Retiro Park in larger processes of capital accumulation. At the same time, it highlights the insufficiency of the tempting yet problematic distinction between public and private space that obtains in easy solutions to the struggles over city-space. As many critics have pointed out, there is design flaw in the idea of public space—it can never explain how a given space, such as a park, comes to be free of the ‘private’ (personal and structural) interests operating throughout its societal context. The story of the Retiro ultimately foregrounds the pivotal role of city-space in the drive for capitalist intercity-competition and suggests that the latter process is insufficiently confronted by idealized notions of the role truly ‘public’ spaces might play in radical democracy and citizenship.
Le Parc Retiro de Madrid comme espace publiquement privé et les problèmes spatiaux de la théorie spatiale
Les travaux de recherche universitaire sur la production de l'espace requièrent une réévaluation en profondeur des catégories statiques utilisées pour l'analyse des processus spatiaux. En insistant sur l'espace en tant que processus, cet essai attire l'attention sur le Parc Retiro de Madrid et ce qu'il implique pour les processus d'accumulation du capital de grande ampleur. Il souligne en même temps l'insuffisance de la distinction séduisante mais problématique entre l'espace public et privé découlant des solutions faciles appliquées aux conflits sur l'espace urbain. Plusieurs critiques ont souligné d'ailleurs le point faible au niveau de la conception de l'idée de l'espace public. Celle-ci n'arrive jamais à fournir une explication de la façon dont un espace donné, tel un parc, peut exclure les intérêts «privés» (personnels et structurels) oeuvrant dans ce contexte de société. En fin de compte, l'histoire du Retiro met à l'avant plan le rôle pivot de l'espace urbain dans le processus de compétition capitaliste interurbaine, et laisse entendre que les notions idéalisées sur le rôle que les espaces vraiment «publics» jouerait au sein de la démocratie radicale et la citoyenneté ne se confrontent pas suffisamment à ce processus.
El Parque del Retiro, Madrid, como espacio públicamente privado y los problemas espaciales de la teoría espacial
La atención del campo académico en la producción de espacio exige un nuevo estudio detallado de las categorías estacionarias empleadas en el análisis de procesos espaciales. Destacando la importancia de espacio como un proceso, este trabajo tiene como enfoque la implicación del Parque del Retiro en Madrid en los procesos más ámplios de acumulación de capital. Al mismo tiempo, destaca las insuficiencias de la atractiva y, sin embargo, problemática distinción entre el espacio público y el privado, que obtiene soluciones fáciles a la lucha por espacio de ciudad. Como han indicado muchos críticos, hay un defecto en el diseño de la idea de espacio público—nunca puede explicar cómo un espacio dado, como un parque, llega a ser libre de los intereses (personales y estructurales) ‘privados’ que operan por todo su contexto social. La historia del Parque del Retiro subraya el papel central del espacio de ciudad en el impulso para competición-interciudad capitalista, y sugiere que el segundo de estos procesos no se ha hecho frente a las nociones idealizadas del rol que los espacios verdaderamente públicos pueden tener en la democracia y la ciudadanía radicales.
Acknowledgements
I am greatly indebted to both Malcolm Compitello and Sallie Marston.
Notes
1 The few scholarly articles that have touched on parks in Madrid include CitationAriza Muñoz, who delves into unrealized plans for a park in Madrid called the Campos Eliseos (1988) and then offers a historical and functional description of various Citationconstructions in Madrid's parks, some of them in the Retiro (1993); Remón Menéndez (Citation1998) looks at the creation of the Parque del Oeste as part of the late nineteenth-century expansion of Madrid and touches in passing on its problematic relation to the class struggle—‘Parque del Oeste definitely seemed more to want to transform the working class into middle-class people than to satisfy the genuine needs of those working classes’ (1998: 204); and Rodríguez Romero and Prieto González (Citation1997) trace the development of nineteenth-century public recreation spaces with a focus on the Retiro.
2 I do not wish to engage culture as opposed to nature, as has been historically done (see Johnston, Gregory, Pratt and Watts, Citation2000; Williams Citation1977). Such an opposition is, of course, the basis of any approach that relegates the cultural to a mere symbolic mode of representation superimposed upon a material reality.
3 This idea is embedded in perhaps his most widely acknowledged metaphor—that of ‘the cinematograph of the mind.’ If we take instantaneous snapshots of the surrounding world, he says, this is merely to be able to insert our action into the unending movement of experience.
4 This is the tendency of CitationMarston's statement recognizing the ‘“nexus” among’ and ‘mutually constitutive nature of the categories’ of state, culture and space (2004: 38). This is the intention of CitationJessop's assertion that the boundaries between the economic and the political are of cultural origin (1999: 380). The uncritical engagement of the culture/state division (see Van Deusen Citation2004) is only one such way in which the abstractions reified by the human intellect capture scholarly attention and manage to obscure the real movement inherent to social practice.
5 And yet, his solution (‘By establishing the boundary between the two realms so that a civilized relationship can be promoted, the threat of encroachment by private interests into the public realm and the threat of public intrusion into the private sphere are both minimized and carefully managed’; Madanipour 2003: 241) falls short of a radical questioning of these terms and the acknowledgement that they have formed out of a power relationship. It is not that between spaces and representations of spaces there is a slippage, but rather that the problems that have arisen in the produced space of the Retiro call attention to contestatory spatial productions at work. Most importantly, to imagine the problem of access to the Retiro in terms of public/private space is to accept uncritically the very terms from which capitalist enterprise profits and explains away structural inequalities.
6 David Harvey follows suit and explicitly bases his own investigations on this model (1990: 218–219).
7 CitationMitchell is certainly aware of the complexity of spatial practices. As a splendid example I cite his Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000). Even so, these complexities are somewhat smoothed out in his work on parks as his otherwise solid critique of entwined cultural and material processes yields slightly to the understandable need for tangible results in the fight for social justice.
8 Though talk of rights cannot assure group inclusion, he argues, it can provide a structure that various actors can refer to in the struggle over space. The emphasis he places on rights is too great given that the use/interpretation of rights is in itself a problematic area of social practice. Once rights are ‘won,’ what is to insure their correct interpretation and application by the courts? By law enforcement? What will assure that people are aware of their rights? Needless to say the jump from rights to praxis is a long one. Mitchell, in fact, undermines his own emphasis on the importance of rights in securing through law a precedent for the creation of public space through action. He writes, ‘that idea [of public space] has never been guaranteed. It has only been won through concerted struggle, and then, after the fact, guaranteed (to some extent) in law’ (2003: 5). There seems to be in the parenthetical clarification ‘(to some extent)’ an implicit recognition that his own emphasis on rights is inadequate. Moreover, his statement that ‘“rights talk”—and even more the practical assertion of rights—remains a critical exercise if social justice is to be advanced rather than constricted’ (2003: 6, emphasis added) recognizes the disparity extant between rights and their meaning, interpretation and implementation. Moreover, we must nevertheless question the idea of ‘public’ which informs this discussion of struggle.
9 One acknowledgement of this invisible dimension of struggle is to be found in Lloyd (1997). He notes that nationalist movement struggles have relegated movements not identical with them to spaces of contingency. This space is ‘the mythopoeic space of arrested development and fixity vis-à-vis the forward movement of nationalism itself. It is, then, to the resources of this mythopoeic space that national culture is held to recur in its atavistic moments, while its historical modernity finds expression in the state form. The state is both the proper end of historical process and the eternal antagonist of contingency and myth’ (1997: 178). These non-identical struggles can be struggles of class or gender, as he notes is the case of Ireland, or by extension any movement that contrasts with the hegemonic constructed normality of the nationalist movement. Lloyd sees the development of the nationalist movement as interacting with state-oriented tendencies ‘before or after independence’ (1997: 188) and since, in the tradition of Ernest Gellner (Citation1983), Lloyd notes that the ‘nation desires the state,’ we have just such a model of how small-scale disciplining in the Foucauldian sense interacts with the large-scale state-idea—through a practice of discarding that which cannot be disciplined; a practice performed by disciplined individuals. Of great interest here is how this same idea gets articulated in M. CitationAugé's (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity with consequences for the argument at hand. He writes: ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of “places of memory”, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position … Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten’ (1995: 77–78, 79). Here, Augé's non-place takes on the semiological ordering function of Lloyd's nationalism. While the latter relegates other social movements to an atavistic past, the former performs the same operation on place, on history, on identity. Movement through space is thus the material component of a sign more often recognized as ideological. It is the iconic representation of a semiotically arbitrarily-motivated sign and sign-system. Controlling access to space, in the Retiro Park or anywhere, is always intimately connected with the phenomenon that Lloyd terms nationalism and that Augé terms non-place.
10 From Frantz Fanon's A Dying Colonialism, quoted in Said (Citation2000: 101).
11 There are numerous studies that have looked at the privatization of the public in Spain including those that have examined public services (García Fernández Citation1997) and others that have focused on political economy (CitationClifton, Comín and Díaz Fuentes 2003; Lavdas Citation1996). One such study by Bartolomé Clavero argues that the bourgeois revolutions in Spain in the nineteenth century ‘brought about a new social order based on the privatization of social relations’ (Cruz Citation1996: 12). McNeill (Citation2002) argues that the Napoleonic occupation of the early nineteenth century in Spain effected a shift from feudal property regimes to privatization of space. This discursive focus of researchers finds a place, too, in more action-oriented protest. Fernando CitationAlvarez-Uría, professor of sociology at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, titles a 2002 short essay ‘La privatización es un robo [Privatization is robbery].’ The organization CitationAttac Madrid rallies against the privatization of public services and against the Acuerdo General sobre el Comercio de Servicios (AGCS) [General Agreement on Marketed Services] (Attac Madrid 2003). Students in Madrid turn out by the thousands to protest the privatization of the University (Gómez Citation2000). Piketes (Citation2003) announces a protest against privatization and capitalist neoliberalism in Madrid. EcoPortal.net reports on protests against the privatization of the railroad (Ordóñez Citation2003). In 2001 the street-cleaning utility in the Retiro neighborhood, and in two others in Madrid, was privatized (Sanz Citation2001) causing a four-fold increase in the cost to residents.
12 As capital and consciousness become increasingly urbanized in the uneven geographical development of capitalism, the city becomes the playground of those trying to accelerate turnover time (Harvey 2000). This can only be accomplished through the production of space and long-term investments. Capitalists and local, state, and federal governments work together to create spaces of long-term investment that will make money, but that will do nothing to minimize the disparity between what the upper tier earns and what the underclass brings home.
13 Investment in consumption spectacles, the selling of images of places, competition over the definition of cultural and symbolic capital, the revival of vernacular traditions associated with places as a consumer attraction, all become inflated in inter-place competition. I note in passing, that most of postmodern production in, for example, the realms of architecture and urban design, is precisely about the selling of place as part and parcel of an ever-deepening commodity culture. The result is that places that seek to differentiate themselves as marketable entities end up creating a kind of serial replication of homogeneity (Harvey 1996: 298, drawing on Christine CitationBoyer 1988; emphasis added).
14 ‘Lugar predilecto de los reyes ya desde la época de Felipe II, fue Felipe IV el que impulsó su creación y en 1868 se convirtió en propiedad del municipio’ (www.madridhoy.net/ciudad/parques.htm). From this point on, all translations in the text are my own. The original Spanish will be included in the endnotes.
15 See La ilustración insuficiente [The Insufficient Enlightenment] by E. Subirats (Citation1981) for a description of the persevering feudal structures in Spain.
16 See Baker and CitationCompitello (2003: 24–25) where they cite Objectives and Criteria of the Plan General.
17 See Compitello's essay (2003a).
18 ‘Los quioscos y locales que se instalaron sin respetar la estética del lugar serán reubicados de acuerdo con la idea original. En fotos antiguas conservadas en el Museo Farroviario se puede apreciar que la farmacia, la fiambrería y la bombonería, mantenían el mismo estilo de la estación.’
19 ‘Los madrileños no tienen conocimiento suficiente del patrimonio monumental del que disponen.’
20 ‘…por razones de seguridad y para evitar el gamberrismo.’
21 This researcher was overwhelmed by the police presence on two separate visits to the park, in the summers of 2001 and 2002. Uniformed police, patrol cars and paddy wagons were extremely visible and most concentrated near the park's central pond area, a draw for tourists and non-white immigrants alike.
22 ‘Policías a caballo, en coche, en moto. Decenas de agentes recorren cada día, durante horas, el parque de El Retiro a la caza del inmigrante.’
23 ‘…16 decomisos de pequeñas cantidades de droga, una navaja; un indocumentado; tres personas sancionadas por consumir algún tipo de estupefaciente en público y 56 intervenciones menores, que incluyen desde pasear suelto al perro hasta la pérdida de un niño o una multa de tráfico por circular el parque.’
24 ‘los inmigrantes que lleguen a España no serán personas con reconocimiento legal y derechos, sino «ilegales obligados a aceptar cualquier condición de trabajo, a ocultarse, a callar ante las injusticias».’
25 ‘For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance … the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves’ (Arendt 1958: 50).
26 Instead, this error is based upon the mistaken philosophical premise (see Bergson 1998 [1907]) that ‘nothing’ might come before ‘something’ rather than that nothing is the presence of something with an additional movement of thought that negates that very something. It is not that space is public before it is made private, that nothing predates something, but rather that strategies and purpose are indeed coterminous with space from the beginning, and it is only that a necessarily positioned analysis has not considered those of interest until now. It is likewise problematic, as I have argued above, to imagine that private interests can be transcended to produce a public space, an idea which begs the doubled-question of whose interests must be transcended (minority groups) and whose will remain uncontested (investors).