The Morality of Urban Public Life: The Emergence and Continuation of a Debate

Abstract

THE MORALITY OF URBAN PUBLIC LIFE The Emergence and Continuation of a Debate Lyn H. Lofland In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs remarks: •Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hangitm' around in canilv stores and bars and drinking soda pop on stoops, anil have passed a judgement, die gist of which is: This is deplorable! If these people had decent homes and a more private or 1 M>.ik outdoor place, they wouldn't be on the street!' V | ,|. A somewhat different but related H&f.tijiessage is to be found in .trie I want to use Jacobs' wry insight and the mes- sage of that little piece of folk wisdom to chart a path through die enormous country formed ays seen in public place^fi IIP SlfMSSlSliSSfSillt^^Bi m Ml sili by the topic public life in the city: past, present, and future. I shall pay particular and focussed attention to the moral tensions and debates that, at least for the past several hundred years, and at least in Nordi America and Nordiern Europe, have been the recurring companions of that public life. Before I can meaningfully get to this matter of public life and moral ten- sions, however, I must lay some conceptual and definitional groundwork. I am going to propose that it is useful to conceive of die city as a settlement form that provides three different kinds of social psychological space: the private, the parochial, and the public realms of urban life. P L A C E S

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.