Guest Editor: Antonio L. Rappa
James W. Doig
Territorial Modernity and Public Space: Lessons from the
Politics of Water Conflict Along the US/Canadian Border
Abstracts
Conflict over water
resources is a major problem throughout the world. This essay
describes the long-standing and often successful effort to
insulate decisions on how to allot water among contending
users, and how to reduce water pollution along a 5000-mile
international border. The effort has been fraught with
political and scientific complexity. Yet, after more than 90
years of experience, it provides a model that other nations
are beginning to examine as relevant to their own efforts to
find solutions.
Sor-hoon Tan
Is Public Space Suited to Co-operative Inquiry?
Abstract
This article
questions the nature of the philosophical commitment to the
problem of 'the public' in modernity. To what extent does the
natural form of the public determine the use and value of the
instruments of pragmatism in the public-private divide. In
this interpretation, John Dewey's ideas about 'the public' are
presented in terms of how to solve a specific problem through
what he sees as 'co-operative inquiry'. The article also
examines the role of public space in the process of
democratization through the potential of co-operative inquiry.
More often than not, it appears that the politics of public
space may be both detrimental and/or beneficial to its
end-users in China, Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the rest
of Asia.
Debora J. Halbert
Citizenship, Pluralisam, and Modern Public Space
Abstract
The article begins with the realist assumption
in political science that posits that political violence and
chaos occurs in the absence of the state, and that the
international system is congenitally anarchic. Using the Y2K
problem and the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade
Center in New York as two instances of violent political
phenomena within global modernity, this article examines
notions of citizenship, pluralism, and their relationships
with modern public space through the lens of 'public disaster'
scenarios in which the breakdown of centralized systems of
power tends to lead to chaos. However, public disasters also
appear to create the opposite effect of bonding communities
together in the face of adversity that leads to greater social
cohesion rather than the breakdown of social institutions. The
article tries to resolve this apparent enigma through several
theories of public space, democracy, and civil society.
Antonia L. Rappa
Modernity and the Contingency of the Public
Abstract
The idea of a public
contingent on its participants is the analogue of resonance to
music because neither would make sense without the other. This
article introduces the concept of modernity as a framing
device and explains the occlusion of the private by the public.
Secondly, the article illustrates the Legal-Autonomous Public
Model, and the Multiple Public Model in the work of John
Dewey, Walter Lippmann, and Kenneth J. Arrow. Public space is
what Foucault was alleged to have called 'Žecriture', which
refers to a convergence of and intermixing of signifiers
within a de-gendered setting (hence Žecriture, as opposed to
l'Žecriture). The great contest between Lippmann and Dewey in
the 1920s signified a clashing of the two interpretations of
the public with one arguing about the need for a return to a
constitutionally guaranteed, left-of-centre public philosophy
that would entertain the elite while taking care of the poor,
and the other a plea for a rationalistic recourse that
surmised and envisaged rational public discourse as only one
of several possible publics. The article concludes with the
notion that the constructions of public space defined by
Dewey, Lippmann, and Arrow promote distinct yet related
interrogations of public space that is more than an agora of
resonating ideas, but includes a kind of automatic
reverberation on its own axes.
Joel B. Grossman
Constitutionalizing Modernity: Forging the Modern American
State
Abstract
Who makes decisions
when an essential, constitutional 'handbook' has failed to
describe any exceptional situation? Is it fair to place power
in the hands of a few specific people to decide? This article
illustrates how the US Supreme Court has modernized and
reconstituted the US Constitution to make it compatible with
an emerging twentieth-century regulatory state and the
attendant public functions within the 'state'. The article
examines the relationships among legal, social, political, and
economic changes in the process of the modern evolutionary
state. The paper represents a theoretical attempt to relate
constitutional growth and evolution to the development of a
constitutionally legitimized 'positive', 'regulatory', or 'welfare'
state, and concludes that constitutional fluidity and
flexibility are potential sources of empowerment, while
incremental constitutionalism with regard to the welfare state
is probably the best possible strategy to adopt in American
modernity.
