The Political Economy of Public Space by David Harvey

The article I choose is The Political Economy of Public Space, by David Harvey. Public space obviously means open to all, no matters who you are, and it belongs to community. Parks, beaches, libraries, post offices, and police stations are count as public spaces. But what we learn is not just what is public, but also learn what it means in deeply, and the example of public, and also what actually does republic represents by in this lesson. In my opinion, public means how people acts in front of others. Social justice for public space access infrastructure and political power.

The article is about explaining the relationship of political and economy in the public space. Through the discussion we did in class, there is a vocabulary that we did discuss for a very time, the vocabulary is gentrification. When we talk about this, gentrification has spread throughout in downtown Los Angeles, and security issues have become a key issue as homeless people roam the streets to name current real-life examples. The key point need to be solved right now is to build up more public dorm rooms, so that the homeless people could get in, and the other public spaces, such as, libraries, post offices, parks, or some twenty-four hours convenience store. However, this way has advantage and disadvantage, the advantage is to keep the public spaces clean and safe for other citizens, the disadvantage is the government need to spend more money into these homeless people. In political and economic terms, this is not just a desire to dismantle everything and occupy more space, but to rewrite the meaning of this place, erasing history and reshaping the boulevards. For example, roads are also part of public spaces, and we can also see the relationship of political and economic from the roads. Let’s say that roads also could tell us about the political and the economy, it concludes lots of information, such as the car that people are driving, the clothes that the drivers are wearing, and also which directions are the people driving,