Reinventing Public Spaces: Politics of Oneself and Politics with Many Others

Abstract

Public space is constituted by social subjects in the creation of themselves and in the political action of their presentation. It is, above all, ways of affirming and recognizing differences in the construction of the city. In this sense, politics with many others become a movement of incorporating conflict as inherent in the plurality of human meanings and purposes of life in society. Public space assumes the expression of multiple potentialities and acts of self-presentation situated in the space-time of their existences. Being as self, living, feeling and being in the world are related to the material and symbolic socio-spatial conditions of men and women in their distinct visibility experiences. Therefore, the analysis of city appropriations carried out by diverse social groups—with their socio-political belongings agendas—make the right to difference a trademark of space reinvention. This chapter departs from Foucault’s aesthetic of existence as the mediation to understand the subject’s daily practices and actions regarding living in the city. Then, it addresses life in common through the debate on visibility, constitution and maintenance of spaces of collective manifestations, which Arendt calls spaces of appearance.