Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-1-2019

Journal / Book Title

Urbanities – Journal of Urban Ethnography

Abstract

This essay seeks to bring the critical analysis of contemporary urban public space into relationship with the explorations of legitimacy put forward in Italo Pardo and Giuliana Prato’s edited volume on that subject (Pardo and Prato eds 2019). The notion of ‘democracy’ is the bridge between those two discussions. As Pardo and Prato note, legitimacy plays a ‘sine qua non role…at all levels of democratic society’ (Pardo and Prato 2019: 19). Without legitimacy, democracy can quickly devolve into a sham (albeit a ‘clever’ one, to use Pardo and Prato’s terms: Ibid.:6), with ostensibly democratic arrangements serving to cloak a reality of authoritarianism. Legitimacy, as the essays in this book establish, is dynamic, contested, multiple, and open-ended, with everyday conceptions of legitimacy often working crosswise to law, political ideology, policy, and institutional norms; nonetheless, Pardo and Prato and the contributors to the volume argue in various ways, the provisional, messy, and collective work of establishing conceptions of legitimacy is crucial to the (itself shambolic and complex) project of democracy.

Comments

This article was originally published in Urbanities, Volume 9, Suppl. 2, April 2019, and is available at https://www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/vol-9-suppl-2-april-2019/

Published Citation

Brash, J. (2019). Public Space, Legitimacy and Democracy1. Edited by Italo Pardo and Giuliana B. Prato, 111.

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