Originally posted by Someone Else in Another Place who was getting their knickers in a twist over kids hanging around on street corners and in shopping malls:
> ...who is welcome in public spaces...
Anybody should be. That’s why they are called "public spaces"
> ...if all they’re doing is hanging around with no real need to be there?
Everybody’s got to be somewhere. Who are we to say why someone needs to be there? Why should people only do what you think they need to do? What is a real need anyway? Who defines it? Is there no margin for error, no social space, no place for fun, no safe place (un)like home, no liminal boundary-crossing interaction? And who tells you yourself where you need to be? Is there a Ministry of Milieu, a Department of Displacement, an Office of Orientation (OFFOR), a Bureau of Bearings, a Patriarch of Place, Supervisor of Situation, an Arrivals Agency, a Vicar-General of Vicinity who tells [b]you[/b] where you need to be? Do you get up in the morning and check in with your local government and ask them for a pass to let you walk the street and do they ask you if you really need to be there?
> Bus stations (and shopping malls, and the streetcorner outside the convenience store) aren’t social halls.
Why not? Maybe they should be! The world needs more social halls. It is in public space that civilisation is born. The market, the city gate, the courts of the temple, the agora, the streets of the city, the forum, the church, the theatre, the public house, the commons, the town square, the beach, the park, the promenade, the football ground, the playground, the shopping mall. These are where people meet and where most importantly they meet people they wouldn’t meet if they only met the people they intended to meet. They are where we rub up against each other, learn to negotiate our own way in society, become individuals rather than social clones of our parents, where we are socialised and develop our public, political lives. They are where we have carnivals, parades, bonfires, demonstrations, protests, marches, processions, street-parties. They are where unexpected social encounters happen. They are where unplanned social encounters happen. They are where unregulated social encounters happen. They are where democracy was born, where the Reformation came from, where things get done and deals get made, where politics is the property of the people rather then their masters, which is why kings and queens and planners and police and big business and bosses in general don’t like free association in public space because they can’t control it. Which is why they like alcohol bans and ASBOs, and "controlled strategies for delivering safe public space", and curfews, and customs and excise duty, and dog-toilet grass emptinesses round tall point blocks, and dole queues, and eavesdroppers, and emigration bans, and fences, and front gardens, and gated communities, and "get out of the car slowly", and ID cards, and immigration bans, and immigration control, and laws against electronic music with repetitive beats, and laws against riding bicycles on the pavement, and laws against secondary picketing, and laws against so-called dangerous dogs, and licensing laws, and logfiles, and monitoring, and paid informers, and passcards, and passports, and permits, and photography bans (when its you with the camera), and police permission for parades and demonstrations, and police spies, and private cars (for those who can afford them), and psychotherapists, and "show me your papers", and rfid tags, and state-funded state-regulated political parties, and the War Against (some) Drugs, and TV cameras (that they control), and windowless walls, and workhouses.
We live in a world of social sensory deprivation where isolated lonely people become little more than production units driving in their lonely air-conditioned cars to their lonely air-conditioned jobs and going home to their semi-detached worker-storage-units at night to be plugged into the Murdoch-mush satellite-soma-feed or the cable-cabal drug-drip to switch their lobotomised brains off like obsolete cars with empty tanks in a cold garage in a brutalist basement of a deserted dead ex-Soviet post-industrial complex in a snow-bound empty bus garage in the unvisited part of Belorus until their bosses have a use for them again. Fuck the Man! Break out! Disobey orders! Irritate someone! Get in the way! Shout in the Streets! Get out and talk to people and rather than doing what your capitalist lords and masters plan for you. Hang around on street corners!
> It’s annoying when you have to shove through a gaggle of kids to get to your train or into the market.
Oh no! Children not obeying orders! Kids with nothing to do! They might think up something to do for themselves! We can’t have that! Bring back National service! Bring back the birch! Nothing should be permitted which is not compulsory!