Genuine freedom of speech depends upon guaranteed access to certain public venues. Place, indeed, mediates the exercise of free speech. And particular places can become vibrant parts of a community, functioning as centres of activism, participation and preaching. This, in a sense, is precisely what Berkeley's free speech controversy was all about. Students were struggling for much more than the right to speak. They were involved in a battle over space, initially over access to one piece of land. Through that conflict, along with earlier civil rights struggles, a radical community was born. While the community did transcend spatial barriers (not all radicals lived in the neighbourhood adjacent to the campus), it was also profoundly dependent upon a sense of place and forged a close identification with specific public spaces. In fighting for access to space in 1964, Berkeley radicals paved the way for an increasingly militant politics of space later in the decade. It was a politics that highlighted issues of ownership and control, of social administration and regulation, of public rights in a democratic society. It also brought into focus the relationship between town and campus, citizen and student, public and private.

Space and Public Life

Spatial forms within contemporary capitalism possess a definite symbolic power. The advancing segmentation of the capitalist city since the Second World War is simultaneously geographic and symbolic.