Le Ray 427427Conflict, Space and the Public Sphere:
Renegotiating Rules of Coexistence in a
Postwar Context
Marie Le Ray
The analysis of public spheres needs to be grounded in specific con-
texts and spaces, far beyond the institutions traditionally recognized as
“legitimate” in democratic (or simulated democratic) societies: legislative,
judiciary, scientific and media-related arenas. This chapter is, however,
less concerned to locate public spheres in a specific community than to
explore their conditions of emergence through various daily social experi-
ences underlying spatial meaning-making processes. By spatial meaning-
making, I mean all the operations through which individuals, collective
actors or institutions ascribe meaning to space: from architecture and
city planning to storytelling, poetry and songs conveying memories and
images of surrounding spaces, but also circulation and daily uses of the
material setting.^1 I will argue that spatial meaning-making, when exposed
to others, and specifically to strangers,^2 constitutes a privileged way to
generate both publicness—that is, a specific regime of social coexistence
and interaction—and arenas of debates and controversies over the exist-
ing social and political order. This approach does not only ground public
spheres in the practical social experiences of actors but also allows us to
bring power back into the analysis: the social fabric of space is indeed a
highly conflicted process. Physical space and, even more importantly, the
meaning of space itself must be controlled in order to reproduce existing
sociospatial relations of power.^3 A spatial and daily-life-oriented prism
is a privileged entry into understanding the conditions of emergence of