Philosophical breakdown of public spacesfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

Everybody wants third spaces until a homeless guy shows up. Now there's a lot of talk about third spaces for a reason. We need places to form community beyond just home and work, but that begs the question of who gets to be a part of our communities. You want more parks, more libraries, but then you complain when these public infrastructures are, well, public. For the unhoused, the importance of public spaces isn't just a matter of wanting somewhere to chill with friends. It's a matter of existence and freedom. In his landmark essay, Homelessness and the Issue of Freedom, Jeremy Waldron argues that the freedoms of the poor are disproportionately restricted under the law, since their material conditions coerce them into a state in which they must choose between survival and the violation of the law. She writes that freedom exists for the homeless only to the extent that our society is communist. Now before your yes scare ass starts a hemorrhage over the c word, let me explain. But first, let's define our terms. Specifically, let's distinguish between positive and negative freedoms. While positive freedom is the capacity to act according to one's free will, negative freedom is the capacity to act free from the coercion of others. So things like loitering laws, public indecency violations. So they apply to the rich and poor alike, they apply disproportionately to those who possess no private property of their own and thus who exist solely in the collective space. And so while a homeless person may possess the positive freedom to say physically lay down in a park, they have their negative freedom restricted since they'll be forcibly removed for doing so because of the regulation placed on public spaces that prohibits certain actions that are typically relegated to tier private. Best sleeping, kissing, showering, all these actions are natural and necessary and yet they're prohibited in the public space. And this limitation is no problem for owners of private property since the public is conceived of as being complimentary to the private. However, as Waldron notes, this complementarity works only for those who have the benefit of both sorts of places. No if you're homeless, you're stuck in a situation where you're forced to violate the law in order to survive. Because in order to exist, one needs somewhere they can exist. There's oftentimes a contradiction with how people consider the homeless, if they even consider them at all. People don't want them pissing in the streets, but they also don't want them pissing in the McDonald's bathroom. People don't want encampments, but they also oppose the construction of affordable public housing. There seems to be a desire for increased public life, but only a certain kind of public. But if we want to advocate for community building, then we need to reconsider who gets to be a part of our community.