In her first book, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (2003), Margaret Kohn analyzed the spatiality of early working-class activism in Italy and developed a sophisticated argument about the conditions for democratic empowerment. In this book, she shifts her attention to the United States. Aside from one chapter on the Wobblies, the focus is on the present. In both books, her emphasis is on the way in which the space for political engagement—“public space”—is constructed, sustained, controlled, or foreclosed. Her overarching theme is that theorists of democracy have paid far too little attention to the spatial conditions for democratic interaction. As she attempts to show in the present book, the privatization of public space—that is, the transformation of once-open downtowns into privately governed business improvement districts, the creation of privately governed gated communities in the suburbs and elsewhere, and the colonization of once-public space by private businesses—tends to insulate people from direct, physical encounters with people who are “different” or who may be attempting to persuade them to think otherwise about political issues. The trend toward privatization is particularly pronounced in the United States, and Kohn's concern here is to show us why we should be concerned about it, as democrats.

Kohn's argument is generally convincing. She walks us through the relevant jurisprudence in the United States, exposing its inner tensions. On the one hand, there is a line of authority dating back to the early twentieth century, in which the courts have affirmed the people's right to use “traditional public spaces” like sidewalks and public squares to leaflet, demonstrate, and make speeches. On the other hand, there is a line of authority that suggests that governments have the right to treat many of their facilities like private property and that any sort of land under private authority (such as a shopping mall) can be subjected to regulations that make free political activity virtually impossible. These days, many Americans have little or no exposure to traditional public spaces and so are unlikely to encounter people who have views or lifestyles radically different from their own. The courts might have used their authority to open up shopping malls and airports to allow for the free distribution of political and religious propaganda. They might also have insisted that political campaigners be allowed to go door-to-door in apartment complexes and gated communities. The trend of judicial decisions since the 1970s has been the opposite, however. The courts have been protecting Americans' rights to seal themselves off from one another.

In the final chapter of Brave New Neighborhoods, Kohn confronts the question of whether a new, more open, and more inclusive public space is being created by the electronic media. Do we still need to have physical contact with one another to develop mutual awareness or to come to an understanding of the wider world? The author thinks that we do, and in any case, she senses that the Web is being privatized on the model of shopping malls, gated communities, and business improvement districts. Whether the space of connection between us is physical or electronic, there clearly is a problem when it becomes commercialized. Commercialism encourages privatism and thus fosters the disconnection that inhibits healthy democratic engagement.

Kohn is particularly strong on the value of encountering homeless people, religious zealots, or political activists whose message or very presence may make us uncomfortable. She tries to reassure conservatives that the openings she seeks are for them, as well as for progressives like her. She also stresses that ongoing engagement with “the other” can be as stimulating and invigorating as it is disquieting. This is a line of analysis that we can trace back from Richard Sennett and Hannah Arendt to John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith. Many have found this line of analysis persuasive, but, as Mill himself noted, there nonetheless is widespread resistance (even among those who seem to have been persuaded) to arrangements that would thrust us out into public space, against our will. As Kohn freely acknowledges, the privatization of public space follows commercial imperatives that tap into our desire to be with our own and to be protected from disquieting encounters.

Kohn's arguments connect with liberal jurisprudence and political theory, but not with the social and political struggles that might actually expand public space. This is curious, because her earlier book pays close attention to the struggles that generated cooperatives, “houses of the people,” chambers of labor, and radical municipalism in early twentieth-century Italy. In that book, the author situates herself theoretically within the traditions of radical critique in Europe, from Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault and Lefebvre and beyond. In the present book, she retreats into American liberalism, and takes John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, et al. as her interlocutors (when she is not speaking to justices of the Supreme Court). In so situating her work, she distances herself from the richer critical tradition to which she was responding in her first book, apparently in the hope of finding a wider audience in America. This may be a vain hope, however, since legalistic liberalism seems to have less and less purchase on the American political consciousness. Kohn senses this: hence, her emphasis on the democratic value of public space. What her argument lacks is an obvious connection with the democratic struggles that might expand public space. To make that connection theoretically and politically, one must tap into the traditions that she explored in her first book, and connect them with the ongoing practices of ordinary Americans. The privatization of public space is being contested, even in the United States. To understand where that contest might lead, we need another book to complete the trilogy that Kohn has begun—a book that this talented and eloquent young theorist is well prepared to write.