Addressing itself to “speech” (but also assembly, petition, and the press) “out of doors,” Timothy Zick's fantastic new book convincingly demonstrates that what he terms the “expressive topography”—the “public space in which First Amendment liberties may be exercised”—has been severely diminished over the last several decades (p. 5). The implications of this general erosion, ordering, and management of expressive space are especially profound in a free society, both because “place” (i.e., the locale, its symbolism, its associations, its history) is as critical to one's expressive experience as voice, sight, and auditory function, and because a diminished geography portends—and perhaps predestines—a diminished democracy.

Following an introductory chapter that exhibits both theoretical rigor and refreshingly clear prose, Zick outlines in chapter 2 the history and theory of his “topography,” stressing that streets and town squares in the colonial era were its earliest features and were “critical to the revolutionary spirit and cause” (p. 30). Moving into the contemporary era, Zick then explains in detail how the “public forum” doctrine has “failed to respond adequately to the various forces and events that shaped public places beginning in the 1950s” (p. 55), meaning that those forums deemed “quintessential” decades ago by the Supreme Court have been vanishing—with no re-placements made available. (The pun is mine.) The upshot of this is an array of bureaucratized public places that reduce the “physical breathing space for public expression” (p. 57).

Chapter 3 considers the desired entry of speakers into the “embodied” places of listeners and viewers, or as Zick puts it, the “places we take with us as we traverse the expressive topography” (p. 65). Here, Zick exhibits an excellent grounding in social science research (e.g., the work of Erving Goffman) as he contemplates the repercussions of denying First Amendment access to individuals' “personal spaces” by way of legal constructs such as “bubbles,” “zones,” “buffers,” etc. Chapter 4 focuses on speakers' efforts to access “contested” places, or venues that are in some sense essential to the message itself, including libraries, lunch counters, jails, government buildings (e.g., the Pentagon), cemeteries, and private residences, among others. There has been insufficient academic attention to the strategic selection of the place (not simply its impact) for the communication of the speaker's viewpoints. Drawing in some of the themes of the previous chapter—abortion clinic “buffer zones” and funeral “protest” zones, for example—Zick offers some especially valuable direction here for how the requisite balancing might be undertaken by courts and local officials.

Chapter 5 looks at what Zick calls “defunct” or “dead” spaces on the expressive topography (p. 145)—“non-places,” as he generally refers to them—a right jab at the Supreme Court and its categorization of such locales as “non-public forums,” or places that for First Amendment purposes are not “places.” These include transit hubs, gated communities, and shopping centers, and Zick's opening discussion of the restrictions in the Mall of America in Minnesota is particularly apt at illustrating the themes of the chapter. “Non-places” are a concern because in the most literal sense, they remove “x” number of square feet from the prospective expressive topography, but they are also indicative of doctrinal failures to acknowledge diminishing space and recalibrate expressive prospects.

Chapter 6 focuses on places such as streets, sidewalks, parks, and squares, locations that have a special resonance in “speech-out-of-doors” terms, because they have “literally and figuratively been inscribed with our history, politics, and values” (p. 182). Here, Zick attends to the emergence of public order schemes in the 1970s, which have had the effect of institutionalizing protest speech even while the expressive spaces have been downsized and demoted. Chapter 7 addresses not “military” spaces per se, but rather the effect of “militarization” of public spaces, which is an interesting metaphor capturing the phenomenon of channeling, containment, and, it seems to me, capture. The point here is to illustrate that, at party conventions, summits, and inaugurations, for example, the effect of segregating expression to “zones” is to effectively suppress or even eliminate it—ironically at the time (and in the “place”) where it matters most.

In chapter 8, Zick turns his attention to speech on college and university campuses and stresses that while we are aware of debates on campus over “speech codes,” we have paid less attention to the deterioration of public space on those campuses; we have discussed what we cannot discuss, in other words, but not so much where we can(not) discuss it. His claim here is that campuses have come to resemble the landscapes that surround them, rife with regulations and restrictions on public liberties—all to the detriment of democratic life, given the significance of the college environs for crafting an engaged citizenry. Finally, chapter 9 draws on the preceding chapters to look forward and contemplate what this all means for a future of “networked” public places, where the effect of being “wired in” is also to be confined and deprived of “place” by technologies that occupy little or no space. Zick uses the notions of “clouds” (wireless fidelity—Wi-Fi—connections in public places), “cameras” (surveillance systems), and “computers” (of the mobile variety) to discuss the present and future implications of such networks on “speech out of doors.”

My only reservation with this fine book is that it should have been called Speech Out of Place, because that is really the larger (double) meaning it conveys—that speech is lacking in “place” and that such speech, as evidenced by and owing to its whittled-away topography, is somehow “out of place,” inappropriate, and lacking in value. Zick does not quite make the normative push here as strongly as he might have (and that is not necessarily a critique), but my concluding impression is that he is basically urging us to “take to the streets,” even though he resists this characterization (p. xiii). Put differently, he does seem to be stressing that there is something qualitatively superior about speech “out of doors” because such expressive occasions—grounded as they are in the “ground” they are on—cannot be replicated with listservs, chat boards, or twitters. MySpace is not my “place”—and nor could it be. Zick's epilogue seems to concede as much, situated as it is around a contemplation of recent global acts of mass public demonstration, of resistance, of pushing back, and of speaking truth to power in public places. In this vein, he concludes by asking the reader to imagine our topography in two or three decades, assuming we stay on our present course. A poor man's Confucius might wonder, “Is there still an ‘out of doors’ if everyone is inside?”