In this thoughtful and engaging book, Margaret Kohn makes the case that space is an important mechanism of social power. With Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre (among others), she agrees that space can function to reproduce and to reinforce relations of domination. Yet, she emphasizes, it also can play a transformative political role, enabling and encouraging the oppressed to challenge and to change social relations of power. Drawing on careful analyses of the histories of cooperatives, chambers of labor, and case del popolo (houses of the people) in turn-of-the-century Italy, Kohn argues that space can promote democratic change by helping to forge collective identity and mobilize collective resistance.

The book takes as its point of departure Jürgen Habermas's work on the bourgeois public sphere (especially Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989). Kohn notes that due to its constitutive exclusions, the bourgeois public sphere failed to realize the democratic ideals it defined: ideals that included political equality, freedom, and inclusiveness. Hence, the importance of attending to the “popular public sphere”: sites where members of the subaltern classes came together to form alliances and coalitions, to pool their resources, and to press for social, economic, and political change. A popular public sphere flourished in prefascist Italy, she argues, in the trade unions and in the mutual aid societies where people engaged with others from relatively similar backgrounds to discuss and to interpret their experiences. It emerged, as well, in the chambers of labor and in the houses of the people where industrial workers and artisans, domestic workers, and unemployed people met across differences of occupation, class, and ideology to define new collective identities and to create new institutions and practices that enabled them to act together.

How, precisely, can space promote transformative politics? Kohn's central argument is that just as some spatial orders divide and segregate, others bring together people who typically would have no contact with one another. Prefascist Italian mutual aid societies, cooperatives, and chambers of labor were organized by locality, rather than by trade. They encouraged interaction among skilled and unskilled workers, among industrial and agricultural laborers, among the employed and the unemployed. Once space brings people together, Kohn stresses, it further can shape their interactions in ways that are conducive to building alliances and forging collective identities. For instance, the neighborhood circulo, or cooperative bar, enabled talk and other forms of interaction by defining what Kohn (following Charles Tilly, “Spaces of Contention,” Mobilization 5 [2000]: 135–59) calls a “safe space,” that is, one free from surveillance and from rule by church and state elites. Here and in similarly “radical” spaces, the disempowered could meet together. They could argue and debate with one another. They could share their experiences and their perspectives, discover common interests, and develop collective aims and strategies.

One important strength of this book is its careful attention to historical detail. Radical Space is a work of empirically and historically engaged political theory. Kohn's central insight is that studying forgotten spatial orders can revitalize contemporary theorizing about democracy. “Looking at the practices of mutual aid societies, cooperatives, case del popolo, and municipalities,” she writes, “could reinforce the normative core of democratic theory by recovering the political logic of a particular moment of the process of democratization” (pp. 2–3). The book raises a series of questions that are critical for democratic theory today. What democratically promising spaces exist, or might be created, in the twenty-first century? How can political actors exploit spatial resources to expand and to deepen democratic politics? What forms of spatial transformation are needed to challenge extant relations of domination?

In order to answer these questions, Kohn would need to disentangle more carefully than she does here the specific contributions that space—as distinct from nonspatial institutions and practices—makes to transformative politics. At some points in the book, she writes as if “radical space” is no more than a facilitating condition for democratic debate and political organization. For instance, in her discussion of Sesto San Giovanni, an Italian town where in the early twentieth century workers were divided into groups of new (industrial) and old (agricultural), Kohn claims that radical space played an important role in forging alliances and enabling opposition to local elites. It is not clear from the discussion, however, how space—as opposed to organizational capacity simpliciter—produced these results. By the end of World War I, Kohn reports, socialists had experienced nontrivial electoral gains in Sesto, thanks to the “dense network of associations that linked economic needs and neighborhood-based solidarities to a political program. The power of the local government … arose out of a series of semiautonomous workers' organizations that were linked together in overlapping sites of integration and coordination” (p. 133). But as Kohn herself notes elsewhere (pp. 5–6), organization is analytically distinct from space. In principle, powerful popular organizations can form absent “radical space.”

At other points in the book, however, Kohn adopts a more explicitly Bourdieuian perspective on the political import of space. At these moments, she stresses that what is distinctive about spatial order is that it encourages the embodiment of contingent dispositions: dispositions to perceive and to classify the social world in particular ways, for example, or to aspire to particular ends, while viewing others as impossible, illegitimate, unthinkable. Bourdieu (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977, p. 90) compares space to a book that the body reads by traversing. At times, Kohn draws on this insight, suggesting that what distinguishes space from nonspatialized organization is that we live the former corporeally. People come to “know their place,” she claims (p. 19), through embodied, and therefore relatively enduring dispositions, which we learn in structured spaces.

The argument could be strengthened with a more detailed account of how exactly it was that radical space helped change the embodied dispositions of the dominated in fin-de-siècle Italy. What was the relation between, on the one hand, changes to practical knowledge through the production of radical space and, on the other, the identitarian and the motivational changes on which most of the book focuses? More generally, how best can democrats understand the political effects of the spaces that our bodies “read”? How can we restructure space in ways that disrupt its non- or antidemocratic effects? That Radical Space helps raise such questions is one of its principal contributions to ongoing debates about democratic politics and popular resistance to power.