If you are stuck for holiday reading, perhaps a short debate on how best to theorise the relationship between public space and politics is what you are looking for? If you have access to the journal Policy and Politics, you will find a couple of responses in the current issue by myself and Quentin Stevens to a short provocation in the previous issue by John Parkinson entitled ‘Political public space: what it is, why it is special and why standard spatial nostrums mislead’. My contribution is really an elaboration of some aspects of Parkinson’s argument, an appreciation, just to show I am not only ‘critical’ when writing in critique-mode. To cut a long story short, Parkinson’s argument is that the ‘big-P’ political significance of certain sorts of public spaces is dangerously sidelined by arguments about the ‘little-P’, or shall we say, ‘cultural politics’ significance of public space understood as a field of broad, dispersed sociable encounters. I think he might be right. What is interesting about the ‘debate’ is that it does underscore the degree to which the precise relationship between political-politics uses of public space and cultural-politics uses of public space, to make a simple distinction, remains poorly theorised and difficult to investigate empirically in interesting ways (I think the significance of Parkinson’s argument, in his work on public space and democracy, lies precisely in focussing clear attention on the Big-P political relevance of uses of public space, something which is often taken for granted in more or less dismissive ways by arguments which are keen to claim ‘political’ relevance for any and all uses of public space).

The same issue of the journal also has an interesting collection of essays exploring the theme of Reconfiguring the Local Public Realm, which comes out of a workshop held in Bristol a couple of years or so ago, which I did attend and present a paper at, but was unable to contribute a final paper towards. It includes a range of pieces from planners, political scientists, and others – I would recommend the paper by Jeremy Seekings in particular, on the question of ‘Is the South Brazilian?‘