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| URBAN SQUARE: SPATIAL POLITICS IN URBAN RESTRICTION |
| LIU Hai1,2 |
1. College of Literature, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China;
2. Ankang College, Ankang 725000, China |
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Abstract Space, as the most important concept in human geography studies, is confronted with redefinition in face of the influence of many social phenomena and cultural trends including globalization, information era, network and postmodernism. Along with the changes of modern urbanization and postmodernist in culture values, the traditional concept of time subverts the time separation and the space limitation. As a result, a unique cultural space known as city square space starts to come into being. It combines separated spaces together including "public and private", "political and daily", "working and leisure", and "physical and virtual". As the public space containing most characteristics of culture in the process of urbanization, city square is a good research object. Influenced by postmodernism, the spatial politics of city square witness a historic change from macro politics to micro politics. Based on this understanding, this paper aims to explore the specific space of today's cities which is city square, and the politics of space as well as the depth interpretation of space culture. This research adopts the methods of philosophy, political science, cultural science, geography and many other disciplines related to spatial theories. Based on the theoretical paradigm in the multi-disciplinary cross-application, the authors expand the cultural space of post-modernist interpretation of cultural depth of character in order to expand people's awareness of the city square cultural forms, and further understanding of its cultural and political space power traits and underlying meaning. On the basis of the analysis, this paper explores the function and culture of city square from the viewpoints of several popular spatial culture theories. It discusses the spatial politics meaning of city square and identifies the following cultural politics nature. (1) City square is a displaced space that surpasses the binary opposition mode of space and hence its unique spatial culture and spatial politics flavor. (2) City square boasts the typical features of spatial carnival, quasi-democratic free market and the reordering after the loss of order, which make it a postmodernist cultural space. (3) Its postmodernism lies in contradictoriness, ambiguity and inconsistency, as well as its dissolution of the binary opposition mode. These explained that the urban square has the post-modern meaning cultural space.
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Received: 16 October 2010
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2011, Vol. 26 
