Speaker Controversies, Library Spaces and the "Right to the City"

The debate over hosting controversial speakers shouldn't just be a matter of intellectual freedom, but also about how libraries naturally create social space in the urban environment.

(Photo: Matt S, flickr - Creative Commons License).

The debate in librarianship over the desirability (or ethics) of welcoming “controversial” speakers has taken on a greater intensity, albeit with a noticeable subsidence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Notable examples in recent years have included Joseph Boyden at Edmonton Public Library following accusations of cultural appropriation of an Indigenous identity, and feminist Meghan Murphy’s appearances at both Vancouver and Toronto Public Libraries criticizing gender ideology and legislation and their material effects on the rights of women and girls (Schrader 2019). Murphy’s subsequent appearance at Seattle Public Library in February 2020 — just on the verge of the pandemic — was met with protests and a bomb threat (Hamm 2020).

With a gradual return to normal activities and programming, this issue will undoubtedly again take center stage for many librarians. Until now library professionals and scholars have understandably oriented their arguments around core principles of intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, and connections between these and democratic processes. However, we believe librarians also need to account for an additional dimension: that of space – or rather, the role libraries play as physical spaces in mediating social interactions and processes.

The library literature both popular and scholarly has long been fond of referring to libraries as “third places,” a valuable component of the public realm between home and work, citing in support of this idea Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book The Great Good Place – despite the fact that he doesn’t actually mention libraries. Other scholars such as Fincher and Iveson (2011) affirm the public library’s identity and purpose as a location of encounter. They argue that the spatial value of public libraries lies in their potential for people to not so much “be themselves”—and thus remain fixed within social categories—but rather, through encounters with other people, to develop new social relations and through them develop new identities. The contribution that public libraries can make in this exploration, they stress, is that, unlike any other public space in which people may gather, the level and type of conviviality required for these interpersonal transformations are facilitated by the library through its collections and services:

To step into a public library is to step into a space that is shared with “strangers,” in the form of other library users and library staff. As such, the forms of encounter that might occur between these strangers are mediated by the normative expectations about how a library should be used that are extant in any given library…One of the remarkable features of “library-ness” most commonly identified in research on contemporary public libraries concerns the diversity of uses and users that libraries can accommodate. Reading newspapers, checking community notices, checking email, surfing the Internet, doing homework, relaxing with a coffee, attending lectures and community meetings, listening to live or recorded music, discussing a book with staff or other users, flirting, meeting and making friends…All of these encounters are significant. They are premised on the capacity of those who use the library to mutually negotiate their common status as library users in the moments of their encounters. This is a process of mutual (if temporary) identification which transcends fixed identity categories (414-415, emphasis added).

The processes by which these encounters and transformations may take place require some theoretical explanation. If we are to properly understand the roles libraries play in generating and facilitating social politics and practices in their urban landscapes, French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) offers particularly generative insights. In his book The Production of Space (1974/1991), he theorizes that urban space is socially constructed by three dominant forces: representations of space (or conceived space) as articulated and implemented by planners, architects and policymakers who create the built environment; spatial practices (or perceived space) or the everyday activities/behaviors of people who intuitively make use of the built environment that has been planned for them; and representational space (or lived space) in which people derive meaning and attachment from space and where culture and politics are developed. Lefebvre viewed this “spatial triad” and its effect on urban space dialectically – that conceived, perceived and lived spaces are all in constant negotiation with one another (38-39).

We should note, incidentally, that there are some similarities between Lefebvre’s notions of spatial practices and that of so-called “behavior settings” in the literature of environmental psychology: the recognition that certain physical arrangements in the built environment will facilitate particular repeated normative standing patterns of behavior (or behavior-in-milieu) regardless of the individuals using them (Schoggen, Fox, & Barker, 1989). 

Lefebvre also viewed such interactions as essential to The Right to the City (Le Droit à la Ville) (1968/1996). In this earlier work, Lefebvre defends the unfettered ability of people to inhabit an urban environment in which they can encounter a mix of different people and social groups, with whom they engage in a continuous, collective struggle to define the city itself. As opposed to conventional views regarding citizenship which recognize only legal membership within a Westphalian nation-state (and, hopefully, the right to vote), Lefebvre saw urban inhabitation as the legitimate basis for full civic participation and decision-making in whatever functions might affect the city as a whole. Likening this right to the life-giving right to nature itself, Lefebvre described this as “a transformed and renewed right to urban life…as long as the ‘urban’, place of encounter, priority of use value, inscription in space of a time promoted to the rank of a supreme resource among all resources, finds its morphological base and its practico-material realization” (Lefebvre 2003, 374 italics in the original). As Mitchell (2003) summarizes,

Cities [are] necessarily public – and therefore places of social interaction and exchange with people who [are] necessarily different…The city is the place where difference lives…[I]n the city, different people with different projects must necessarily struggle with one another over the shape of the city, the terms of access to the public realm, and even the rights of citizenship. Out of this struggle the city as a work – as an ouvre, as a collective if not singular project – emerges, and new modes of living, new modes of inhabiting, are invented (18, italics in the original).   

A Lefebvrean view of libraries would see them as socially-produced spaces both at the scale of the urban landscape and within their own walls, an interplay of the triad at the urban and institutional levels. Represented/conceived spaces are those established by architects and library administrators who create the physical and policy environments in which library users and staff establish their own social practices as they inhabit the space over years and decades. Representational space – the lived use of the library in which users create their own meanings, cultures and politics – can be formed anywhere as they are influenced by borrowed library materials (from which each reader derives their own significance) as well as in the library building through the use of meeting rooms in which to engage the community in dialogue. This dialogic function of the library as both a repository of knowledge and a venue for debate between groups of people with different or competing socio-political projects become in this conception an essential component in facilitating the right to the city, to participating in the urban ouvre. 

If the library is to be theoretically understood as situated regionally in an urban landscape and playing a key role in the production of space and in facilitating the right to the city, then clearly a normative theory of librarianship commensurate with this understanding is going to be beyond the bounds of conventional LIS literature. This is why — as we have argued elsewhere — that librarianship needs to look to the realms of both political science and urban planning to better support our engagements with our communities and their political aspirations.

When considering libraries spatially, we are generally conflating ‘spaces’: those within the library; the library within its geographic location (physical community); and the library that occupies the mental spaces we build – the socio-cultural and political constructs with which we situate the functions of the library in our society. Unravelling this conflation of space[s] is important in understanding why libraries – and librarians – make the choices they do with regard to what happens within their (physical) walls.

Where we shift from these mental spaces of governance to physical spaces, very little is said by the ALA about the management of library space as a public institutional space or as a matter of public policy. Article VI of the Library Bill of Rights aside, public space management is instead discussed instrumentally in terms of what parts of the library constitute public space, as opposed to non-public (staff and operational) space, or issues of freedom of information related to a library’s legal/constitutional requirements i.e., what meets the tests of a legal challenge (ALA 2019).

There is, in other words, a strange silence in our official literature in regards to a clear, principled and epistemologically-grounded statement on how and why one manages public space in the public interest. There is discussion on legal obligations and of conflict, and even on how to manage space legally to shut down conflict using other definitions of content that can be applied equally without challenging the informational content of the speech. For example, in the ALA’s Library's Legal Answer Book, we read,

Q19: What if the meeting gets out of hand— too loud or worse? This is a good opportunity to enforce content-neutral meeting room regulations, such as caps on noise levels. The regulations must be enforced evenly, to all groups, abiding by the same criteria. A summer reading celebration with music would need to meet the same noise restrictions as a meeting with an angry crowd. Although restrictions based on expected audience reactions are content based, restrictions based on the group’s own past behavior can be constructed as content-neutral. For example, a rule that an applicant may not use a room if it has damaged library property and not paid for it in the past is based on verifiable behavior, not speech content (Minow & Lipinski 2002, 234).

Alternatively, we can point out also that in policing such spaces, the discourse focuses on how conflicts happen, and what the legalities of shutting down events or policing spaces are and how these might affect personal liberties. In other words, one can enforce decorum, but not views.  One can police behavior, but one cannot guide. Libraries are not powerless, but they are avowedly neutral. Yet this assertion and practice of neutrality is insufficient because it is vulnerable to criticism for being unprincipled. Turning again to Lefebvre, addressing this gap requires moving beyond a strict focus on everyday spatial practices, to conceive of libraries in terms of constituting representational spaces – as “places imbued with meaning that people recognize and experience as significant beyond themselves as individuals” (Carp 2008, 135).   

As such, in public policy, as in democracy, process is at least as important – if not more important - than outcomes in order to maintain stability, legitimacy, and ultimately public trust in public institutions — which is a necessary condition to maintaining democracy. Library space management needs an understanding of process and space management, and a set of concepts and principles behind it that reflect public policy and what we mean by the “public interest.” In sum, libraries need a guiding statement concerning space management as equally developed and as powerful as its principles on information content management and freedom of expression. Ideally such a statement would link purpose to practice to outcomes.

In Lefebvrean theory we can see a rich source of guidance for rethinking and re-conceptualizing the place of libraries in civil discourse, and of the role of the librarian in the public domain. Accordingly, we argue that intellectual freedom is no mere atomized, abstract ideal but fundamentally – and literally – grounded in the inherent socio-political and spatial functioning of public libraries in the regional landscape. In our management of libraries and the spatial practices we permit (and at times police), we need to be cognizant of the potential for “the representational space/lived space of an authorized few [to] prompt their selection and implementation of a representation of space (conceived space) without regard to the full sociospatial realities of its intended location” (Carp 2008, 136).

We can see this potential in the impatience (on the part of some members of the public and library workers alike) with library neutrality when it comes to space usage in the cases that have seen wide coverage in the news, e.g. the rejection of a Black Lives Matters meeting because the group had a Black/persons of color only attendance policy (Garrison 2016), or the conflicts at Seattle and Toronto public libraries regarding the hosting of feminists advocating for sex-based rights and opposing gender identity legislation (Hamm 2020; Schrader 2019). These stories dovetail the interest group narratives the public holds with regard to their public institutions – their right to advocate specific interest group policies from a public institution – with the partisan mode impulse of some members of the library profession. Most of the resulting discourse is on freedom of speech and contested group rights and identities, rather than about the library as a representational space of meaning, which libraries maintain in the public interest.

These freedoms and the social spaces on which they depend are natural and inherent: all library administrators and practitioners need do is provide the space and materials for them to flourish on their own. To delegitimate these principles as somehow only of interest to the political Right is to interfere with, constrain or abort these inherent spatial functions. It would further abrogate citizens’ right to the city by preventing encounters with difference, and their ability to contribute to the urban oeuvre.

At a more grounded, issues-based level, the extent to which librarians engage in efforts at problem formulation rather than emotional reaction to events is paramount to our ethical engagement with our communities. Like so many other disciplines and professions who have incorporated their insights, we should understand from Rittel and Webber (1973) that all social and political controversies involving conflicting community stakeholders are inherently “wicked” and resist simple (or simplistic) formulations. At their most basic, such conflicts are always a symptom of other problems involving broader and historical socio-cultural and political conditions and contexts.

Therefore, going forward in a (hopefully) post-pandemic era, library administrators, workers and scholars need to look beyond mere functional and instrumental approaches to managing space. Rather than responding to transient events with a focus on individual speakers and their perceived/anticipated views, and only according to the perspectives of narrow range identity groups, we should be thinking socio-spatially on behalf of multiple publics. While all members of the community have the right to access the public library and its spaces, nobody has the right to be free from encounters with ideas (or people) with which they might object – or, on that basis, restrict the right of others to access and discuss those ideas in the context of social encounters.

The right to the city is the right to encounter difference. In our age of increasingly entrenched identity politics, we would be wise to recognize the power of the public library to – in the words of Fincher and Iveson, facilitate “process[es] of mutual (if temporary) identification which transcend[] fixed identity categories” (415) and instead facilitate our shared common (urban) citizenship. As part of their essential contribution to the urban oeuvre, libraries should nurture a broader socio-spatial framework, one in which all citizens should be free not only to exercise their right to intellectual freedom but to construct meaning – or representational space – within their walls.

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Sources

American Library Association. (2019). Meeting rooms, exhibit spaces, and programs. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/spaces

Carp, J. (2008). "Ground-truthing" representations of social space: Using Lefebvre's conceptual triad. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 28(2), 129–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X08324685

Fincher, Ruth and Kurt Iveson. (2011). ’Just Diversity’ in the City of Difference. New Blackwell Companion to the City. Wiley-Blackwell.

Garrison, J. (2016, February 19th). Black Lives Matter meetings run afoul of library's policy. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/02/19/black-lives-matter-meetings/80637498/

Hamm, A. E. (2020). Women’s Liberation Front holds sold-out event at Seattle Public Library despite bomb threat, interruptions, arrests. Feminist Current, February 3rd. https://tinyurl.com/7zf3ppfh

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell Publishing.

Lefebvre, H. (2002). The right to the city. In The Blackwell city reader (Ser. Blackwell readers in geography), G. Bridge & S. Watson, eds. Blackwell Pub, 360-375.

Minow, M. & Lipinski, T. (2002). Library's legal answer book. ALA Editions. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3001674

Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. Guilford Press.

Oldenburg, R. (1991). The great good place : cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. Paragon House.

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1972). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning (Ser. Working paper, no. 194). Institute of Urban & Regional Development, University of California.

Schoggen, P., Fox, K. A., and Barker, R.G. (1989). Behavior settings: A revision and extension of Roger G. Barker's ecological psychology. Stanford University Press.

Schrader, A. (2020). Should public library boards embrace intellectual freedom as their institutional soul? Centre for Free Expression. https://tinyurl.com/yd4nz85p