Abstract
Recently, debates concerning the concept of “publicness” have become closely related to the question of how modern civil society is to be conceived. In fact, such discussions directly influence community planning (machi-zukuri), a field of policy-making, in which one of the most urgent issues is how to create people-centered “publicness” to eventually replace the conception of it as defined by the state in actual policies.
Yet, as has been pointed out in past research, “publicness” has been perceived to be formed only among / by those who participate in public activities. As such, we have come to think of “publicness” mainly as an ideal or something that “must be, ” something yet to be created. This has in turn led to a problem in actual policy implementation, because even if we accept the rhetoric that defines the ideality of “publicness, ” we are still confronted with enormous difficulties to put it into actual implementation in the context of community planning (machi-zukuri).
Taking the case of a park construction in a newly built residential area as an example, this paper attempts to shed new light over various relationships that exist within any form of “publicness” and usually overlooked by current discourse. It will demonstrate the importance of what I term “open relationships' publicness” in order to offer a settlement of the above-mentioned problem. By so doing, it attempts to envision an alternative society that is different from that occupied by the pursuit of an ideal form of “publicness.”
