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The main characteristics of public space are accessibility and usability for all citizens. However, current developments, primarily observed in cities, suggest the loss of a clear distinction between public and private space. Instead, urban spaces of hybrid character are emerging. Spaces with public functions, like train stations, parks or pedestrian areas, are changing in character, and semi-private spaces, like malls or plazas, are spreading. In order to get a realistic view of developments this article offers a critical appraisal of recent privatisation trends followed by a brief summary. After discussing feasible reasons for the loss of private space the article considers potential implications for the future of citizenship.

This study examined black South African lesbian's lived experiences of power and violence through a reading of the lesbian body as a site through which social identities and power are produced, maintained, contested and reframed. The analytic gaze was cast inward on intimate relationships as well as outward on the social and community contexts. Forty black lesbian women who were or had been in intimate same-sex relationships participated in five focus group discussions and 22 depth interviews. Discourse analysis, edified by a feminist poststructuralist theoretical paradigm that advanced an intersectional analytical approach, revealed that participants assumed multiple and ambiguous gendered subject positions, and vacillated between positions of power and powerlessness in various contexts. The enactment of gendered and sexualised violence on the lesbian body within intimate lesbian relationships, as well as in public and social spaces that also marked politicised and racialised spaces, reflected tensions and contradictions that may be situated within the historical juxtapositioning of colonialism and democracy. While black lesbian women generally exercised high levels of self-surveillance in order to avoid culturally and socially endorsed raced and gendered practices that served to regulate and punish black lesbian sexuality; the lesbian body represented a powerful site of resistance in which gendered identities and sexualities were reconceptualised and renegotiated in more fluid ways within the current historical period in South Africa. Within this reframing, black lesbian identity represented and embodied a personal and a political statement of identity and resilience which troubled and contested citizenship in democratic South Africa. This study has foregrounded the importance of considering the interconnectedness of the public and private domains, and the intersections of history and contexts in the enactment and experience of power and violence in the lives of black lesbian women. It has important implications for research, programme design and policy.

The incursions of women into areas from which they had been traditionally excluded, together with the literary representations of their attempts to negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces, is the underlying theme that unites this collection of essays. Here scholars from Australia, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland and the United States reconsider the well-entrenched assumptions associated with the public/private distinction, working with the notions of public and private spheres while testing their currency and exploring their blurred edges. The essays cover and uncov

Home is a nodal point in a series of polarities, including family-community; space-place; inside-outside; private-public; domestic-social. These may not be stable but seem both solidified and undermined as they play out their meaning and practice in and through the home. The "public" is traditionally the state's domain, while the "private" the citizens'. But where does "private" end and "public" begin? Can a border or boundary be placed between the two? Is such a boundary culture-specific or universal? Is it static or dynamic? Scholars often perceive borders as barriers and bridges, porous and impenetrable, and border studies have shown that urban entities have their own internal and external borders. I argue that such internal urban micro-boundaries can be found in the domain of domestic space, separating the private from the public, and that they are dynamic and constantly negotiated. Not necessarily marked, they are acknowledged by a mutual and tacit agreement, a social and cultural consensus. In this paper, I focus on common expansions of private into public space in Limassol, Cyprus, and the ways in which, this social consensus is achieved through the use of several tactics. As I illustrate, all these tactics seem to transform public space into private, on a symbolic level. The paper's contribution lies in the examination of this type of boundary, which has received little academic attention, as well as in the introduction of the term "tactics of inhibition."

The article proposes that an internet website, in terms of linguistics, is perceived and described as a space. The subject of qualitative research presented in the article are posts written by the users of a vortal addressed to the website's administration. An analysis of the content of these posts has confirmed that the website is treated as a public space that, first and foremost, shares information, but also allows for interaction. In addition, the article provides an endogenous perspective on the subject matter, i.e. that of the creator of the website, for whom it constitutes a private space.