Saskia Sassen in Public Interventions. The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition in SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain says that:

We are living through a kind of crisis in public space resulting from the growing commercialization, theme-parking, and privatizing of public space. The grand monumentalized public spaces of the state and the crown, especially in former imperial capitals, dominate our experience of public space. [This is a] period marked by the ascendance of private authority/power over spaces once considered public.

Most familiar, perhaps, is the impact of high-income residential and commercial gentrification, which generates a displacement that can feed the making of a political subjectivity centered in contestation rather than a sense of the civic on either side of the conflict. The physical displacement of low-income households, non-profit uses and low-profit neighbourhood firms makes visible a power relationship – direct control by one side over the other as expressed directly in evictions or indirectly through the market.