Sara Evans and I, building on such history, have combined ideas of public space and freedom for democratic self-organization and co-creation in the concept of “free spaces” (1986, 1992). Free spaces, rooted in everyday life settings, are places in which powerless people have a measure of autonomy for self-organization and engagement with alternative ideas, and they are also places where people come to see themselves as makers of culture and producers of the world, not simply its consumers. Free spaces are places where people learn political and civic skills. They are also culture-creating spaces where people generate new ways of looking at the world. In free spaces, people simultaneously draw upon and rework symbols, ideas, themes, and values in their traditions and the culture to challenge conventional beliefs.
Thus, for instance, the historian E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (1966) described places such as taverns and sectarian churches in which working people found space for intellectual life and democratic self organizations, separate from the gentry and the crown. Evans and I argued that free spaces also lay at the base of every broad democratic movement in American history, from the African American freedom struggle to the populist Farmers’ Alliances of the 1880s, from labor struggles of the 1930s to feminist movements and modern community organizing. Such democratic movements show how complex are the power relationships of culture within and across societies.