The project investigated the neglected issue of the development of administrative space in the European context with spatial analysis of power relations and meanings. The project’s two main research questions explored the confrontation of ideas and their contexts from the Roman Republic to modern Republicanism:
1) How the conflict between Republican ideals, political power and administrative practices transformed the spaces of administration?
2) How this conflict changed the social topography of Rome, the public and private spheres of governance?
The project explored the linkages between ideals and practices with regards to Republicanism, one of the foundational tenets of European societies. Values and ideals have a complicated relationship with space, both with regards to the build environment that comprises of the urban environment as well as the imagined spaces that are an integral part of the perceived spaces. Many of the complexities about space and ideas remain hidden due to the fact that our sources are predominantly written by elite men. Since they were not themselves hindered by restrictions based on status, especially freedom, gender or ethnicity, the ancient writers are by and large silent about them. Are they visible in the built environment and how?
One of the things that our legal sources reveal very little of are the practices of administration, the lived experience at what is now called the customer side of administration. How was the inevitable waiting, the delays that people who sought an audience with a magistrate, was experienced and do we know anything about the practices that developed? How was status and wealth, the resources and connections that come with them, a part of the administrative experience, such as the possibility of having a slave or a servant handle the waiting or use one’s connections to deal with the magistrate directly, for example over dinner. Studying these reveal fundamental truths about how our societies function and the structural iniquities within.
The overall objective of the project has been to produce an intellectual and social topography of Roman Republicanism and its later influence, exploring how values and ideas formed in ancient societies have influenced our understanding of good polity. One of the most interesting results of the project has been how contextual these understandings have been. Just as the project has discussed how the modern paradigm of the separation of public and private has been projected into the past, there have been presentist attempts at using the past to legitimate current forms of Republican thought. What the juxtaposition of the built environment and the ideas and ideals of Republicanism in the long historical perspective, through our investigations of the four Republican moments, shows is that ideas and their practical manifestations exist in a fluid relationship, one where power politics and economic realities are visible in different ways. The project, although historical, has important implications even today, as the earlier practices between public and private administration and administrative space are being transformed by the expansion of distance work and the privatization of public spaces.
