Public Space: Rhetorics of the Pedestrian

“Public space” is among the most widely used tropes in the spatial disciplines, shaping perceptions of meaning, justice, and experience in the city (as elsewhere). The term floats across drawings, images, plans, policies, and conversations yet is often neutral or abstract, represented as a universal space where everyone is welcome. Yet public spaces are sites of political speech, protest, or civic gathering, control, surveillance and proscribed activities, serendipity, programming, violence, profit, joy, and they might be exclusionary or inclusionary or, paradoxically, both. Public spaces may also be sites of historic celebrations, tensions, or erasures not all of which may be evident in the present. In this class, we hypothesize that public space is better framed as always already contested, never universal, and is a locus of ongoing implicit and explicit struggles.

In another register, public space may take the form of green space, open space, plazas, parks, sidewalks, streets, highway underpasses, untended landscapes, living rooms, digital realms and, in other cases, temporary interventions or appropriations in any of these sites. Add to these the innumerable “semi-public” realm of atria, lobbies, train stations, malls, and fair grounds, and the conventions of publicness become a blur.

In effect, the utility of the term public space is problematic. For whom is space public? How are such spaces public? Who is and is not speaking? Are there ways of representing the conflicts and claims embedded in such places? To get at the tensions underlying abstract or normative conceptions of public space, this class asks that we shift the object-like concreteness of the idea of public space toward social relations, and toward commoning and counter-publics, with shifting spatial possibilities. Class readings, discussion and research will be based on historical and theoretical debates and on case studies of built and unbuilt public spaces of the past two decades. We will explore how public spaces are legitimized, debated, built, and used, as well as resisted or remade. Examining designs and plans, managers, stewards, and users, property conventions and social regulations, materials and experience, the class will examine public space to inform our design work and inescapably, our politics.