Idea Of Public Space Research Articles

Gendered urban cycling and the ethics of caring: coming to voice in the streets of Tijuana and Oaxaca amidst the patriarcarro

ABSTRACT This article explores grassroots organisations and collectives of women cyclists in the cities of Tijuana and Oaxaca, Mexico. Taking a narrative approach, it delves into the idea of public space that emerges from their life histories, chronicles, and talk groups. It contends that the narratives of their urban practices and interventions, and of their lives as a whole, are a radical resignification of the meaning and purposes of streets and other urban public spaces. Currently sites of different forms of oppression, in these women’s actions and narrative formulations, they become places ‘from which I come to voice’, intersubjective locations of ‘radical openness and possibilities’ developed through an ethics of caring. This collective vision pushes against capitalist ideas of streets as places for the efficient transit of individuals for productivity and consumption, and against oppressive boundaries of gender, sex, and class. Instead, what emerges from their narrated experience is a relational form of mobility, a way through the city that fosters self-affirmation, inclusivity, and community. Our contribution is based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and on ‘disappropriative writing’ exercises with our participants to produce the collaborative public archive of community narratives of urban cycling (www.reciclarseenlaciudad.com) upon which this and other research outcomes of this project are based.

Forms of Life and Public Space

New words have found their way into the public sphere: we now commonly talk about “confinement”, “barrier-gesture” or “distancing”. The very idea of public space has been transformed: with restrictions on movement and interaction in public; with the reintegration of lives (certain lives) into the home (if there is one) and private space; with the publicization of private space through internet relationships; with the cities’ space occupied, during confinement, by so-called “essential” workers; with the restriction of gatherings and political demonstrations in public space. With these and other recent changes, it is imperative to revisit the concept of public space, which continues to be used as if it were self-evident, despite its profound transformation over the past few decades, in a process of realization and “literalization”. No longer just a comfortable metaphor for reasonable debates, public space has become a concrete reality in the 21th century. This transformation in the various phenomena, such as the occupation of squares and public spaces; the demand for spaces of conversation and expression for those without a voice; the transition of private matters into the public realm through verbal expression; and the expression and circulation of public issues within popular cultures. As a result, the question of public space is increasingly intertwined with that of private spaces, such as the home or individual subjectivities, forming an internal, logical relationship.

Collaborative Public Space in China: Two Waterfront Projects, Shanghai and Suzhou

This paper discusses public space in China and explores how theories of public space can be applied to two waterfront projects. As case studies the paper compares two public waterfront projects: The 18 km Jinji Lake project in Suzhou and the 45km Huangpu River waterfront project in Shanghai, both completed in 2018. The Jinji lake development in the heart of Suzhou designed by EDAW later AECOM also boasts inclusive 24/7 access and people centered design. Democratic theory is commonly used in the West to discuss public space however LiminHeearguesthatthediscourseasunderstoodinthewesterndemocratictradition is not adequate for Asian cities (Hee, 2017). Constructing Singapore Public Space, Springer) This paper finds that although the idea of public space in China is argued to be an evolving concpt (Gaubatz, 2008, pp 72-83), notions of democratic participation, Human Centered Design (HCD) and place-making methods are central development policyinChinesecities.Whereastermslikevibrancyandvitalityarecommonlyusedby scholars to evaluate and discuss public space in China, rather than democratic theory, theories from western scholars such as Habermas’s theory of the public sphere are also relevant and collaborative practices between civil society and the state are key to the participatory nature of Chinese public space.

Rethinking public space: between rhetoric and reality

The idea of public space has moved from a critique to an orthodoxy, embraced by most stakeholders as an important part of urban development. In this process, however, it has been co-opted in ways which may be at odds with its earlier ideals. This paper develops a critique of this process of transition, showing how the rhetoric of the public space as a multidimensional space of interaction may be used, but practically targeting the creation of a space of attraction, an instrument of delivering investment and maximizing rewards. The paper examines four areas of this transition in the broad processes of political, economic and cultural transformation, and the gaps between rhetoric and reality in the provision and character of public spaces reflect these processes in concrete ways.

Birds Behaving Badly: The Regulation of Seagulls and the Construction of Public Space

This article is about the socio‐legal construction of one of the least‐loved birds in the United Kingdom: the ‘seagull'. In particular, it is about how the gull has been brought within the realm of the ‘anti‐social', in a context in which urban‐nesting gulls (of which there are many in the United Kingdom) are cast as causing a great deal of public nuisance, ranging from noise, aggression, and mess, to attacks, injuries, and stress. The article examines the measures adopted by local authorities to regulate the gull population – and to regulate people, in the name of regulating gulls – and shows how a construction of the ‘seagull’ underpins and justifies this regulatory framework. It argues that the story of the regulation of seagulls in the United Kingdom is also a story about the construction of public space, to the point that the measures adopted here challenge the very idea of public space.

Parks, People, and Property Values

The role that parks played in Manhattan changed dramatically during the antebellum period. Originally dismissed as unnecessary on an island embraced by rivers, parks became a tool for real estate development and gentrification in the 1830s. By the 1850s, politicians, journalists, and landscape architects believed Central Park could be a social salve for a city with rising crime rates, increasingly visible poverty, and deepening class divisions. While many factors (public health, the psychological need for parks, and property values) would remain the same, the changing social conversation showed how ideas of public space were transforming, in rhetoric if not reality.

Public Space, Urban Identity and Conflict in Medieval Flanders

Ideas of public space can say a lot about the societies that create them. A clear example of this was its use in Flanders during the medieval period. People within Flanders found themselves in a unique situation having one of the highest amounts of urban densities in Europe. This allowed for a distinct urban identity emerge. Within the urban centres of Flanders a distinct political culture had been fostered which caused many examples of conflict within cities themselves and against the nobility of Flanders, France and Burgundy. By looking at examples of these conflicts a distinct urban identity appears. This urban identity allowed public space to be used as a tool by the people of Flanders in order to protect their political rights and liberties. To see the use of public spaces as a tool Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the construction of public space must be understood. Once Lefebvre’s theories are understood specific spaces may be looked at in order to see what role they played in the urban identity of the Flemish cities and how these identities wrapped up in public spaces were used as tools during times of conflict, revolt and rebellion. The spaces that provided the best examples of this were the distinct borders of towns defined by walls and defences, belfries and marketplaces.

Art as a diagnostic: assessing social and political transformation through public art in Cairo, Egypt

Since January 2011, Egypt has undergone several waves of political upheaval in order to craft a new form of governance. Central to this process has been the role of art. This article argues that artistic interventions that engage with the idea of public space and that take place in the public space of the city engender interactions that illuminate the complexities and difficulties currently facing Egyptian society. More so than serving as documentation of what has taken place or as acts of protest, public art can serve as a diagnostic of issues that simmer underneath the surface of national politics. Based on interviews, focus groups, and observations conducted between 2011 and 2013 with Cairo-based artists and arts advocates, the paper explores the way in which public art has signaled tensions regarding class, gender and increasing political polarization. By exploring the relationship between art, artists and urban space, this paper extends analyses on political transitions to take account of the effects produced by forms of artistic expression within the public sphere.

Urbanism and Urbanity: The Spanish Bourgeois Novel and Contemporary Customs (1845–1925) by Leigh Mercer (review)

MERCER, LEIGH. Urbanism and Urbanity: The Spanish Bourgeois Novel and Contemporary Customs (1845-1925). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2013. xi + 201 pp.Driven by spirit of work in urban geography that has influenced language and literature fields more and more since 1991-the date of English translation of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974) by Donald Nicholson-SmithLeigh Mercer's first book combines urban novels, everyday practices, and city planning in a wonderfully textured study of social space. Building explicitly on studies of and literature in Madrid and Barcelona by Edward Baker, Daniel Frost, Jo Labanyi, and Joan Ramon Resina, and dovetailing also with work by Tom Lewis, Rebecca Haidt, Eugenia Afinoguenova, Susan Larson, Carlos Ramos and myself (among others), Mercer is concerned above all else with idea of public space as a performative realm in which Spanish middle class enacted and displayed, first, its coming of age and, later, its own decline into decadence (5).Through an intriguing method and organizational scheme, Urbanism and Urbanity demonstrates that the bourgeois social of nineteenthand early twentieth-century novel are primarily gendered spaces while convincingly tying culture of display into historical, economic, and political trappings of urban (8). That is, book is wonderfully verteb rated by specific urban spaces; it is dedicated, then, like many novels and urban guides of period, to the comprehension of particular and site-specific spatially encoded rituals-specifically those unfolding in the museum, theater, promenade, boutique, stock market, casino, Congress and field of honor, all sites where gendered class identities are performed (4). As a nuanced painter of modern life in Spanish cities, Mercer is attentive to how historically gendered notions of private/public space both structure social life and are challenged by oppositional readings. At same time, central move of her work is, I would say, to fuse large-scale modern shifts and small-scale (personal-individual) practices. Discussion of each site in her work's chapters shows multiple novels to be [participating in larger cultural discourse emanating from urban plans, conduct manuals, and city guides of this era (17). Ultimately, book's persistent and interwoven focus on three literary moments in modernity (i.e., folletines, Realist novels, and fin de siglo novels) allows for a dynamic discussion that engages hallmark characteristics of literary periodization as it has been theorized within Hispanic Studies more generally, while going beyond such admittedly disciplinary concerns.In first part of chapter one, All World's Her Stage: The Museum and Theater, Mercer invokes Benito Perez Galdos (La desheredada), Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco (Maria, la hija de un jornalero), Clarin (La Regenta), and Vicente Blasco Ibanez (La maja desnuda) in discussion of how in these Spanish novels the museum appears as an institution dedicated to production of so-called ideal woman, a context in which women, through their objectification by male gaze, can be possessed and exhibited (26). Exploration of social space of museum, in this example, carries us from one novel to another in succession and selectively-according to site-specific logic driving Urbanism and Urbanityencouraging active reader to see textures, multiplicity, and even friction, where focus on one novel alone (and in isolation) would be misleading and perhaps insufficient. …

Contestation and Bracketing: The Relation between Public Space and the Public Sphere

In this paper I seek to clarify the relation between the notions of public space and the public sphere by distinguishing between two dimensions of publicness—contestation and bracketing—in the classical notion of the public sphere as developed by Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. By clarifying this relation I aim to bring out how public space can be seen as the site of political practices distinct from those usually associated with the public sphere. That in turn will facilitate an understanding of why the idea of public space has been resorted to by activists and scholars to overcome limitations of the public sphere. On the basis of the two dimensions, I propose a distinction between two notions of public space, one centred on contestation and another on bracketing. I argue that both conceptions help articulate political practices that go beyond what is customarily allowed for in the deliberations of the public sphere: On the one hand, practices that visibilize dissent and expose inequalities and, on the other hand, practices that construct alternative arenas where marginal or subordinate people's self-confidence as political actors can be strengthened.

Negotiating and Designing Public Space. Experiences with a new M.Sc. in Urban Design Program in Hong Kong

This contribution reflects on first experiences made with a newly launched Master of Science in Urban Design program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. As an important part of this program, students have to develop their design proposal in response to feedback of different stakeholders and community members. Thus the program responds to the growing aspiration of Hong Kong’s citizens to shape the urban development of their city and a lack of a meaningful participation process in the region. With its high density, protected country parks, efficient public transport and large scale housing program, generally, Hong Kong offers important lessons for contemporary urbanism. However, since the end of the British colonial rule and in face of increasing property prices, pollution and the disappearance of local heritage, intensive debates started about the regions future. Another central point of the recent discussion in Hong Kong – and key theme of the new urban design program - is the demand for the rights and qualities of public space. The paper presents the set-up of the design studio, which was closely linked to a course on “urban processes”. During the semester, students had to organize community forums and street exhibitions in a specific district, invite stakeholders and residents and discuss with them their ideas. Their projects, then, had to respond on the various feedbacks and integrate them in their design and policy proposals. The text reflects on the student projects and the lessons learned in the process. It addresses general questions such as the challenges in communicating with a diverse community (e.g. language barriers and culturally different ideas of public space). It addresses the question of the intended and unintended effects of a participatory design studio in the community, and possible follow-ups. And it reflects on the general role of design and designers in shaping community spaces.

Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship (review)

Reviewed by: Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship Fred Rowland Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship, John M. Budd. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008. 281 p. $60 (ISBN 1-59158-591-0) Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship is an ambitious book in which John M. Budd, professor and associate director of the School of Information Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia, works toward putting the complex and varied profession of librarianship into a coherent intellectual, philosophical, and political perspective. He suggests that there is an "absence of reflection" in our profession and offers "opportunities and suggestions for reflection" through an examination of history, information science, education, ethics, democracy, and information society. (p. vii) He does not claim to have the last word on this topic, preferring "the initiation of self-examination—in expression and in process—that will be joined by others." (p. viii) Unfortunately, the result is very uneven and provides for reflection and confusion in roughly equal measure. The author is strongest when he is discussing the political and social aspects of librarianship, which the profession all too often obscures behind seemingly objective standards, policies, and practices. By extending his analysis outside the traditional boundaries of librarianship, he shows that, instead of reflecting on our purpose and letting it drive librarianship, we often allow our purpose to be driven by outside forces. In a time when the very idea of public space is threatened by the idealization of markets and business perspectives, he reminds us that libraries should strive for the common good and that "librarians have the ethical responsibility to provide access to communicative content that resists state control and market homogenization." (p. 129) Budd questions the constricting vision of patrons as customers and libraries as quasi-bookstores because it impoverishes the services provided to our respective communities. By not confronting this ideology, librarians are allowing market-driven constraints to limit the possibility of contributing to a more inclusive public sphere. He describes the tension between intellectual freedom and social responsibility at the heart of librarianship and offers reasons why addressing that tension would help to make our profession more deliberate and assertive. He unpacks the multiple and often contradictory meanings of democracy and information society to show that librarians should be more aware of how these obfuscations promote certain interests over others. The problem in all these discussions, however, is that, in order to glean Budd's genuine insights, the reader is forced through a vast maze of political and philosophical detours. Though many of the themes he treats are of great importance and his approach is often interesting, Self-Examination is fragmented by a lack of focus on his essential points and by a habit of straying wildly off course. He provides quick references to scores of thinkers but inadequate explanations of his own philosophical principles. He offers wide-ranging perspectives on librarianship but too few concrete examples. Throughout, the reader is left to wonder whether the chapters are a series of stand-alone pieces meant for meditative reflection or links in a chain that are leading to a grand synthesis. The final chapter, entitled "Optimistic Synthesis," does little to resolve this question. Self-Examination is packed with references to technical philosophical terms, philosophies, and philosophers. This is not the first time Budd has dipped heavily into philosophy to illuminate the ways of our [End Page 169] profession, having previously published Knowledge and Knowing in Library and Information Science: A Philosophical Framework (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001). Often there seems to be no apparent reason why these references are introduced, since they do little to elaborate the library issues at hand. For instance, the author often refers to "telos" (italics in the original) when he could just as easily say "purpose." He titles his first chapter "Genealogy of the Profession" and discusses Fríedrích Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and the work of Michel Foucault before racing through thousands of years of library history. The themes introduced in this first chapter alone could fill an entire book. Instead, it is difficult to understand what role this genealogy plays in the remainder of Self-Examination. In the...

Madrid's Retiro Park as publicly-private space and the spatial problems of spatial theory

The scholarly focus on the production of space necessitates a thorough reassessment of the static categories employed in the analysis of spatial processes. Emphasizing space as a process, this essay calls attention to the recent implication of Madrid's Retiro Park in larger processes of capital accumulation. At the same time, it highlights the insufficiency of the tempting yet problematic distinction between public and private space that obtains in easy solutions to the struggles over city-space. As many critics have pointed out, there is design flaw in the idea of public space—it can never explain how a given space, such as a park, comes to be free of the ‘private’ (personal and structural) interests operating throughout its societal context. The story of the Retiro ultimately foregrounds the pivotal role of city-space in the drive for capitalist intercity-competition and suggests that the latter process is insufficiently confronted by idealized notions of the role truly ‘public’ spaces might play in radical democracy and citizenship.

What is a World Capital of Culture? The Case of Paris

Paris invented the notion of modern art and that of the avant-garde. She exercised undisputed hegemony over modern art and literature from the midnineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, when New York “stole” the concept. Pioneering works of the 1930s like Roger Caillois’ Le mythe et l’homme and Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-werk indicated the existence of a secret generative link between the mythology of Paris as “capital of modernity” and the discourses of modern art and literature.1 The line of research was reopened in the 1990s and early 2000s in major studies by Patrice Higonnet, Christophe Charle, Pascale Casanova, Christopher Prendergast and Karlheinz Stierle.2 These writers are in intimate dialogue with some of the most important forms of cultural theory in the 20th century. Higonnet combines Roger Caillois’ theory of the mythology of the metropolis as frame for interpretation and action with Habermasian ideas of public space. Charle, a cultural historian and Casanova, a scholar of comparative literature, both draw primarily on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Prendergast uses deconstructive approaches, tracing the readability and blur of a 19th century Paris stretched out between “Paris the political and cultural capital”, dominating its territory and “Paris, the metropolis”, network of cultural exchange. One type of cultural theory is lacking, though. A world capital of culture is a capital of mediation. It mediates worldwide and is mediated worldwide. Yet none of the above see the problem as one of media studies and media theory. Walter Benjamin was a pioneer in linking art theory and urban studies to the theory of the modern media. Karlheinz Stierle puts this aspect of Benjamin’s work into parentheses in order to re-appropriate the Passagenwerk for German philology and hermeneutics (Romanistik). I will try and understand the notion of a “Paris world capital of culture” also from the perspective of media history and media theory. Only thus can one grasp what was most productive in the relation between the discourses of Paris and those of the avant-garde.