Interventions In Public Space Research Articles

Urban Revitalization in Small Cities across the Atlantic Ocean

City centers and riverfronts across the Atlantic Ocean have undergone substantial transformation over the last two decades. This paper analyzes walk-only precincts and waterfront revitalization in two pairwise cases (PCs) of small city exemplars on two continents in locations at about the same latitude but separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The argument is twofold. First, to be fully effective, city center revitalization interventions need to be coordinated with appropriate institutional programs to create collaborative management opportunities among multiple civic and business agents. Second, multiple cultural offerings, environmental amenities, and pro-active leadership positionalities have contributed positively to the evolution of waterfront community economic redevelopment opportunities in riverfront locations. The methods involved multiple site visits to cities of various sizes on the Iberian Peninsula and the Northeast of the United States at different times during the last twenty years, extensive literature reviews and syntheses, data analyses, assessment of policy priorities, and interviews with employees in various economic sectors, business owners, residents, elected officials, planning professionals, and community leaders. Two of the main conclusions are that, to be fully effective, the public space interventions on the Iberian Peninsula had to be coordinated with appropriate regulatory and institutional programs to generate collaborations with multiple civic and business agents and that the Northeastern cities have attempted to revitalize their riverfronts by conserving water-based and urban historic assets and amenities from further erosion due to downpours and floods as well as socio-economic and cultural transformations.

Reclaiming Public Spaces amidst COVID-19 Pandemic: Tactical Urbanism as a ‘Resilience’ Response

Several cities were struck by the global COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2020. The rapid and hazardous spread of the crisis resulted in a profound urban transformation, changing the fundamentals of urban living. This research provides a perspective regarding the vulnerability and resilience of cities, particularly their public spaces. Public spaces, a significant component of the urban realm, remained fundamental in transforming cities during the pandemic. Implementing radical measures to minimize the spread of the virus and adopting emergency plans to resist the subsequent socioeconomic collapse demonstrated the varying yet synchronized stance on resilience. Two key approaches are used to pursue the concept of resilience as a strategic framework for public spaces. These include a balancing or bounce-back approach, which supports the idea of ‘return to normal’. The other is an evolutionary or bounce-forward tactic, characterized by adaptive capacity and transformation. This research reflects on the adaptive capacity of ‘resilience’ in public spaces, in which ‘tactical urbanism’ as an effective tool is used to create flexible, low-cost, and temporary design strategies to achieve public health goals and urban sustainability. It also discusses the examples of tactical interventions in public spaces during the pandemic and manifests the strength of temporary tactics to bring long-term change. The research concludes by proposing a new paradigm for public space planning, associating tactical urbanism and incorporating the evolutionary or adaptive capacity of resilience. The discussed strategies instil a vision for designing resilient public spaces for highly anticipated future pandemics and other hazards.

URBAN ACUPUNCTURE IN GUMUSSUYU PARK FOR RETHINKING GREEN AREAS WITH RECYCLING

Public spacesare spaces used by all individuals living in the city. For this reason, these areas must be capable of meeting the needs of all user profiles in society. Public buildings, parks, squares, streets, avenues and boulevards are the main urban public spaces. Squares, boulevards and streets are among the most important and dynamic elements of public spaces. These elements connect public spaces and structures, providing access to individuals living in the city, interaction and communication between individuals and make complementary and flexible interventions in public spaces, which are an integral part of the city identity that constantly changes depending on cultural and political changes in ensuring the sustainability of these areas. The literature focusing on the possibility of creating livable and lively spaces with intervention tools recommended by Habermas (2004) and Arendt (2006) presents urban acupuncture as a solution method proposed by Rubió (2008), Hoogduyn (2014), Casanova (2014), Casagrande (2015), Jooshani & Polat (2019) and Nassar (2021). This study aims to develop Gu?mu??suyu Park in Istanbul, Turkey, as a living part of the city again. In this study, the urban acupuncture approach was used to improve the unused area in Gu?mu??suyu Park. The data for the study were collected through observations made during field trips and presented as visuals and documents. Problem definition and visualisation methods were used in the presentation format. The ideas put forward for Gu?mu??suyu Park will become a part of the park's life and a breathing space for people living there or those passing by.

The kNOw school

In January 2023 the Anga Art Collective met with Kelly Hussey-Smith for an online conversation abouttheir practice and collective approach to art making. Anga Art Collective’s work explores artist-ledpublic pedagogy through friendship and modes of collectivity, performance, and interventions in publicspace. Emerging from fifteen years of art, friendship, public interventions, and inter-disciplinarydialogue the fifteen-member collective use creative practice and public pedagogy to explore localcontexts and issues in Assam. Their practice shows how collective approaches to knowledgeproduction, learning and creativity can be dynamic forces in generating and sustaining relations.In 2020 the collective established The kNOw School as a response to monolithic narratives andrepresentations of national identity in contemporary India. Over time, the school has developed into aseries of pedagogic and epistemological questions about knowledge production, knowledgehierarchies, and contextual learning. Concerned with local knowledge and regional plurality, theirprojects and interventions range from workshops with young people to curatorial projects that bothstrengthen regional bonds and challenge art world hierarchies. Through these site-specificcollaborations and interventions, they generate collective questions about how public pedagogy mightcontribute to practices of equality and solidarity and contribute to a vision of a more egalitarian society.In this conversational interview, edited from an online video conversation between five members of theAnga Art Collective in Assam, and journal co-editor Kelly Hussey-Smith in Naarm, we explore Anga ArtCollective's (d)evolving practice as a form of relational, durational and iterative public pedagogy.

The Aesthetics of the Social Rule of Law: The Case of Parque Biblioteca España in the City of Medellín

This article deepens and exemplifies the relationship between aesthetics, ideology, and politics by studying a case of aesthetic intervention in public space: the Parque Biblioteca España Project in Medellín, Colombia. In this way, from a qualitative methodological approach using mixed research instruments, this work will lead us to observe how the aesthetics of the Social State of Law was used as an aesthetic/political tool to confront social exclusion in Medellín.

Planning for fear of crime reduction: Assessing the impact of public space regeneration on safety perceptions in deprived neighborhoods

Fear of crime significantly reduces people’s time–space access to and use of public space, notably in high-crime neighborhoods where concerns around personal safety are more acute. One widely used strategy to reduce fear of crime is the regeneration of the built environment. However, tension remains on whether this strategy is effective, and if it is, then where, which and for whom public space interventions work. This research, incorporating a gender perspective, assesses whether neighborhood-level regeneration of public space significantly enhances or reduces residents’ perceptions of safety in deprived urban areas with a gender perspective. To test these impacts, we run a randomized control trial with 100 residents in a high-crime neighborhood in Santiago de Chile. A series of geotagged photographs of the area and ten treatment photo simulations of proposed interventions were rated by residents according to their perceived safety related to crime. The results suggest that: highly unsafe perceptions cluster in specific neighborhood locations and are particularly acute for women; the regeneration of public spaces significantly increases perceived safety for both men and women; and the effectiveness of different interventions is gender-specific. The results suggest, while an effective technique, public space regeneration in deprived neighborhoods can be further optimized through urban design and planning policy that are space- and gender-specific. The technique presented could support researchers and practitioners to understand the spatial distribution of perceptions of safety, to select effective interventions to make deprived neighborhoods feel safer, and to assess the impact of regeneration strategies.

Grassroots temporary urbanism as a challenge to the city of austerity? Lessons from a self‐organised park in Thessaloniki, Greece

AbstractThis paper traces the legacies of austerity through a focus on grassroots temporary urban interventions in public spaces. Drawing on a self‐organised neighbourhood park in Thessaloniki, Greece, it explores and analyses the politicising dynamics of these urban experiments that emerged as a direct response to state retrenchment but became a long‐term legacy of austerity with material and social consequences. The aim of the paper is to contribute to contemporary scholarly debates on temporary grassroots urbanism amidst austerity by uncovering the ambiguous nature of such urban experiments without reproducing dichotomising approaches that understand them as either a vehicle of neoliberalisation or an instrument of revolt. Through the case of Svolou I develop a twofold argument. First, regarding their social dynamics and legacies, grassroots urban initiatives that lack a politicising element of disagreement with (planning and governance) authorities result in creating parallel micro‐spheres of socialities and solidarities with a questionable long‐term impact against austerity urbanism. Although such socialities are important at the local level, they often risk reproducing neoliberal rationalities of individual responsibility and exclusions. Second, regarding their material legacies, I argue that grassroots urban initiatives produce temporary self‐organised spaces and experiment with innovative grassroots space‐making processes but they often remain entrapped at the local level without being able to develop broader contestations of the uneven urban development model emerging in and through austerity.

How Has the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative Promoted Public Spaces for Children?

Abstract: The Child-Friendly Cities Initiative was developed nearly 30 years ago to recognize cities for their work on improving the lives of urban children based on the rights of the child. There is considerable international interest in this initiative even today. However, many planners and built environment professionals feel the initiative has not done much to provide public spaces and independent mobility for children. This paper engages with such criticism and investigates the drivers and nature of public space interventions in recognized child-friendly cities in 24 countries and demonstrates how the initiative has promoted public spaces for children through policies, planning, and programming efforts.

Transforming Life for Young People

The article makes a posteriori contribution as part of the active place-making discourse in the African context within two dimensions: First, it substantiates how public spaces can be transformed when shifting the focus from place-based to a process-oriented approach framed around the empowerment of the human condition to improve subjective wellbeing. Second, it provides rich insights into a case study on several informal settlements in urban Sierra Leone, West Africa, based on our project aspiration to create safe and conducive spaces for one of the most under-prioritized population groups - the urban youth. Together, both dimensions provide an invitation to evaluate way's how the UN-Habitat Public Space toolkit 13 can be effectively implemented at a local level and upscaled to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.7.Philosophically, the mixed method action-research project received inspiration from Henry Lefebvre's social production of space which informed the design of the dream-catching process and was translated into a unique social research methodology that bridges the disciplinary divide from public health, anthropology, and urban design. The role of process-oriented approaches to place-making, in this context called space-making, is the key element of this paper. However, the empirical baseline data on subjective wellbeing collected from 1091 young people function as the foundation method to identify and validate the possible impact factor of the public space interventions to improve their environmental conditions. The conclusion reflects on the emergence of new epistemologies associated with the idea of urban loveability as it embraces the public space as an open-ended process to place-making in the African context to transform not just a place but the human condition - in this case, marginalised urban youth.

Temporary Urban Interventions in Public Space

Insufficient research on the typology of temporary urban interventions, which has become a common tool for pointing out possible scenarios in the development of unused and neglected urban areas in recent 21st century projects, indicate the relevance of the article’s topic. A literature review has allowed for a definition and analysis of the typology of temporary urban interventions in order to determine their basic characteristics, the relationship between the intervention and public space, and the establishing initiatives. The paper determines the formative period through an analysis of architectural and artistic events in 20th century and distinguishes three direct predecessors: events in public space, experimental architectural projects of the 60s, and art installations in public space in the second half of 20th century. A synthesis of collected data is an important prerequisite for understanding the role and impact of temporary urban interventions on future public space. Based on the obtained results, the research emphasizes the importance of the relationship between temporary urban interventions and public space for the creation of contemporary urban space in 21st century.

Formats and Potentials of Local Small Arts (Kleinkunst)

The article focuses on the phenomena, developments and potentials of small arts (Kleinkunst) in the Slovenian space. Small arts are a form of artistic response that, through diverse performance genres – such as cabaret, new burlesque, improvisational theatre, stand-up, interventions in public space, contemporary circus, drag, queer and LGBTQI+ stage events – provides a social commentary on the existing traditionalist, heteronormative, patriarchal and capitalist society. The article elaborates the term small arts and its artistic and social elements and tries to identify it concretely in the local space. This broad umbrella term is characterised by the heterogeneity of its themes and aesthetics. In Slovenia, it has an even more specific undertone and position, as its development and influence are hampered by a small population. When selecting the creators of small arts, the author focused mainly on those working in the sphere of the non-governmental sector, who create continuously, have artistic credibility and are not market-oriented.

Mobility regulations and urban projects in Mexico City: An accessibility focus on territorial inequalities

Global Cities frequently concentrate their public budgets and private investments in their central, wealthy zones. This article outlines the inequitable distribution of the public budgets, private investments and mixed-use zoning among the municipalities of Mexico City with regard to the provision of accessibility. Global Cities’ perspectives lack acknowledgement of elements of mobilities theory. This paper will discuss how mobility regulations and urban projects involve public space interventions and the shaping of citizens’ (mobile) daily life activities and conditions. The phenomenon is illustrated through two cases: 1) The city’s latest mobility regulations (2014 and 2015) related to its inhabitants’ daily long-distance commuting and air pollution mitigation, and 2) the urban project called Cultural Corridor ‘Chapultepec/Zona Rosa’ (CCC) related to citizens’ urban planning interventions, which was cancelled in 2015. In order to achieve equality between territories, governments should consider citizens’ participation within urban projects and mobility regulations. Governments should also take account of interrelations between urban planning and mobility perspectives.

Urban experiments exhibited: Exploring practice-based design research and agency in urban space

This article explores the methodological considerations regarding the organization of a site-specific exhibition in urban space and the design research experiments that may be part of such an exhibition. The aim is to encourage design research as ‘exhibition’ and to propose a format that allows theory to enter the exhibition programme for the purpose of aligning exhibition contributions with theoretical contributions. Through the proposed analytical approach, we offer a method and a model to analyse interventions in public space in relation to agency and the participatory agenda for humans and non-humans. The main contribution is an exploration of the specificalities of curating an exhibition in urban space as a distinct practice-based design research project, where programme, research questions and experiments create knowledge on scaling agency in regard to temporality, citizenship and the value of urban space.

The Social, Political, and Environmental Dimensions in Designing Urban Public Space from a Water Management Perspective: Testing European Experiences

Urban areas are increasingly experiencing extreme weather events, especially related to water (e.g., droughts, heatwaves, floods), which are devastatingly impacting infrastructure and human lives. Compact cities, conceived to create more robust, effective, and sustainable environments, are under pressure to increase their resilience by co-producing adaptive strategies mainly focused on the urban public space. However, public space design tends to face environmental challenges without sufficiently exploring their intersection with social issues (citizens living conditions and vulnerability) and political structures (governance). This contribution delves into how urban public space interventions are (not) moving towards achieving urban resilience in an integrated way instead of sectoral. A triple-loop approach has been developed and tested in ten urban public spaces in European compact cities in the last 25 years. The results report how most projects reinforce the social dimension by promoting citizen well-being through new quality standards in public spaces, excluding some citizenry’s vulnerable segments (immigrants, women, and disabled). The political dimension reinforces hard adaptation measures to manage water resources, although increasing attention is put on nature-based solutions, and most projects ensure participation processes. Finally, the environmental dimension is the most transversal by increasing land conversion, ensuring flooding mitigation, and enhancing adaptive capacity.

Absence and Presence: Nona Faustine and the Black Body in the National History of the United States

How should the history of Black Americans be included in the physical landscape and memorialised? What new visual vocabularies are needed to expand the idea of the nation? Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series (begun in 2012) provides a compelling counternarrative to stereotypical and racist representations of Black Americans in public spaces. With her body, Faustine explores the links between colonialism, racism, and capitalism that continues to be celebrated in public monuments in the United States. Her works invite viewers to participate in and interact with the built environment in new ways that acknowledge these public spaces as sites of nationalism intimately connected to the history of US racism – slave labour, Jim Crow, and police violence. In White Shoes, Nona Faustine contests dominant and entrenched national myths through the materiality of her body – her Black body. Her interventions in public space re-inscribe a neglected history onto the urban landscapes of New York City. Faustine’s work challenges white patriarchal dominance through mediated images of Black bodies by creating presence where there is absence.

Locative Media Walks

In this paper, I attempt to express the connection between (i) audio walks—that is, movement-based geo-locative or technologically-mediated sound interventions in public spaces— and (ii) the Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts of nomadism and the rhizome. On the one hand, I seek to illustrate how site-specific, interactive artistic works that draw on geo-locative media technology produce an environment of augmented aurality within public space. On the other, I aim to describe how nomad- and Minor-art theories can find expression in artistic practices that focus on walking and listening (in) to the city as a smooth space, including narratives, stories, soundscapes, and minor historiographies, using recent GPS technologies. Finally, I draw on a combination of several theories on art, space, embodiment, walking, and technology to explore new aesthetic directions in public space geo-locative walking art.

Picturing these days of love and rage: Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Impossible Rebellion’

This essay combines text and photographs to animate and engage the 2021 Extinction Rebellion protests in London. The work draws attention to the Rebellion’s creative interventions in public space and identifies and explores five modes of geographical street activism. We offer this encounter and visual report in the hope that it might inspire geographers to imagine and launch their own ‘impossible rebellion’ in the wake of environmental emergency.

“To Work–To Sacrifice–To Die”: The Cult of Military Martyrs and its Manifestation in Slovakia during the years 1938–1945

The Slovak Republic of 1939–1945 was established on the doorstep of the deadliest war in history. It almost immediately became an active participant in the war as an ally of Nazi Germany. Moreover, already in March 1939, Slovakia, just after its foundation, found itself in a military conflict with Hungary. These facts were naturally reflected in all spheres of society, including urban spaces. This study aims to analyze interventions in the public spaces of Slovak towns related to a cult of martyrs. There was strong need to justify the new Slovak Republic’s participation in the war. This need became increasingly pressing, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union, which met with the disapproval of the majority of the population. I therefore ask how the regime responded to this. I am especially interested in following questions: how were public spaces transformed change in an effort to build a martyr cult before and after the attack on the Soviet Union? Were there significant interventions in connection with this event (the declaration of war against the USSR)? Had the symbol of a martyr or a soldier changed, and if so, how? The study is organized chronologically. I analyze interventions in public spaces during the so-called Little War in March 1939, at the moment of entry into the war against Poland in September 1939, and at the moment of entry into the war against the USSR in June 1941. I examine interventions on architecture-material level which involved the renaming streets and the creation of memorials. I also focus on perceptions of the street as a “stage” for military parades or ceremonies in the course of which soldiers were awarded decorations.

Ventilation and Low-cost Strategies on Mitigating COVID-19 Infection Disease Transmission in Indoor Environment

During the normalization phase of COVID-19 epidemic, it is gradually reverted to use building space, especially for office. Prevention of airborne pollutant has emerged as a major challenge. Ventilation strategies can mitigate the spread of airborne disease in indoor environment, such as increasing ventilation rate, modifying ventilation mode, etc. The larger ventilation rate can lead to higher energy consumption may not effectively reduce infection risk. The potential of ventilation modes for COVID-19 control should be explored. Furthermore, it is necessary to adopt low-cost strategies, such as physical barrier, to increase the prevention efficiency while combining the ventilation system. This study was to investigate the impact of physical barrier on the spread of particles and infection risk in an office with a sufficient ventilation rate, and then compare different ventilation strategies, including mixing ventilation (MV), zone ventilation (ZV), stratum ventilation (SV) and displacement ventilation (DV), for the optimal one. The simulation model was mainly used in this work and validated by the experiment to show a good agreement with the model prediction. The results showed that (1) the SV showed greater performance in mitigating infection disease spread than MV, ZV and DV, with a minimum infection risk of 13%; (2) a barrier height of at least 60 cm above the desk surface is needed to effectively prevent the transmission of viruses with the risk of infection reduced by about 72%. This work can provide a reference for development of ventilation strategies as well as low-cost prevention interventions in public space oriented the prevention of COVID-19.

Form, exform, and information in public space

If the urban tissue can be compared to a verbal text, how appropriate, then, do the linguistic disciplines prove in urban studies? This article briefly shows how morphology (Oliveira, 2016) and semantics (Benveniste, 1971) help us understand the city’s physical structures as well as the meaning these structures embody. Then follows a more substantial discussion of poetics (Ricœur, 1991) and its relevance to research on art in public space. An artistic intervention in public space may in fact appear as a poetic trope within the prosaic context of the city (De Certeau, 1988). Interrupting the smooth run of the urban machinery, it may re-inform what has become redundant. Thus, Marianne Heske’s House of Commons not only questions our definitions of form and exform (Bourriaud, 2016); in-forming an ex-form, it also questions the power of definition and other power structures inherent in the cityscape.