Interventions In Public Space Research Articles

AN ELUCIDATION OF PUBLIC SOUND ART THROUGH A NON-SONOROUS TRADITION

The origins of sound art are usually traced to previous sonorous artistic manifestations such as futurism or fluxus (see Labelle, 2006; Kahn, 1999). However, in non-sonorous manifestations it is also possible to appreciate some features of sound art that go beyond the dominant role that sound plays. By adding to the topic of sound art essential notions of temporality, spatial construction and social recognition, the emergence of a sonorous artistic practice which goes beyond the mere use of sound is revealed. In this sense, research in public sound art, which is the primary topic of this paper, provides three issues to which it is important to pay attention in order to pose new sound art theories and ideas: First, the viewer-listener, considered simply as a citizen; second, the city, understood as a sculptural space and a social space, and finally, derived from the previous two, the transformation of the concept of ‘space’ in the practices concerning the public sphere of art. The implementation of these concepts, which took place naturally in different artistic domains, represented the beginning of the creative use of sound and, specifically, the awakening of public sound art. For this reason, based on sound art studies, as mentioned above, the projection of the article goes beyond these writings in an attempt to connect sound art with the public space. Literature on sound art has described its origins through music, poetry, architecture and other disciplines. However, this article addresses its origin in connection with the specific area of the city. The sound installation’s pioneer, Max Neuhaus, will act as a guide towards this aim. This process allows a rereading of some of the most evocative examples of sound art and, at the same time, provides other references that will be valuable for assessing the growing interest in the creation of sound interventions in public space. The prolific career of Max Neuhaus, which covered a broad range of topics, will establish a connection between public sound art and artists and thinkers who are rarely linked to this medium. These connections will, however, offer new perspectives onto the most widely discussed topics of the discipline: temporality and spatiality. This inquiry into the roots of sound art is an attempt to make a contribution to its history, not only by way of evidence, but also through suggestions provided by works of art that are far removed from the medium of sound and by other contributions from different fields of studies.(1)

Non Public Spaces

Non Public Spaces Imre Szeman (bio) Invisible Oil. Ernst Logar. Springer. http://www.springer.com. 94 pages; cloth, $39.95. How could oil ever be invisible? During the second half of 2011, oil was constantly in the news, mainly as a consequence of the protracted public and political debate over U.S. approval of TransCanada Corporation's Keystone XL pipeline. The new year promises to bring little relief from oil news, whether because of the role that the Keystone XL will undoubtedly play in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, or due to the start of hearings in Canada about the Northern Gateway pipeline, or because of the myriad other stories that will inevitably arise in relation to oil: rising prices at the pumps, sizable investments in new explorations, geopolitical wrangling to secure energy supply, reports of enormous corporate profits, and further news about the ecological devastation wrought by oil economies. Though we rarely set eyes on its physical substance despite the depths of our dependence on it, the ongoing drama of power, profit, and violence that surrounds oil is very much part of daily life. Yet despite the public prominence of this commodity, Austrian artist Ernst Logar is right to insist on oil's invisibility. Invisible Oil documents Logar's exhibit of the same name held at Peacock Visual Arts in 2008 in Aberdeen, Scotland. Consisting of large format photo and text pieces and a series of innovative installations, Invisible Oil continues Logar's ongoing artistic exploration of the social mechanisms and historical truisms (from money in 2009's Monetary Interventions in Public Space to the concept of sustainability in 2010's Sustainable Transformation) that animate and enable life in late capitalism. Logar's object here is oil, but oil as it is lived in Aberdeen, a community that has experienced the destabilizing effects of being near the epicenter of a major oil field. The city's economy was on the decline in the 1960s until the opening up of the North Sea oil fields in the 1970s in the wake of the OPEC crisis led to an economic revival. It has also brought with it inflation, crime (Aberdeen has the second highest crime rate in Scotland), problems with income distribution, and, now that the North Sea is a decade past peak production, a looming economic and social crisis. The book is interspersed with photos that Logar took of the city of Aberdeen while he was an artist in residence there in 2008 that provide some helpful visual context for the issues that he investigates. However, these photos are not included in the exhibit that this book documents, which is just as well: to my mind, the pieces included in the show engage in a more ambitious and critical interrogation of the consequences of life with oil than such city scenes could ever do. The primary exhibit space of Invisible Oil consists of images mounted on three sides of a rectangular room. At the center of the room sits a huge Lucite drum on a metal plinth. The drum contains a single barrel of oil: forty-two gallons sourced by Logar from a Scottish refinery, crude whose origins lie not in the North Sea, but in Venezuela—an immediate sign of the global networks along which this commodity circulates. Along one wall is a series of responses (either on letterhead or email printouts) from oil companies to the artist's requests for access to three sites: the well-head of an offshore rig, a lab where crude oil is analyzed, and a company's conference room. These letters reveal the original name of Logar's project to be "Non Public Spaces"; the photos that he had hoped to take were clearly intended to render visible sites deemed to be essential to the production of oil but which are hidden from view, despite their power in shaping publics in Aberdeen and elsewhere. With one exception (one company gave him access to their lab, photos of which are included in another section of Invisible Oil), none agreed to his request; it was only a single company that answered his request for a barrel of oil as well. Perversely, one might want...

Atmospheres and Occasions of Informal Urban Practice

An architect and an artist discuss approaches to working with public space, social engagement, aesthetics and politics. Whilst the architect has been more concerned with agonistics and the artist with hospitality, they share interest in fostering informal urban practices. Their dialogue explores the potential contemporary role of the creative public practitioner, referring to different projects, ranging from action-based provocations and surgical interventions in public space, to a series of open-ended socially engaged public events and provisional transportation situations. The conversation unravels both their conflicting and shared desires for how informal creative practices may engage in the ongoing re-conditioning of different kinds of participatory urban atmospheres and occasions, whilst circling around how creative criticality might be more publicly valued and lived by urban citizens.

Cascoland: Interventions in Public Space, Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa (review)

Reviewed by: Cascoland: Interventions in Public Space, Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa Loren Kruger Cascoland: Interventions in Public Space, Drill Hall, Johannesburg, South Africa. Edited by Roen Schoenmakers and Michiel van Oosterhout. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2008; pp. 240. €24.50 paper. This compilation of essays and photographs may document only a single series of “interventions in public space” in central Johannesburg in 2007, but it deals with issues around reclaiming public space and enacting new publics, which resonate far beyond this specific occasion. This occasion brought together Cascoland, a public art group based in Amsterdam that had worked in 2006 in New Crossroads, an informal settlement near Cape Town, and the Joubert Park Project (JPP), whose members combine the efforts of artists, entrepreneurs, and unemployed youth and their elders to revive this dense and dangerous district in the eastern inner city as public space through art, commerce, play, and reconstruction of the built environment. JPP’s efforts began in 2000 by bringing together informal photographers taking wedding and other pictures in the park with students of public art and the formal, even aloof Johannesburg Art Gallery, which had hitherto turned its back on the park. These efforts paralleled those of other organizations—including Witwatersrand University (Wits) and the Market Theatre on the western edge of the inner city—to harness funds provided by the Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA, a city agency) to revitalize the inner city not merely by beautification, but also by expanding skills training, employment opportunities, and community responsibility among inner-city residents and by encouraging more affluent citizens to return to the city to play as well as to work. These efforts have not produced miraculous results: inner Johannesburg remains a risky environment whose residents from across Africa must compete for scarce resources, but whose lack of a shared language has encouraged suspicion, crime, and lawlessness. Nonetheless, they have improved not only the appearance of the city, but also community responsibility and day-to-day civility on the streets. It is this challenging long-term endeavor that provides the context for understanding Cascoland and the project of combining work and play, making and performing, to renew civility in the city. As this preamble suggests, performance here extends beyond the confines of formal theatre by trained actors for a schooled though passive audience. The Cascoland project culminated in a ten-day festival (9–18 March 2007), but the book documents in texts and images each stage of planning, multiple sites of art-making, education, social interaction, and assessments by local critics and consultants, thus providing an illuminating and reproducible account of the process as well as a document of this particular case. The festival included modern-dance pieces, including “Living on a Construction Site,” by trained choreographers (121), as well as urban vernacular dance by groups like the Swenkas—older men strutting in formal suits, whose name derives from a formerly popular men’s store called Kaye and Swank—and InnaCity, hip-hop by young men in the neighborhood. It also included less scripted though no less significant kinds of performance and other spatial practices, from social interaction to the reconstruction of spaces to facilitate such encounters, and thus highlights the contribution of spatial and social practices to theatre and performance. This reconstruction began in 2004, when JPP moved into the anchoring site for these events, Drill Hall, which, as its name implies, had been a military installation. Renovated to house a gallery as well as offices for JPP and city services like Child Welfare, Drill Hall was still surrounded by an ugly concrete fence when plans for collaboration with Cascoland were initiated that year. A 2006 assessment by local architect/urban designers SharpCITY apprentices Dino Kiratzidis and Andreas Hofmeyr, and Cascoland guests Bert Kramer and Jair Straschnow led to the creation of a steel fence whose more open structure provided not only access and security, but also, in the form of horizontal bars, retractable tables and chairs that invited street entrepreneurs as well as visitors to work and play with the structure. This collaboration also produced a steel-and-vinyl structure called the “urban playmobile” (83) that provided not only a stage, but also a temporary landmark...

The contestation for, and management of, public places in Johannesburg, South Africa

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show the changes to date between the apartheid (ideological) and democratic use and management of public space. The abolition of apartheid laws in urban areas led to a great deal of contestation for space and also to new forms of management of public space.Design/methodology/approachThis paper looks briefly at the background which led to public space being “reserved” on a racial basis. It then examines examples of the contestation for space that developed with the relaxation and, finally, abolition of apartheid legislation. It finally provides and discusses some of the solutions that have developed in both the use and management of public space.FindingsLittle has been practically resolved in relation to contestation over various aspects of urban public space. Where public space interventions have been private sector led, such interventions are not without their own difficulties.Research limitations/implicationsGenerally the paper confines itself to Johannesburg. The paper relies on the personal experience of the author and research of written material – time constraints have not permitted research through questionnaires.Practical implicationsThe practical implications of the results to date are summarised and recommendations made for application to other South African towns and cities.Originality/valueRelatively little is available on the practical applications of the subject matter in South Africa. The paper could be of value in developing further debates, both in South Africa and in world cities subject to mass immigration.

Study on Urban Planning Evolution in Historic Center of Barcelona

This paper aims to analyze the planning policies in Barcelona by examining the evolution of physical plan in its historic center. Since Cerda Plan (1859), historic center has experienced a great deal of planning activities, but most plans found it difficult to satisfy their aims under the dictatorship of Franco. After 1979 when Catalunya gained the autonomy, based on the concept of "misrourbanisme" which includes a program of multiple, small-sale, and inexpensive interventions in public space with rehabilitation of its historic center avoiding gentrification and maintaining social coherence in the affected neighborhoods.

Rural islam and change: Case study: Cholistan

This paper investigates how public space can leverage disruptive changes in urban environments which compel sustainable urban transformation. We draw on three recent cases in New York City (Times Square in Manhattan, Jackson Heights in Queens and 596 Acres in Brooklyn), where activation of public space radically changed the function and identify of apparently stable urban systems by giving rise to nascent ‘urban commons’. As healthy commons are indicative of cultural and institutional practices aligned with sustainability, we examine how innovative social and institutional practices can form in urban environments, and compel more sustainable ways of living. Drawing on resilience theory as a framework, our analysis focuses on the contextual conditions and mechanisms that enabled new public spaces to form; the processes by which ‘commons practices’ developed; and the way these urban commons influence urban systems more widely. We find that rigid urban systems can be ‘loosened’ by iteratively prototyping urban interventions (such as temporary street closures). These actions create fertile, low-risk, experimental conditions in which stakeholders can cultivate and consolidate shared resources and custodial commons practices. The formation of these ‘communities of practice’ is essential for the advocacy and protection of new commons as they begin to scale and challenge dominant urban system configurations. We conclude by describing how urban commons must scale vertically and horizontally within wider urban systems to support transformation towards sustainability. Upon identifying a range of challenges to this process, we suggest that the distributed replication of small public space interventions may offer the most pragmatic path towards promoting and normalising commons practices, as it can seed a groundswell of grassroots social innovation. In turn, these activities may lay the cultural foundations for traditional institutional stakeholders and urban authorities to play a more progressive and enabling role in urban transformation.