I'm happy to say that physical space does matter, and places for people to meet face
to face, be it a mall or a park, all of these places do matter and that there is the potential
for change.
Public space is one of the most often used phrases in talking about cities today.
Usually it refers to open outdoor space.
There are no doors to that space.
It is free and accessible to everybody, and nobody has to pay an admission fee to come
in.
Public space is a place where people come to be represented as part of the public, as
part of the group of people who have sovereignty over a city or a place, who have some right
to be there to determine how it's going to operate.
Public spaces should never be static, they're never finished, there should be platforms
on which communities continually recreate themselves and define themselves.
Almost any space around you really should be public space, except those areas that are
specifically private property, but I kind of have trouble believing that land is private
property and I think all space is public space.
And usually there's some kind of slippage between what was intended and what really
happened, and often that slippage becomes the impetus for the generation of a new set
of ideals about how parks should be organized.
Places that are considered public and open to the public are in fact exclusionary.
So the question is how have our definitions of who ought to be excluded from public space
really changed?
A public often historically had been defined, for example, as white property owning men.
Now that's changed drastically as struggles for inclusion by women, by people of color,
by immigrants have transformed who we take to be part of the public.
And so with those struggles, there's been an opening up, I think, of public space and
a diversification of who's in public, who's counted as part of the public, which in turn
has transformed what public space is.
One of the things that we forget is places that we take for granted as kind of, you know,
originary public spaces like Hyde Park.
People demanded their right to be in that space, and in fact in that case it was when
working men who were fighting for an expansion of the franchise to non-property owning men
were not allowed to meet in any of the halls, and so they pushed down the fences around
the royal park and opened it up for public debate where the famous Speaker's Corner
is now.
And those kind of responses and that kind of dialectic is, I think, what constructs
public space as it actually is.
We still have the ideal of public space that was created in ancient Athens and then ancient
Rome.
We think of public space as the physical area of the public sphere.
That is a place where people reasonably meet and mingle and talk about life politics and
the future of society.
So there is always the shadow of the political world behind the idea of public space.
Park design has changed over the years since the 1860s when the very idea of public park
was born in the United States.
The first ideas of public park were to create spaces of nature.
But those came in after things like courthouse squares, right, or the old town commons where
on particular occasions when there was a protest that had to be made where people got together,
right, and met.
Park design was intended to affect the behavior and to create appropriateness.
Central Park itself was constructed to provide a place where working people could learn to
be proper Americans, learn to be proper citizens, learn proper modes of behavior.
That's a lot of the big parks of the late 19th century and the United States did.
And there's that sense that they were often gifts of the elite.
Central Park would be an example of what I call the pleasure ground in the early days
when you didn't want men spending their wages on alcohol.
The powers that be, why don't you create an environment that would be appealing for a
man to take his family with him to stroll in public.
If he sees himself as head of his family, he'd be less likely to spend their food money
in a local tavern.
Union Square at first was pretty much a few patches of green space in the intersection
of three really big streets.
During the time that Robert Moses was in control of public park construction in New York City
in the 1930s, the design for Union Square was changed to make more of a secluded space
of nature in the middle of the city.
Around Union Square, you still had the three busy streets, but the park itself was enclosed
by high stone walls and trees.
W. H. White, who was a journalist, but became a kind of public anthropologist, read the
work of Jane Jacobs, especially where Jacobs talks about eyes on the street.
Here's a place that is dangerous.
Bryant Park in the middle of New York, it's green and spacious and the cops patrol it
in pairs as well as they should.
No undesirable muggers and dope dealers have made it their territory.
They've been able to because it is cut off from the street by fences and walls.
Very pleasant these tree-shaded paths, but you can get a feeling of entrapment in them.
Even a shuffling derelict poses a threat that he wouldn't elsewhere.
To make a place like this work, you must unfence it.
So when his ideas were adopted by the New York City Parks Department, they raised the money
partly through the private organizations, the bids that managed Bryant Park and Union
Square.
And they used this money to tear down the stone walls and tear down the trees that had
blocked the view of the park from the outside.
The term social control didn't, when it was invented, didn't mean what it means to us
today as a sort of negative, you know, big brother manipulating thing.
It was actually meant as groups collectively controlling themselves, deciding what was
appropriate.
They didn't want people being drunk or they didn't want accidents in the streets killing
little kids, so they, you know, made the playground movement.
To some degree, we all determined the kind of behavior that will be permitted in public
space because we all put our eyes on the space.
And by our own surveillance, we censure or we accept different kinds of deviant behavior,
different from ours.
The number one activity is people looking at other people, but it is a point that is
overlooked in many, many designs.
Here are the girl watchers.
They're a bit disdainful, sort of looking down their nose as though the girls weren't
quite worthy of their talents, but it's all machismo.
We have never, ever seen a girl watcher make a pass at a girl.
People don't feel free in public space if they think they're going to be mugged.
They also don't feel free, or many people don't feel free, if they think somebody sitting
next to them is going to bother them in some way.
The notion that eyes on the street will make undesirables go away, at one level, is right.
But it is, of course, also problematic because who defines what constitutes undesirable?
What more right do I have to be in that place than a bunch of teens of color, right?
Or a homeless person who's just tired of shit and wants to sit down.
Or a few of them who want to just sit there and talk with each other, with all their stuff
because they have nowhere else to put it.
And how are those decisions made?
Often it's the police.
It's the city government agencies like the Parks Department, but increasingly the private
business associations, in the form of business improvement districts, who control public
spaces, hire their own private security guards, who are free to police the public spaces.
For guarding plazas, television cameras are often favored.
Their usefulness seems to be largely symbolic when they reassure management.
They don't see very much.
Nothing beats a human being.
Life and successful places usually have a kind of mayor.
Here's one of the best, Joe Hardy of Exxon.
He's good at spotting potential trouble, but what he likes best is helping people.
Two girls, for example, who would like to have their picture taken.
And that's one reason why there isn't much trouble.
Since the late 1970s, public space, especially public parks and commercial streets, have been
increasingly managed by private business associations, which represent the interests of commercial
property owners, building owners, and also represent the interests of powerful institutions
in the neighborhood.
For profit, interests organized in the form of a non-profit association.
Because public parks are managed by similar organizations called conservancies.
It's a little bit complicated, but it's basically a private group managing a public space.
Bids or business-improving districts, as they call, claim that they're coming in and making
the area better.
What we say is that they're targeting a specific group of people to push them out.
They want to paint a picture of what that area should look like.
So you start to see ventures that don't allow a person to lay down.
And it's obvious who they're targeting in these areas, people who don't have any other
place to live, and they're redesigning our cities, and I think that's troublesome.
And if we were to design all our spaces so there are no room for these undesirables, right,
where would they go?
If we wanted to be creative, we could design efficient ways to help people live outdoors.
Or we could provide them with housing.
Or we could do nothing.
It's just a really poor policy.
There are rules about not picking through the trash baskets, which hamper the earning
activities of homeless people.
There are rules about not setting foot on the grass at certain points.
There are rules about using the space during certain times.
Now on the one hand, all of these rules may make a space safer.
On the other hand, they are rules that are decided on by a private association and imposed.
One, two, three, four.
The High Line is an interesting example of private management of public space.
It has got a huge amount of favorable publicity.
And indeed, the two men who created the organization, the Friends of the High Line, have received
the 2010 Jane Jacobs Award from the Municipal Arts Society for contributing greatly to the
way we see New York City.
The High Line is kind of a blur between the open space ideology where we like the city
and we like looking at it, hence getting a new perspective on it by being raised up and
walking through the buildings.
And in fact, there's that one place where you can sit and watch the avenue traffic as
a film.
There's a sustainable component in that the decision was made to keep the embodied energy
in the elevated track rather than tearing it down.
It's turning the volunteerism of the weeds and the plants of there into an aesthetic ideal.
The High Line is one of the great stories that has inspired many people to fall in love
with New York again and to see the potential of great public spaces to come out of anywhere.
That said, there's a little bit of too much attention right now to the very expensive
parks in the city.
And we think you can have a big impact on public spaces spending a lot less money.
And these parks are not only getting a lot of money for capital improvements, but getting
a lot of money for security and maintenance.
The buildings that are being built around the High Line are very expensive.
And it's an interesting question whether the High Line would have been developed so fast
and so far if it were located in a low-income neighborhood, let's say, of the Bronx or Brooklyn.
Well, in a way, it's a commentary on the fact that municipal tax budgets don't pay for parks
anymore.
And so users are taking over people who have businesses or live near them.
The only problem with that is it means only where there are resources will you ever get
interesting parks.
And the whole advantage of using tax money is that you can even out amenities in all
neighborhoods, rich or poor.
It is absolutely a political reality that cities do not have the money to maintain parks,
to build new parks.
But more than an economic reality, it's a political reality that is wrapped up in a
long-term assault on the public and anything that is public.
We call it by the shorthand of neoliberalism.
So the argument doesn't go far enough.
It needs to start interrogating precisely why it is that a state can give great big tax
breaks for a corporation to locate in a particular place, but cannot pay for decent trash cans
in a park.
During the course of the 20th century and in the first few years of the 21st century,
men and women have increasingly been shaped by their roles as consumers.
We're so trained to consume our environment.
Right now we're trained through the commercialization of it all, through shopping malls.
We are very sensitive to the kinds of spaces that appeal to our sensibilities as consumers
and appeal to us as attractive spaces where we won't be bothered, where we will enjoy
a few moments of leisure and where we will be able to buy a cup of coffee or a sandwich
and graze for a while with other people like ourselves, kind of like a shopping mall with
grass in the middle of the city.
I called this once domestication by cappuccino because it's a kind of pleasant vision of
urban civilization, really shaped by consumer culture.
A lot of Americans think of the space around shopping malls as public space, but in fact
that space is privately owned and privately managed, and the courts have always upheld
private property owners' rights over that space.
That often results in banning political activities, demonstrations, or even just wearing a t-shirt
with a slogan.
Two dozen pro-pot protesters marched into the Aurora Mall today.
They were responding to a man stopped in the mall because he wore a Yes We Cannabis t-shirt.
Yes We Cannabis on a poster.
No response by the Aurora Mall.
But the same pro marijuana statement on a t-shirt last weekend.
He tried to say it was offensive.
Conduct rules at the mall warn customers about non-offense of attire or wearing clothing
that might lead to violence or conflict.
The same thing is also true on streets.
Streets that are governed by business improvement districts.
It means that private agencies can engage in policing of streets precisely because the
same kinds of constitutional limits on the ways that public police can interact with
people using the sidewalks do not hold for the private police.
A private police person can come up and ask someone what they're doing there.
A public police officer is not supposed to be able to, unless there's some reasonable
suspicion.
Is that sense that we're invited into a space now, rather than we can be there as a right?
The premier example now is Millennium Park in Chicago, where there is not a square inch
that is not sponsored by some corporation or foundation.
You can't sit on a bench without knowing that it's the Chase bench of whatever, whichever
person it is.
It's the Pritzker Pavilion.
It's all of these kinds of things.
It's less a public space and certainly less a publicly supported space than it is a private
space that has been opened up for the public to use and a privately supported space.
Community gardens represent a middle ground between purely public and purely private.
They are managed by the groups that put their work into the garden.
The park system is run by the Parks Commissioner and paid employees.
The community gardens are managed by volunteers and maintained by volunteers.
Community gardens happened with a large amount of immigration.
From 1880 to the 19-teens, where a lot of the social service groups, the settlement houses
at the time, created programs to help immigrants.
One of the things they would do is take some open space and allow the immigrants to create
little mini farms there and grow their own vegetables.
Then when the First World War happened, they became victory gardens so that we can send
food over to our boys overseas and also have food to eat here.
Then probably the latest, the modern wave, if you will, of community gardens began in
the late sixties when there was mass exodus from the cities, mostly of white folks that
were fleeing the center cities and abandoning huge swaths of land.
What happened then were the people that stuck around said, we're not going anywhere, this
land is just sitting there doing nothing or being an eyesore, we're going to clean it
up and make something out of it.
If you look at a map of New York City that shows where all the community gardens are
and overlay that with where all the low-income neighborhoods are, it will almost be an exact
match.
So the community gardens have actually become an alternative park system.
Giuliani, during the late 1990s, decided that the city government could no longer afford
to keep all of the city-owned property in its portfolio and it would be beneficial to
hold auctions to sell the property to real estate developers.
There were many protests where Latinos, working class, middle class, students, environmentalists,
activists joined together to protest the city government's efforts to sell their gardens.
They became spaces of organization, community organizing, but also city-wide organizing.
The conflicts resulted in the demolition of some of the most beloved gardens, but not
all.
Under Mayor Bloomberg's compromise, many more community gardens would be saved.
Some would be bought and managed by nonprofit organizations and foundations, but a few of
them would be sold to developers to build housing.
I think that it's the closest thing that we have so far to a community ownership of public
land.
Anti-war demonstrators protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies,
and demonstrations.
Central Park is the starting point for the parade to the U.N. building.
The estimated 125,000 Manhattan marches include students, housewives, beatnik poets, doctors,
businessmen, teachers, priests, and nuns make up in costumes where bizarre.
The Supreme Court at one point declared that engaging in public questions, so engaging
in protest, engaging in debate was a primary use and had been from time immemorial for the
streets of the city.
They backpedaled very, very quickly after that and started finding that primary purpose
of streets was to move goods and to move people from one place to another.
So transportation and commerce becomes far more important and our rights are trumped
by the rights of commerce.
Ideally, if we go back to the image we have of the Agora in ancient Athens or the Forum
in ancient Rome, we should all be citizens and creators in the largest sense in public
space, but I'm not sure we really know how to be creators in public space.
So those are the trends.
What has to happen, I think, is a reversal of those trends, a fight to open up spaces
and a fight to deregulate them in some ways, to make them less controlled, and a fight
to return them back to public ownership, public control, and really democratic ownership
and democratic control.
I would like to see public space change and I guess in a way that it's truly public.
Public space should be a place for the city's mental and physical health.
Public space should be a place that we can go to, we can hang out in, we can relax, we
can play.
Public spaces really build and reflect the identity of a neighbor.
Maybe we'll get some of that real active involvement.
Folks should have access to green spaces.
We can lie on the lawn and do nothing.
Do stuff.
They get to do the planting and the harvesting and deciding when to replant.
Markets, they need public buildings.
Clean facilities for everybody.
But I'd also like to make sure that they actually work for human interaction.
Public space must be a place to live.
There have to be broad spaces where people gather together to say something is not right.
They have to be places where you can push for your political right.
And just speak their minds.
And so that's really at the heart of why public spaces are so contentious, precisely because
they have to be so many different kinds of things.
Public space has to provide for all of the needs of the population.
And this is a major responsibility.
Yeah, that's enough.
There might be more.
Thanks for watching.
