By Allison Arieff
(SOM Thinkers Series, Metropolis Books, 2017)
There’s a wonderful observation in the 1999 obituary of William Whyte, editor, urbanologist, observer. He was, writes Michael T. Kaufman, “in favor of razzmatazz, good honky-tonk, and anything that invested sidewalks with hustle and bustle.”1 This criteria! Public spaces, it suggests, are above all to be places of spontaneity and joy.
In 1980, when Whyte published his seminal work, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, we weren’t yet tasked with conceiving of how the virtual public square might manifest (as Jared Lanier discusses here), let alone imagining the future of public space on Mars. Public spaces were often created by fiat—not through the arduous process of community engagement. The more we learn in fact, about how public space was created in the past the more we find ourselves in the middle of vexing dilemmas: What does public space look like for everyone? What policies, practices, and physical artifacts exclude the public? Which ones are inclusive (and how can we have more of them)? Public space has become even more valued but also, far more complicated to create. The reasons for this are myriad and complex and form the raison d’etre for this volume.
Spontaneity and joy are hard to achieve at the end of a grueling multi-year process of community engagement, environmental review, and fundraising. Our current moment reveals the extent to which we need to examine process as much as finished product. It also reveals that designing a space to attract people is an act in need of constant reinvention.
Though perhaps what needs reinvention is the impulse to constantly reinvent. Take one of my favorite public spaces, Alemany Farmer’s Market in San Francisco. It is one of the very few places in this increasingly stratified city that attracts a truly diverse population. Founded in 1943 by a group of victory gardeners (the market moved to this location in 1947), it is the oldest farmer’s market in the city. It is also the only one run by the city’s government and perhaps because of that it’s also the least precious. At a time where most local businesses are closing assuming new identities to serve San Francisco’s increasingly young and affluent populace, Alemany shows no interest in changing the way it’s been doing things since its first day of business.
Held in a massive—and largely unused—parking lot, Alemany, it must be said, is not much to look at. The vendor booths are concrete. Signage is cheerful but limited to faded murals of fruits and vegetables; public programming, such as it is, is a balloon lady and a guy playing the steel drums. Little thought was ever given to the flow of traffic or the path of pedestrians. Cars vying for parking idle right next to food trucks.
I’m always struck by how radically undesigned this place is. If there were meetings to figure out how to attract more people, those meetings had no outcomes other than to leave things as they were. Alemany feels very do-it-yourself, much like a project built from the ground up. Its plainness is what attracts—there’s just enough to make it work. Were the city to undertake significant upgrades, it seems likely the market would lose much of its appeal.
Alemany embodies what Chris de Wolf celebrates in his discussion herein of beloved Hong Kong markets in “Sensory Navigation in Hong Kong”—“the palimpsest of human activity.” But Hong Kong, he cautions, “is a place particularly vulnerable to late-capitalist development that privileges visual order and threatens sensory heritage,” where … new development seems to have no tolerance for the mismatch of uses that has always characterized Hong Kong.” That mismatch of uses, that human activity, is so often what draws us in to many beloved public spaces—until it doesn’t.
About a mile north of Alemany in San Francisco’s Mission District is the 16th and Mission BART station plaza. Much of the human activity here is of the sort Jane Jacobs would have celebrated as “an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.” Thousands use this BART station daily. There is a smattering of retail: a Walgreen’s, a Burger King, a bank, some offices, a Chinese restaurant. Flowers, toys, and cellphones are sold off of fold-up tables; popsicles, cut fruit, and tamales are often sold off of wheeled carts. It’s not unusual to see musicians performing on the corner. Pigeons perched on power lines survey the scene.
But there is also a lot of drug activity here, too. And trash on the ground. It’s not uncommon to see knife fights, or discarded needles. There’s a large homeless population, and not unrelated, one of the city’s several attendant-monitored public bathrooms. Signs are posted that ask passersby not to use the wall as a restroom. Several social services and affordable housing opportunities for the poor and working class are located in the surrounding area, including forty-three SROs (single residence hotels).
Some community organizers refer to this space an “open air living room”; others describe it as a place of danger and blight. Both views are correct, but can they co-exist? So far they do, albeit tenuously. In 2016, the San Francisco Planning Department met over the course of nine months with community groups and activists in the neighborhood to develop a community design plan for the 16th and Mission station area. The planners were wholly unprepared for the outcome: the neighborhood refused all suggestions. No clean up, no trees, nothing. Why?
This once largely Latino neighborhood has become a flash point of issues around gentrification, displacement, and anti-tech sentiment. So controversy was not entirely unexpected when a developer called (I kid not), Maximus, proposed a ten-story, 380-unit, mixed-use, transit-oriented development for the site, with twenty-four percent of units set aside for affordable housing. Neighborhood activists have been fighting ever since to stop the project, claiming it would cast shadows on the nearby elementary school and exacerbate gentrification. Referring to the project as the “Monster in the Mission,” they have demanded that Maximus deliver a building made up entirely of affordable housing units—or nothing. Keeping the area as is—no new benches, no plantings, no cleaning—the thinking goes, will prevent further displacement.
It once seemed obvious, easy even: add public space, improve quality of life. But it’s not so simple any more. Public space has busted out of its narrow definition and has increasingly become something that needs to be controlled, policed, privatized, prevented even. It exists in the cloud and on social media, manifesting into what Jared Lanier, in his essay, “Why is the City Square Square?” calls “antigoras”—“the places where commoners gather online, acting as if they were first class citizens, still effectively innocent of the fact that they are under intense surveillance and subject to stealthy behavior modification by algorithms.”
In 2011, the Arab Spring came to be known as the Twitter uprising, but as it played out on the streets, the limitations and dangers of the virtual public square came to light. As Lanier explains, “those who stroll through the antigora submit to surveillance, scrutiny, and manipulation; more lab rats than freedom fighters.” Twitter and Facebook became tools for organizing, but then became a means to root out oppositional voices. Lanier struggles with this contradiction, tries to figure out what a two-way internet might look like, how we might have a center, a city square, rather than the digital equivalent of sprawl. Still in the early stages though (remember, the iPhone just turned ten!), says Lanier, “we have yet to settle on a comfortable shape.”
Rachel Monroe picks up on this specter of big data in “Eyes in the Sky: Being Watched in the Rural West,” where she makes the surprising assertion that we can best discover the future of surveillance in the rural Southwest. No hick towns here, observes Monroe, writing from West Texas: rural border surveillance takes advantage of other cutting technologies—as well as crowd-sourcing and gamification—and follows an established path, “from the battlefield to the border to the city.” Our cherished notions of the limitlessness of the West and the freedom it offers are a touch out of date, she writes. “In today’s technological landscape these spaces provide the best sightlines: when there are so few people around, it’s easier to zoom in.”
Monroe brings up another disconnect: the point that nearly all of our debates about the use of public space presume an urban context and center on a city’s plazas and parks. This is an area ripe for further exploration. Examinations into non-urban public spaces—suburban playgrounds, hiking trails, and the like—might begin to reveal their own tensions and conflicts.
One of those examinations lies here with Michelle Nijhuis’ exploration of how climate change is having an impact on our national parks, describing how the park service must now manage for “continuous change that is not fully understood.” How do we plan for that exactly? By experimenting for starters, but also by being open to change. Nijhuis quotes Liz Davis, the chief of education for Assateague Island National Seashore, a national park site that is gradually shuffling west: “People ask, ‘Will I still be able to enjoy it? Will my kids and grandkids be able to enjoy it?’ The answer is yes, they will. They might not enjoy it in the same way, and they might not get here the same way. But they still will be able to enjoy it.”
They may have to pay more for it though. In 2017, the proposed National Park Service budget was slashed by almost $400 million. To address that shortfall, the current administration has said it will turn to privatizing public park services—a move that would surely increase costs for visitors and put the egalitarian nature of visiting a park out of reach for some.
To zoom out further, consider outer space. In “Public Space In Outer Space,” Sarah Fecht careens past current preoccupations to how humans might survive space journeys, fast-forwarding to a time when we will need to figure out how to inhabit this new terrain. Public spaces, Fecht argues, may be even more important in space than here on earth, essential to sanity and well-being thanks to “the hostile outdoor environment, cramped quarters, and the fact that everyone’s life depends on everyone else.” But who owns space? Really all of outer space is a public space, because according to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, it belongs to all of humankind. But as tech giants hurdle over one another to colonize the territory first, will the tenets of that treaty hold? Will the final frontier belong to the people or the conglomerate with the best rockets?
Back on earth, privatization has emerged as one of the more vexing issues around public space. Generations of urban theorists have argued that how cities are made (and remade) is in the public rather than private sphere. When private interests manage or control those spaces, the freedom to do so is restrained. Some uses, populations and behaviors are sanctioned, others curtailed. We’ve seen an increase in the use of so-called defensive architecture: elements in public spaces, like spikes, speakers playing loud music or even jets of water, deployed to deter people from lingering, sleeping or sitting. How far will entities go to mandate how our spaces are used? To read China Mieville’s fictional tale “Final Report” is to see just how far.
Public space is changing. From gentrification to grassroots activism, surveillance to privatization, we’re only just beginning to grasp its increasing complexity. We now have an increasing awareness of the unintended consequences of once seemingly benign bike lanes, parklets, and plazas, and increasing resistance to many of the interventions that have become go-to tools in the urbanist toolkit. That has been a jarring experience for many, myself included. But I think it proves instructive. Hopefully this will encourage us to explore the issues of inequality, inequity, and environmental injustice that are emerging as a major part of the discourse around landscape architecture and city planning.
The “just enough green” model is attempting to address just this. It’s a model that has emerged in response to a frustrating paradox: low-income communities tend to suffer from various kinds of environmental injustice, from poor air quality to lack of urban green spaces. The irony is that when communities are improved, they become more attractive to more people. A brownfield site is cleaned, transit accessibility is improved, a new park opens – suddenly the “bad” neighborhood is ripe for gentrification.
The challenge may be in determining how much improvement is “just enough.”
Jennifer Wolch, Dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, suggests that planners intervene not on a grand scale but a lot of modest ones, focusing on things like small parks and community gardens that may not serve the broadest public but do serve the intended one. Too often cities aim to create high profile projects that don’t necessarily solve the problems of the community but instead attract media attention and real estate speculation. (textbook case: the super high-end Hudson Yards neighborhood that emerged from The Highline). It’s not that a bigger project doesn’t ever make sense but if that is the chosen direction, it should at least incorporate local input and protect local culture. Further, whether big or small, these efforts need to deploy tools and strategies designed to mitigate the effects of gentrification and displacement such as the construction of more affordable housing, the preservation of existing housing stock, and the development of more creative financing strategies (like those that help provide first-time buyers with their down payment)—tools that perhaps might have helped temper the response to change at 16th and Mission.
Achieving “just enough green” can prove elusive, but there have been a handful of successes. The Newton Creek Nature Walk is often cited: due to the efforts of life-long residents and newcomers who came together to form the Newton Creek Alliance, a polluted waterway and a sewage treatment plant were transformed into a cleaner, greener neighborhood. But other examples are rare with often even the most well-intended efforts greeted with antagonism and mistrust, responses not wholly uncalled for given generations of bad behavior. Ultimately “just enough” green requires that the very definition of what is green changes, too.
Another strategy for creating the “right” public space is to not erase all that preceded it. Such was the case with the former Tempelhof airport in Berlin, which re-opened as a public park in 2008. The original plan for the park included nearly 5,000 new residences with high-end retail, designed by a group of internationally renowned architects. Berliners, fearing the socio-economic changes that often accompany such development projects, however, rejected this plan in a 2014 referendum and for now, it remains pretty undesigned—and extremely well-used.
So how do we think about creating public spaces that advance public health, equity, and social justice and are also places people want to spend time? If we tick every box do we create something so over-programmed that no one wants to go there? How do we avoid “the big sort” of the public realm, where, just as people are increasingly self-selecting neighborhoods to surround themselves with people most like them, people similarly choose public spaces using that same criteria?
This squares with Ben Davis’ observations in “The Future of Public Art in Five Phases.” Aesthetics, he writes, “have been drafted into service to respond to various economic-political conflicts, yet also continuously found themselves at the mercy of economic political shifts they cannot themselves control.” Davis is writing about art but could just as well be describing the betterment efforts at 16th and Mission. How this all plays out is anyone’s guess. Public art (and I’d argue, public space), at one extreme, he predicts, will “likely be a symbol of the city as luxury commodity. At the other, it will be testimony to inadequate and under-resourced government policy. Or society itself will become more equal ….”
In his series of images on public art showcased here, Lawrence Weiner reveals this, written on a manhole cover: “In direct line with another and the next,” in reference to the grid pattern of New York City’s streets. Instead of a precious sculpture set on a pedestal, Weiner’s work is walked on by tourists and residents of the city, all of whom have equal access to it. The work refers as well to the odd democracy of New York City. Though it’s a city of vast extremes, the rich and poor, powerful and disenfranchised still all wait for the same “Don’t Walk” signs to change when crossing the street. Standing in line, riding the subway, walking down the street, New Yorkers are always “in direct line with another and the next.”
Our civic spaces and their accompanying regulations, are a reflection of what—and who—we value. So let’s take our cue from the optimism of Davis and Weiner, in imaging their democratizing potential. That the essays in this volume take us everywhere from West Texas to Mars, reveals the infinite variety—and possibility—of this space. There is not, nor will there ever will be, a formula for creating successful public spaces. The task of doing so is perhaps not so easy as Whyte once imagined, but if we add equality, equity, and environmental health to the equation of spontaneity and joy, we may be one step closer.