Public art as an urban practice

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Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, UCL

PUBLIC ART AS AN URBAN PRACTICE

JOHN BINGHAM-HALL

A dissertation submitted in part fulfilment of the degree of

Master of Science (Advanced Architectural Studies)

September 2011

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I, John Bingham-Hall, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where

information has been derived from other sources, this is acknowledged within the

thesis.

Signed:

John Bingham-Hall

Date:

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Abstract

Public art has become familiar to urban planning and is central to many local council

policies regarding public space. However, the majority of discourse has come from art

theory and as a result the art object has been considered as implicative socially,

aesthetically and morally but rarely morphologically. Where calls have been made for

an approach to public art that does take spatial issues into account, these have stoppedshort of providing a methodology. This study, therefore, aims to respond to these calls

by developing a set of measurements that can be applied to public space and provide

an understanding of public art as a solid object in the urban fabric.

This is commenced by piecing together a history of public art that reveals categories in

the way in has been used in cities at different periods in time and comparing these to a

case study of one London boroughs collection of public art. Critical interpretations of

the various categories of public art are covered to provide a background to the

argument for developing an urban approach. The basis for the present work, though, is

derived from quite recent theory in urban morphology that describes empirically how

traditional monuments and ceremonial spaces are formed in the urban fabric.Following these methods, the public artworks under investigation are assessed in

terms of their distribution across the borough, their accessibility at a local scale and

their visibility from urban space. These measurements are used to try to establish

categories amongst the sample that are based on spatial rather than historical or

stylistic similarities.

Following a survey of the full case study based mostly on data, a smaller sample is

taken for a focus study to reveal through close observation how these spatial

categories are embodied in art objects and how artists have responded to the

potential patterns of visibility and accessibility revealed by space syntax measurements.

The area covered by the focus study is explored in more depth than is possible in thesurvey and discussion of the commissioning that brought its works into being married

with spatial analyses to explore how the two are interrelated.

It is concluded that spatial measures provide a tool for both assessing the implications

of a location choice for a public artwork and for understanding how public art practice

is impacted upon by specific patterns of urban morphology.

Keywords

Public art, public space, London, monuments, urban morphology

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express the utmost gratitude to my supervisor Dr Sam Griffiths for his

willingness to engage with a topic that at times seemed hard to pin down. His

profound insights on the subject propelled forward my own understanding and kept

my curiosity fuelled throughout. I am also indebted to Kinda al Sayed who went

beyond the call of duty to assist me technically and make this study possible from the

earliest stages. Further thanks to Ashley Dhanani for introducing me to the software

that saved it all and to Wafa Al-Ghatam for showing genuine enthusiasm when it was

needed most.

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Contents

1. Introduction and background

1.1.Introduction: public art as an urban practice 81.2.Historical and theoretical precedents 91.3.Aims for an urban understanding of public art 19

2. Methodology

2.1.The methodological problem 212.2.Data 212.3.Software 222.4.Space syntax analysis & its application in the study 222.5.A methodology for investigating public art as an urban practice 28

3. Survey: spatial descriptions of public art

3.1.Introducing the case study 313.2.Distribution of the sample 333.3.Accessibility 363.4.Visibility 41

4. Focus study: reinstating the art object

4.1.Introduction 474.2.Planning & art in Lewisham town centre 484.3.Observation data and images 514.4.Analysis; the public art object in a spatial context 64

5. Discussion

5.1.Ideologies of urban morphology 685.2.Public art and its response to spatial ideology 69

6. Conclusions

6.1. Public art as an urban practice 716.2. Public art as an interdisciplinary practice 71

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Bibliography

Bibliography 73

Non-bibliographic references 75

Appendices

1. Lewisham Borough Council's public art map 762. Background data for the full sample 783. Plates of images for the full sample 864. Survey data for the full sample

i. Table of data 136ii. Segment maps 140iii. Comparative scatter graphs 147

5. Software 166

List of figures

Figure 1: Victor Pasmores Apollo Pavilion at Peterlee, Co. Durham (Source:

www.commons.wikimedia.org) ___________________________________________________ 11Figure 2: Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in Federal Plaza, New York City (Source:

www.commons.wikimedia.org) ___________________________________________________ 14

Figure 3: Monuments aligned at Waterloo Place, London (Source: www.commons.wikimedia.org) ___ 19

Figure 4: Example of convex spaces at road junction convergence and in linear space, Brockley

(MasterMap/QGIS) ____________________________________________________________ 24

Figure 5: Example axial mapping (in red) of Ladywell Fields and environs, with (left) and without (right)

parks (MasterMap/QGIS) ________________________________________________________ 25

Figure 6: Example map of visual barriers (in black) with resulting isovists (in pink), Deptford Town

Centre (QGIS) _______________________________________________________________ 26

Figure 7: Isovist from C, Crofton Park Library, with intersecting axials in red (QGIS/MasterMap) ___ 30

Figure 8: Convex spaces & intersecting axials (in red), Deptford (QGIS/MasterMap) _____________ 30

Figure 9: Convex spaces with intersecting segments (in red), Deptford (QGIS/MasterMap ________ 30

Figure 10: Borough topographical map with main centres labelled (QGIS/MasterMap) ____________ 31

Figure 11: Borough topographical map with artworks labelled, demonstrating clustering in six town

centres (QGIS/MasterMap) ______________________________________________________ 33

Figure 12: Segment map showing choice at radius n with main centre labelled (Depthmap/QGIS) ___ 34

Figure 13: Segment map showing choice at radius n with main centres and parks (in italics) labelled

(Depthmap/QGIS) ____________________________________________________________ 35

Figure 14: Scatter plot comparing convex size with convex integration at radius 400m. Data split into

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quadrants and partial trend line shown ______________________________________________ 37

Figure 15: Scatter plot comparing convex size to convex integration at radius n with data split into

quadrants ___________________________________________________________________ 38

Figure 16: Chariot [43] and Blue Green [42] located centrally in a convex space (MasterMap/QGIS) _ 39

Figure 17: Remains of industry at Deptford Creek (Photo credit: author) _____________________ 40

Figure 18: Isovist size compared to isovist axiality. Groupings demonstrating artworks with similar

isovist properties _____________________________________________________________ 42

Figure 19: Isovist from Newsfeeds [39] extending 400m along linear space (QGIS/MasterMap) _____ 43

Figure 20: Poem [30], a using linear space to convey narrative (Photo credit: author) ____________ 43

Figure 21: Bins [15] set back into an enclave from the street (Photo credit: author) _____________ 44

Figure 22: 'Consensus landmark' locations: isovists with distinctive shapes, high axiality and integrated

lines of access (QGIS/Depthmap) __________________________________________________ 45

Figure 23: 'Routemarkers': artwork isovists with uneven shape, low axiality and segregated lines of

access (QGIS/Depthmap) _______________________________________________________ 46

Figure 24: Lewisham's morphology during the 1930s (EDINA Digimap Historical Maps Collection) __ 48

Figure 25: Figure-ground relationships in the post-war (west) & pre-war sections of Lewisham Centre

(QGIS/MasterMap) ____________________________________________________________ 49

Figure 26: Convex spaces of Column [19] & Ridgeway [23] are separated from building entrances __ 50

Figure 27: Traditional monument on Lewisham High Street. A flat edge faces is face-on to the street axis

to create a fixed view (Photo Credit: author) _________________________________________ 64

List of tables

Table 1: Five largest convex spaces with corresponding integration measures. Circle is twice as large as

the next largest and masks comparison between other data ______________________________ 36

Table 2: Ten largest isovists and corresponding axiality and longest views ____________________ 41

Table 3: Comparative data for the focus sample _______________________________________ 51

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1. Introduction and background

1.1. Introduction: public art as an urban practice

"Public art needs to be seen as a function not of art, but of urbanism. It needs to be thought

of in relation to, rather than insulated from the numerous other functions, activities and

imperatives that condition the fabric of city life"

(Gibson 1988, 32)

Despite the call made over twenty years ago by Eric Gibson, the interaction between

public art and public space has seen very little attention from within architectural

theory. We have arrived at a position in the practices of planning and regeneration in

which the commissioning of works of modern art for the public urban exterior has

largely become assumed as a necessity. However the critical discourse has been mainly

prepossessed with the concerns of art theory; modes of production, modes of

reception, aesthetics of gender and race, responsiveness to context and so on. Thus

official policy seems to have become hyper-aware of the sensitivities and potential of

public art practices, and very vocal regarding their social and moral obligations, but

largely ignorant of the complexities of location. What seems clear is that art can neverappear accidentally or as a result of an organic, unplanned process of city building. The

active decision to locate it in public space must always be purposeful and surely

embody some kind of ideology about what that artwork can do for public space. This

study, though, aims to address not what public art does, but how it does it. It will

investigate the morphologies of public spaces in which artworks are located to attempt

to show how our experience of public art and whatever ideology it represents might

be shaped by those spaces.

Public art will be studied as an urban practice. This is not to say that the content or

function of any individual artwork is any less important due to its urban location, but

that in this study the social function of urban morphology will provide a way to

understand art objects and their location. The city cannot act as a replacement for the

gallery as displaying art is not its primary function. If therefore we are to continue to

use the city for art we must surely learn to use art in an urban way. To understand

public art as an urban practice suggests that it should be understood in its nature as a

concrete object in the functional network that is the physical city as much as it is in its

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nature as an expression of the social forces at work in that city. Hopefully this study

will contribute to this without presenting yet another ideology for how art can save

public space. Rather, the aim is to demonstrate that space itself is structured by society

so that society can function, to offer rigorous ways to understand better the social

functioning of the spaces displaying art and to discern whether artworks are in line or

at odds with that function.

In order to do this a case study will be taken of the public art collection of the London

Borough of Lewisham. This includes murals, reliefs, freestanding sculpture, buildings

and designed street furnishings accompanied by a public arts strategy which outlines

the council's understanding of the role of public art. Firstly though we look back at

how public art became standard practice and what historical forces have shaped itsassumptions.

1.2. Historical and theoretical precedents

The establishment of public art as a practice

There are various histories telling how public art arrived at the form we recognisetoday and conflicting views on its lineage with earlier forms of public sculpture. John

Willett conducted the first historical survey on this subject in Liverpool in 1965

(Willett 1967). Willett traced a history of Liverpool's art from the nineteenth century

when the citys new industrial elite as saw the arts as an 'advancement of their society's

aims' (1967, 23). Art began to be disseminated to a wide public through the

establishment of municipal galleries, art schools and the filling of public space with

sculptures of political and colonial figures. These presented a dominant version of

historical progress that aimed to teach rather than encourage self-expression; there

was a fear that otherwise the working classes would be 'so much enlightened that they

will be treading on the heels of their superiors' (1967, 30). So the public realm was

used to display symbols of modern political power and to demonstrate the cultural

strength of the industrial city.

Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Robinson championed an attitude

toward public sculpture which he called civic art (Robinson 1904, 6) and can be

understood as a direct descendent of this project of social advancement. Where

Victorian monuments were historical symbols made possible by the wealth created by

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the industrial revolution, the motivation behind civic art was to demonstrate the

rationalisation of the city itself through technology and planning. This included the

freeing of the city centre from the industries of the Victorian era, leaving the possibility

for open space, 'trees and turf' and a project of beautification evident in some

artworks in this study. Robinson believed civic art and a unified urban aesthetic to be

the 'visible crown' (1904, 17) of a virile modern city and the ultimate aim of a process

of urban evolution. 'Doing things in the right way, which is ever the beautiful way'

(1904, 28) was his central aim for his civic art, which did not need to represent

anything other than the very ability of a society to invest in the city beautiful. With the

simultaneous move towards pure abstraction in fine art, we can see how dominance of

the historical or political monument began to be subside and space be made for a

public expression of the increasingly autonomous and non-representative practice ofart. So before the world wars public sculpture moved from an educative role,

monumentalising and communicating publicly the dominant narratives of politics and

history, to being an expression of the glory of the contemporary city, but either way

was a sanctioned way to represent society's highest achievements.

However, according to Willet these views were 'no longer fashionable' (Willett 1967,

23) by the 1960s. Looking at the contemporary situation he deemed the words 'public'

and 'art' as 'chalk and cheese' (1967, 1) in that the private vision of an artist-genius ofthe model of the late-Modernist mainstream was incommensurable with the wider

social mentality at the time. He called for a new era of public commissioning which

used art to humanise, strengthen place identity, and encourage self-expression in the

populace. Whilst these ideologies are now well rehearsed they launched a new project

for art at the time, such that in his key text on the subject Malcolm Miles could state

that 1967, when Willett's book was published, was 'the year in which, arguably, 'public

art' began' (Miles 1997, 91). For Miles, then, public art as it stands today is a direct

reaction against the public uses of sculpture described above. The social practices

which Miles and his peers advocated for public art in the 1980s and 1990s can also be

seen as descendent from fashions developing in 'post-Modernist', avant-garde art

around the time of Willett's text.

However, a social public art practice was at work before Willett called for artists to

put their creativity at the service of people and places. This was illustrated by Deanna

Petherbridge in the Architectural Review in 1978 when she looked back at what she

called the 'town artist experiment' (Petherbridge 1979), in which artists worked

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collaboratively from within a town's planning department. She traced the phenomenon

of the resident artist back to Victor Pasmore's 1954 appointment as artistic consultant

to the architecture department of the new town of Peterlee in north-east England,

which saw him introduce highly contemporary styles into public buildings and the

Apollo Pavilion, which verged on abstract sculpture rather than architecture (1979,

127). The first officially deigned 'town artist' was David Harding in Glenrothes who

from 1968, in contradiction to Pasmore's purist approach, asserted that 'the influence

of the artist was to be more fluid, that of a catalyst, with more actual involvement with

the spaces between buildings and the external environment' (1979, 126). He was also

responsible at the time for introducing the first university teaching on Art and Design

in a Social Context, the name of his course at Dartington College. So from here it

began to become orthodox that artists should have a concrete role in shaping thedesign of public space and that public space could be realm into which artists should

express their creative forms, but in reaction to a social context rather than a

morphological one.

Petherbridge quoted 15 town artist projects at the time of writing, the most famous of

which was Liz Leyh's residency in Milton Keynes, which resulted in the city's renowned

concrete cows (1979, 128). Public art was well enough established as a concept by this

time that Petherbridge could claim that money should be saved from aspects of a

development such as play parks and decorative elaboration to make budget available

Figure 1: Victor Pasmores Apollo Pavilion at Peterlee, Co. Durham (Source: www.commons.wikimedia.org)

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for public sculptures. It can be assumed that the post-war phenomenon of the town

artist was tied up with the development of a welfare state modern cities were to be

built for improved quality of life for the many working class men and women returning

to normal life after the war and artists were put to work on these new towns to

contribute towards that quality of life.

In the 1980s a scheme was developed in the USA called Percent for Art which strongly

encouraged (though did no oblige) developers to dedicate 1% of a project budget to

arts commissioning and therefore began to place this these urban improvements in the

hands of private corporations. In 1988, as part of a drive to attract investment to inner

cities and incorporate the ever-increasing creative industries, the Arts Council of

England officially endorsed this concept for Britain (Selwood 1992, 12). The Arts

Council's remit was to support artists as much as it was to promote access to artsuggesting that public space has become thought of as a convenient way to display

works which are not necessarily created in direct response to urban conditions. There

is now an established culture of art commissioning in private development and many

developers have clearly outlined arts policies; St James Home group have gone so far

as to establish an Art Foundation (Dowdy 2003).

In what is perhaps a final stage bringing public art to that which we recognise today has

been the amalgamation of both planning-led public sculpture and artist-led public artpractice into a 'cultural economy'. Florida has argued that the 'creative class' is now the

driving factor in Western economies (Florida 2005) and as Miles has also noted (Miles

1997, 108) art is now seen to be key to attracting business interest and middle class

residents. The rush to support creativity in this was has indeed been referred to as

boosterism at its most frenetic (Walden 2008) demonstrating how prominent art has

become to economic and planning policy.

Lewisham council, for example, runs a dedicated agency called Creative Lewisham

through which it promotes two distinct but now clearly interrelated agendas: public

realm improvement and support for the creative industries. The borough has identified

a 'Creative Sector cluster' around New Cross and Deptford, and is 'working to

strengthen and protect the existing cluster as well as market it as a destination for

cultural tourism' (Creative Lewisham Agency ?). In terms of public art it 'lobbies for

the implementation of the boroughs art policy and on a practical level brokers the

purchase of artists work and the commission of artists projects' (Creative Lewisham

Agency ?). Art, then, is seen as a way to support desired forms of economic activity

and to present a present a desired image of the borough to a wider public. They key

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distinction in the context of this study is that where previously official policy provided

artists specific briefs to create a civic work or a historical monument, the council now

supports existing forms and seeks to show that Lewisham is a place where culture is

self-generating. Public art in the 21st century has been, then, part of an economic

project to regenerate many inner city areas that, like Deptford and New Cross, have

been attractive to artists due to the very decline that rendered them affordable in the

first place.

Public art has developed from a tradition of locating sculpture in public space to

uphold certain perceptions of society, to a form of welfare in the post-war social

recovery, and a reaction against these tradition in which avant-garde artists sought to

develop other ways of working with and in the public sphere. In a current state diversekinds of art form are financially supported by councils as an economic tool in

regeneration and their results presented in public, artists work with communities to

encourage cohesion and engagement and private corporations invest in art as a way to

improve brand identity in the public realm. We will look now in more detailed at the

criticisms, what ideologies critics have presented as alternatives and whether this

teaches us anything about the actual siting of art in particular types of public space.

What is expected of public art as an art practice?

Critical literature on public art has tended to focus on the ways in which it could be

better carried out as an art form but not an urban form, with somewhat utopian ideas

about its potential for communities and places. However, in criticising its

contemporary state both Sara Selwood and Malcolm Miles, two of the key writers in

the field, make vital points which may help to elucidate the social structures underlying

public art. Miles' central point is that a Modernist view of commissioning has

dominated the planning based public art. This treats public space as value-free and

autonomous and introduces singular abstract works by removed artists, in order to

provide wider public access to a 'privileged aesthetic domain' (Miles 1997, 59). He

places this in lineage with early 20th century civic art commissioning and states that,

whilst monuments, which are 'elements in the construction of a national history', are at

odds with modern secular democracy (1997, 61) and no longer produced, modern

forms public art are no less ideological. The ultimate example of this, referred to by

almost all texts on the subject, is the case of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (figure 2) a

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sculpture installed in New York's Federal Plaza in 1981 (Senie 2002) which caused

huge controversy by blocking movement across a large section of the square; the

commissioning body Arts-in-Architecture gave primacy to artistic vision over the social

function of public space.

Miles takes a polemic stance against this approach, using feminist and Marxist readings

of public space to argue for public art policy that treats space as value-loaded and

personal and for art forms which are always either applied as urban design or work

with social rather than concrete forms. That is to say, he is a proponent of what has

been called 'new genre public art' in a milestone volume edited by Suzanne Lacy (Lacy

1995). The 'new genre' resolves the tension between public and art (as noted by

Willett) by operating from within the specific 'public' in question, for example as an

arts facilitator engaging in process-based, social arts practices within a given

community. Fixed and permanent public sculptures on the other hand, according to

Miles, risk justifying development and deflecting discourse on the full consequences of

economic regeneration whilst demonstrating to a wider public that the development is

viable for business and the influx of the middle classes.

Sara Selwood (Selwood 1992) offers a handbook for public art commissioning which

also acts as a critique. She defines public art by its funding source and attributes its

Figure 2: Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in Federal Plaza, New York City (Source: www.commons.wikimedia.org)

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urban concentration to the location of this funding rather than to any essentially urban

nature to the culture of public art (1992, 12-13). Also warning of the dangers of

private sponsorship she suggests that it is an undemocratic imposition of private tastes

on the public realm (1992, 21). Where vandalism has often been interpreted as a lack

of sophistication in the communities in which art is located, Selwood believes this to

be a strong and valid form of protest against this imposition (Selwood 1992, 24).

An unquestioning acceptance of public forms of art is evident in Lucy Lippards

argument that the art world must change its attitude towards community-based art

and incorporate the view that good art can be 'enjoyed (or even made) by the public

(Lippard 1998, 272). She is also critical of the fact that much art presented as public,

and indeed the majority of that created throughout the 1980s, is in fact corporate-

sponsored (IBID). Her interpretation of public art is similar; that it should be a form ofpublic engagement rather than an attempt to provide the public with works that may

be irrelevant. In other words she is asking artists to change their attitude towards the

city but like so much other critics does not ask architecture to offer an understanding

of how art might operate as an urban practice.

Two accounts have approached an urban understanding of public art and serve as a

starting point for this study. Rosalyn Deutsche, in her interpretation of the standardTilted Arccase study, noticed that the debate surrounding it understood the city as a

'transhistorical form, an inevitable product of technological evolution, or an arena for

the unfolding of exacerbated individualism' (Deutsche 1992, 159) but did not address

the morphological implications of this enormous object. While many were outraged at

its ignorance of site-specificity the square's existence as a public gathering place and

thoroughfare she believed it to be a highly developed engagement due to its re-

orienting of movement patterns and its disruption of the expression of state power

inherent in Federal Plaza's morphology. She was also critical of proponents of the work

who argued against the possibility of 'simplistic of populist notions of natural, self-

evident use' (1992, 161) and countered with the view that the pure aestheticism was

an unrealistically 'noncontingent' use for public space. She proposed to bring the

debate into urban theory to allow for a better-informed excavation of the ideology of

spatial use through the reimagining of public art as an urban practice (Deutsche 1992,

162). However she saw this approach to art as an abstraction for heuristic purposes

and whether its potential ends there will be tested by this study.

A decade later, in 2003, Doreen Massey undertook a survey of modern public art in

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Milton Keynes in what is perhaps the closest to a precedent for this study. She starts

with a thorough and very informative discussion of the various concepts that

constitute the notion of 'public places' (Massey and Gillian Rose 2003, 2). This

discussion suggests that openness is more definitive of the city than enclosure, that a

'place' should be seen as a meeting point of various layers of activity which extend

across urban networks rather than a discrete entity, and that anything entering or

inserted permanently into a place including a public artwork will be more

constitutive of that place than it is reactive to it as a pre-existing form (2003, 4). She is

also led to questions which seem to have been absent from much of the earlier

criticism such as why a public space should require an artwork, what role that artwork

is expected to play in that space and why the integration of some works into the urban

fabric should cause them to become ignored. In relation to this latter question shepoints to sculptures which were built into the city's fabric during its initial construction

(the aforementioned town artist scheme) and are integrated in such a way that they

are never seen head on, wondering whether they are so familiar they do not need to

be seen as such or whether they are thus simply ignored (2003, 23). Massey's

conclusion is that any commission should undergo a thoroughly empirical but

interdisciplinary preparation that uses urban theory to investigate the specificity of the

proposed place and surveys the public that will be receiving this work. However, herown methodology for this goes no further than an 'exploration' involving a day-long

observation of one sculpture. The results were purely descriptive and suggested that

'no response [from the public to the sculpture] was immediately visible' (2003, 16).

Massey has been prolific in both geography and cultural theory and would therefore

seem well placed to have answered her own call for a methodology incorporating

urban morphology, urban society and arts practices. However, her nonetheless

revealing discussion remains at a theoretical level and does not find specific ways to

refer to the implications of public arts location in an immediate space and a wider

urban network. So drawing on her rich interpretations of public space and introducing

space syntax, a theory which does allow for empirical descriptions of that space, seems

a strong starting point for the kind of investigation Massey proposes for public art.

There is, then, a rich body of criticism covering the implications of the content of

public art and its sensitivity to gender, socio-economics, politics and the preconceived

uses of public space. However, despite calls for a more rigorous understanding of the

spatial implications of art objects by Deutsche and by Gibson, and Massey's

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recommendation of an empirical preparation for individual commissions there does

not seem to have been a method presented for the project of modern public art as an

urban practice. Therefore we will look forward now to various theories and methods

which have been developed to address other questions of public space to demonstrate

how such a project might be forwarded.

How might we interpret public art as an urban practice?

Urban economic theories describe the ways in which cities have arisen from and for

the advancement of economies. For example, Edward Glaeser highlights essential

interactions that are 'nonmarket' (Glaeser and Scheinkman 2000). Nonmarket

interactions are the social influences arising as externalities of market transactions,such as peer pressure and the sharing of ideas, which due to urban spatial

concentration lead to innovation. Clearly our direct experience of public artworks is

always outside of the 'market', though they imply an indirect cost to the taxpayer, and

whilst Selwood believes the urban concentration of public art to have followed funding

sources Glaeser's theory would suggest that art might arise out of urban concentration

and attract that funding. Carmona suggested that public artworks can act as points of

'triangulation' (Carmona et al. 2003, 166) stimulating interaction and the sharing ofideas between two individuals by acting as a shared point of contact and Miles,

though in criticism, pointed out that they are used to affirm the colonisation of the city

by the creative industries (Miles 1997, 106), arguably now the attribute most

fundamental to our economy (Florida 2005). So perhaps in some way public art is an

inevitable result of the surplus of creative ideas formed in cities. Eric Wolf gives a

possible model for the way this physical manifestation of latent creativity may be

structured. His concept of the 'ceremonial fund' suggests that once technology allows a

surplus of production above the basic necessities society can afford to invest in

ceremonial forms which are necessary for that society's perpetuation such as extra-

marriage and the upkeep of social networks in the form of a ceremonial fund collected

as a religious offering and distributed by the head of the religious body (Wolf 1966, 6-

9). In a more complex and deeply buried form, capitalist society collects a ceremonial

fund through taxation which is redistributed in ways which support and perpetuate its

forms, including spending on artworks which are on display as part of the city's

concrete structure. So perhaps in a society whose economy is driven by the

concentration and sharing of creative innovations in cities, public displays of non-

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functional abstract art serve to symbolise and perpetuate confidence in the ongoing

surplus of creativity. Where artists such as those of the 'new genre' work with social

processes to produce artworks which are the result of an accord between local

residents and an artist-facilitator, it could perhaps be argued along similar lines that the

resulting object serves to symbolise and perpetuate confidence in the other pillar of

capitalist society, democracy. The question here will be, though, whether there are

particular kinds of space in the city that afford or have been created specifically for the

display of society's ceremonial wealth.

Hillier, in Space is the Machine, proposed that certain urban morphologies do indeed

exist to allow for ceremonial display (Hillier 2004, 171-189). The ceremonial axis is

one which is often segregated from the street network and thresholds with residentialor commercial interiors, and at right angles to a key monument or building so that a

fixed and stable view of that object is prioritised over visible comprehension of street

layout. These ceremonial axes are wide and straight, synchronising space so that a

greater area is visible from a single viewpoint in space-time. This synchrony reinforces

the syntactic properties of location, so that in Hilliers example a parade ground and

market square are very differently embedded in the urban fabric but in both cases their

investment in synchrony lends symbolic importance to their respective syntacticdescriptions (Hillier 2004, 185). Polly Fong has applied these concepts to several

monuments in London and Westminster and her study (Fong 1999), though limited to

the traditional commemorative statues of the 19th century, offers some very useful

points for looking at more recent public art. Her point that monuments have no

interior and are unlike buildings may go some way to explaining why they have often

been excluded from architectural discourse, but she notes that like buildings,

monuments are solid objects whose spatial arrangement in the city represents the

value attached to them by society. To describe this spatial arrangement she uses the

concept of the isovist, a concept introduced by Michael Benedikt to represent the area

visible from a certain point in space (Benedikt 1979), and establishes several rules

relating to the form of isovists taken from monuments. In ceremonial forms of space

the isovist will be more or less symmetrical, have smooth edges and have a long 'finger'

ending in a blunt tip whilst in instrumental spaces there will be asymmetry, a less even

outline, and several fingers ending in chamfered points (Fong 1999, 4). She also refers

to the arrangement of monuments with each other, showing that at Waterloo Place in

Westminster their isovists are contained in one another's so a global structure of

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dominant ceremonial routes is marked out by their presence (figure 3), whereas in the

City of London they are revealed only in moving through the city and positioned at

axial convergences to lend symbolic importance to key locations not marked by

facades out in the way previously described. So following Fong, this study will use

isovists to describe the more recent artworks under investigation and to offer

comparisons with the traditional forms to which, as we have seen, contemporary

public art is in part a reaction.

Figure 3: Monuments aligned at Waterloo Place, London (Source: www.commons.wikimedia.org)

1.3. Aims for an urban understanding of public art

As we have seen, previous discourse on public art has focussed on the object itself and

its audiences. Meaning has been sought in modes of reception and encounter between

either a cultural object or a cultural agent (ie an artist) and a generalised public or

specific socio-economic group. The debate surrounding these issues has been very

active and largely successful in steering accepted practices in public art away from

extremes such as the unpopular Tilted and towards formats which are seen by

proponents such as Lacy as socially beneficial. Whilst these debates within art theory

will undoubtedly continue to inform the methods of individual artists commissioned to

create works in public space there is a gap in the way location is addressed.

This study, then, aims to respond to calls for an understanding of contemporary and

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future public art policies from the point of view of urban theory; surveying the

arrangement of public art in space and integrating discussion of both the social and

spatial implications of inserting a solid object into public space. Fong has provided very

valuable ways to investigate the monumental properties of space around a statue in

what could be said to be an urban understanding of public sculpture, but these objects

were created nearly 200 years ago and form part of different urban art artistic

cultures. Monuments no longer seem to be included in our understanding of public art

(if Lewisham council's collection is any indication) and therefore the field is left lacking

in any attempt to systematically address the mainly post-War practices that now

comprise the genre.

If the primary function of the artwork can be taken to be the perceptual purveying ofbeauty or of social, cultural or symbolic information, then it can be assumed that the

artwork in an urban system acts as an image as well as a concrete object. A sculpture

in public space, for example, is different to, say, a sculpted staircase, in that the fulfilling

of the primary function of the staircase, to allow access from one topographical level

to another, requires physical contact whereas the artwork occupies a physical space

but demands no physical contact. The implication of this is that a public artwork must

be assessed within the urban system not only with regards to its location in space butalso with regards to the extent of its potential for visual communication. Therefore, a

methodology was needed to investigate both the visibility and accessibility of art

objects rather than simply as autonomous forms against an urban background. An

empirical methodology is intended not to replace but to refine the aesthetic criticisms

by Miles, Deutsche, Selwood and others, and where their arguments are reinforced by

a spatial description this will be pointed out. Finally, it should be made clear that this

study does not seek to propose policy, practices or art forms but instead seeks to

learn from the situation as it stands and inform policy-makers and critics with a better

understanding of how the morphology of public space impacts upon the presentation

of art.

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2. Methodology & data

2.1. The methodological problem

Against the theoretical background presented in the previous section various data

sources and analytical methods were available to build up a spatial description of the

context of Lewisham's public art. The central theoretical issue in developing a

methodology for this study is whether objective measurements of urban space can tell

us anything about objects which are products of individual artists with varying

motivations and which do not necessarily have to respond functionally to their

surroundings. On a more technical level it was necessary to adapt existing spatialmodels to account for issues encountered in the morphology of the study area, discern

which measurements from these models were relevant to public art and develop a

framework for interpretation. This process will be outlined in the rest of the section.

2.2. Data

London Borough of Lewisham's Art MapThe art map provided by the borough (see appendix 1) lists 52 individual artworks

referenced numerically and roughly locates them on a notional rather than

geographically accurate map. Throughout the study every artwork will be referred to

with an abbreviation of its name (see appendix 2 for details) followed by this reference

number, which can also be used to navigate appendices 2-4 and the art map. The art

map does not actually give precise locations for or descriptions of the artworks, and it

became clear upon attempting to visit all works that it was also in some cases out-

dated and even quite wildly inaccurate. The section of the council website dedicated to

its collection of public art (http://www.lewisham.gov.uk/inmyarea/arts/public-

art/Pages/default.aspx) had quite limited information on the works listed and omitted

to provide any information at all on many of those named on the map. Thus the first

stage of the study was to identify the named art object at each site and create an

accurate database detailing address, precise location at this address, category, artist,

year and commissioning body for each piece (listed in full in appendix 2). Whilst many

of the objects were evident some required a significant level of investigation to be

found, including using non-council web resources (see Non-Bibliographic References),

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satellite imagery and the help of individuals encountered on site. It also arose from this

stage of the study that both Spectrum (22) and Nelson's Lion (16) were no longer in

existence their one-time location was learned only from staff at their sites (the local

library and a cadet training base respectively) and they were therefore also excluded

from the study.

Ordnance Survey MasterMap

Digimap Ordnance Survey MasterMap Topography Layers (last updated 2010) were

obtained via EDINA (see Non-Bibliographic References), for an area covering the

borough of Lewisham and immediate environs in twenty 2x2km sections. Eight types of

map are available and four were used in this study: Topographic Area to show land

uses and extract footprints for buildings and structures; Topographic Line to extractobstructing lines such as walls and fences; Topographic Point to give locations for

freestanding objects such as trees and lampposts; Boundary Lines to produce a layer

showing the borough boundary.

Axial map of London

An axial map of the whole of Greater London has been developed within the UCL

Space Group and a cut-out was taken from this covering the whole area within

Lewisham's political boundary with an approximate 1500m buffer and following as

much as possible a continuous edge. Significant remodelling was then undertaken as

described below.

2.3. Software

MapInfo was initially used to extract the appropriate data from the OS MasterMap and

produce appropriate maps for analysis in Depthmap, a spatial analysis programme

developed by Alasdair Turner at UCL. However, data compatability issues led to a

switch to the open source geographic information system Quantum GIS (QGIS). See

appendix 5 for further details on how QGIS was used in this study.

2.4. Space syntax analysis & its application in the study

Hillier and Hanson's general morphological theory of architecture (Hillier and Hanson

1984) enables us to talk about not only the internal properties of a space its

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immediately visible attributes but also to quantify its invisible relationship with the

spatial network of the city as a whole and understand better its role within the social

system that created that spatial network. This theory, 'space syntax', offers integrated

quantitative ways to talk about both settlements and buildings but some specific

aspects will be put to use in this study. A fundamental aspect of the theory is tocategorise space into basic and very general categories which describe the fundamental

elements of settlements (1984, 95): X space is the interior, enclosed within buildings

and to a greater or lesser degree private; x space is the enclosed or controlled

exterior space attached to X space such as gardens and private courts; y space is the

public open space defined by boundaries of X and x space; Y space is the undefined

open space surrounding and 'carrying' the whole settlement. Our main concern here

will be y space as a container for public art, and the nature of the boundaries of y withX and x and following are the definitions of the various aspects of space syntax analysis

and they way they have been employed in this study.

Convex analysis

Urban 'y' space can be notionally broken down into a series of two dimensional

segments called convex spaces, so that each point within a convex space has an

uninterrupted view of all other points and so that the fewest and 'fattest' possible

convex spaces cover the whole settlement (Hillier and Hanson 1984, 97) (see figure 4).

A convex space thus can be spoken of in terms of its size, its syntax within the wider

network and its constitution, the nature of its edges. The traditional settlement

morphologies studied by Hillier to develop this analysis consisted generally of an

interconnected network of streets and squares which are fully constituted by building

edges so that his definition of unconstituted convex space was a lack of permeable

entrances to the interior of the blocks of built form. However, this morphology is

relatively rare in Lewisham and therefore in order to establish the convex space

occupied by each artwork some rules needed to be established which were more

specific to the conditions, and further types of constitution introduced.

Building edges were evident from the topographical map but this layer of data does not

visibly distinguish other one-dimensional physical barriers such as fencing from non-

obstructing lines such as pavements edges. It was necessary to create a subset of data

from the topographic lines layer giving a map of non-building edges which block

permeability. The convex space occupied by each artwork was then drawn so that:

no vertex was unattached to a solid boundary, as this would mean that the

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space was tending away from 'fatness' and overlapping with another potential

convex space

a road junction was deemed to have a convex space at its convergence, soneighbouring convex spaces would not overlap with this

fencing or freestanding walls were considered a barrier where they enclosed aspace, even if they include an opening, such as those around a tennis court

fencing or freestanding walls were not considered a barrier where theypunctuated rather than enclosed space, such as small barriers around

pedestrian crossings

as recommended by Hillier, an amount of tolerance was afforded for minorobtuse angles in the building edge and the point at which this became a new

convex space was left to judgementAs building edges defined convex space to varying degrees and in some cases not at all,

the definition of constitution became a continuum from fully constituted edged by

buildings or solid structures and other convex spaces and unconstituted edged by

freestanding barriers or natural elements such as rivers.

Axial analysis

Following this, y space can then be represented in a one dimensional model, as a

network of lines drawn on a map of the settlement so that every convex spacecontains at least one line and the fewest and longest lines possible represent the

Figure 4: Example of convex spaces at road junction convergence and in linear space, Brockley(MasterMap/QGIS)

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totality of y space (Hillier and Hanson 1984, 91). This map is then analysed to produce

a quantification of the degree to which any one line is accessible from the rest of the

network, which we call its level of integration (Hillier and Hanson 1984, 115). Highly

integrated routes are topologically close to a greater number of other routes than

segregated ones which even if metrically close to surrounding spaces are topologicallyless accessible. An analysis at the scale n takes into account the whole system (which

here is the borough of Lewisham and its immediate surroundings) whereas more

localised measures analyse the number of routes accessible with a set number of

changes of direction. Again the nature of the study area and the predominance of

artworks in open spaces meant that additional guidelines needed to be established for

axially modelling parks and footpaths:

footpaths through an open space were simplified into straight lines

footpaths constrained by buildings were split into their composite segments multiple paths through open space were observed only as long as they were

accessed separately from the street

footpaths' ability to connect spaces was observed more than any angulardistance added by their curvilinearity.

From the full axial map, a second 'no parks' map was produced which excluded

footpaths and open space, so as to differentiate where artworks were accessible fromurban and green space (see figure 5).

Segment analysis

Later developments of the space syntax method have produced a segment map with

each axial line split into sections between axial intersections. Segment analysis

calculates properties of much smaller sections of space and was chosen for the

accessibility part of this study due to its ability to give an integration value for a veryspecific location. The analysis of this map will also be used to demonstrate a

Figure 5: Example axial mapping (in red) of Ladywell Fields and environs, with (left) and without (right) parks(MasterMap/QGIS)

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measurement called 'choice', which is a simple concept quantifying the statistical

probability of any one segment lying on a route from any two other points in the

network. Here, local measures take into account a certain metric radius so that at n a

route with a high choice value is likely to be a significant traffic route through the area

and/or a main shopping street whereas at radii of 400m (roughly 5 minutes walk) and800m (roughly 10 minutes walk) high choice is more likely to signify local

thoroughfares and smaller clusters of shops. The axial map available been intended for

a wider-lens study of a whole city so it was necessary to make some significant

refinements for a detailed segment analysis. Almost all intersections of three or more

axial lines had to be remodelled as they were overlapping to form small polygonal

loops which exaggerated the number of segments around the study sites, and once the

study areas had been adjusted the process had to be applied across the whole area aslocal integration (400m radius) then became biased away from the local centres initially

focussed upon.

Isovists

Unlike convex and axial analyses, the isovist does not aim to model the total system

but is an independent measure of the total visible area from any one point in space

(Benedikt 1979). This type of analysis has mainly been used within buildings to

represent strategic viewpoints and views along a route through interior space from the

point of view of as observer (ie within a set angle representing the human field of

vision.

Figure 6: Example map of visual barriers (in black) with resulting isovists (in pink), Deptford Town Centre (QGIS)

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However by taking a 360 isovist it is also possible to represent the total area from

which a point location can be seen. In order to calculate isovists at the urban scale a

map was created containing only those objects from the geographical information

which act as a visual barrier. Initially this was attempted using only buildings, but theresulting isovists were unrealistically extensive and through a more thorough

investigation of the background data other necessary layers of information were

determined including physically obstructing lines, freestanding structures, freestanding

objects and trees (see figure 6). The latter of these are mapped only as point locations

in the data, meaning they have no spatial extension and are not recognised by

Depthmap as a visual obstruction. To overcome this, QGIS was used to generate

automatically a layer of essentially circular polygons drawn at a radius around eachpoint. In this way trees were given a total radius of 4m and freestanding objects (which

from on site observation were ascertained to be mainly street lamps and bus shelters)

were generalised to a radius of 2m.

Further applications of space syntax

Other studies within the field of space syntax offer ways to develop these spatial

definitions to investigate the complex morphologies of public space.

Ruth Conroy-Dalton, like Fong, has spoken about the specific isovist properties that

could define a landmark although her subject is not specifically public art (Conroy

Dalton and Bafna 2003). Landmarks here are the 'consensus-landmarks' proposed by

Kevin Lynch, which regularly feature in the cognitive maps produced by inhabitants as

visual points of reference. In attempting to discern the spatial logic of these consensus-

landmarks Conroy-Dalton found that they tended to have distinctively-shaped isovists

accessed by integrated axial lines.

Campos (Campos 1997) combined convex and axial mapping to describe the strategic

locations of squares in the city of London by summing the integration values of all axial

lines intersecting with the convex space of the square. She found that this total value

showed very strong correlation with the level of use of each square and that attractors

such as bars and cafes appeared in the more strategic locations rather than overcoming

segregation to attract customers. This will be taken as a justification for using convex

space to provide a fixed definition of the location of public artworks within the axial

map rather than arbitrarily choosing which line with which to associate them.

Julienne Hanson looked at a way of defining the different kinds of open space that have

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been produced by various eras of city building by calculating the ratio between figures,

buildings and other solid structures, and ground, the open space containing or between

these structures. She found that in the post-War developments such as housing estates

and new towns the ground became much greater in proportion to built mass (Hanson

et al. 2007, 55) and makes a cursory suggestion that art was used in this context to actas an interface between the home and this new, alienating landscape. This has also been

described elsewhere as the morphological shift from traditional to modernist space,

with the latter described as an 'amorphous landscape' which surrounds 'freestanding

pavilions' (Carmona et al. 2003) as opposed to the clearly defined y space in between

solid blocks of built form. This description will be used throughout the study to point

to situations in which art works are located in what appears to be these kinds of

modernist, ground-dominated landscapes or in more traditional spaces.

2.5. A methodology for investigating public art as an urban practice

With these models of urban space in place, a methodology was put into practice to

capture data on various spatial aspects of public art locations. The convex space and

isovist captured for each artwork is presented for reference in appendix 3, analysed

segment maps in appendix 4ii and the resulting data in appendix 4i.

Firstly, QGIS was used to retrieve area values for the isovist relating to each artwork

and this data recorded. In order to establish the context of each isovist, QGIS was

used to quantify the number of axial lines (from the 'no parks' axial map) intersecting

with each isovist (see appendix 5 for software technique) and data recorded under

'isovist axiality'. Data was also recorded for the longest radial of each isovist, in other

words the longest line of sight to/from each artwork, and its compactness, the degree

to which it was contained rather than spread across radials. So this gave an indication

of the size, shape and nature of the area each artwork could be seen from.

Next, convex spaces were measured in size and their syntactic properties calculated.

The number of discrete axial lines which intersect with each convex space will be an

indicator of the degree to which it is bordered by y space or by X & x space and

therefore of its description. For example, figure 8 shows the convex spaces Hands, Pink

Palace and H&H, which have similar synchrony but intersect with 1, 2 and 3 axial lines

respectively and described, in that order, as single linear movement space, convergent

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linear movement space and as convex space with several points of access (see example

in figure 8). However, in order to arrive at a more accurate quantification of the

integration and choice values of the specific section of space occupied by an artwork it

was decided to take these values from the segment map. Following Campos,

integration and choice values for all segments contained by or intersecting with eachconvex space were summed, using selection tools provided by QGIS, with the process

repeated across the sample at radii of 400m, 800m and n (see figure 9). These

measurements will be referred to as convex integration and convex choice at radius

[x].

Data was tabulated (full data in appendix 4), which in itself provided an empirical spatial

description of each artwork but was impossible to interpret in isolation. In order to dothis heuristic comparisons were made between various data sets. These are all

included in appendix 4 and those comparisons revealing interesting patterns of

correlation are presented within the body of the study with an interpretation of their

interrelationships.

So a methodology has been developed which builds upon existing ways of modelling

urban space through space syntax, by establishing rules with which to apply these

models across a unique study area and proposes new techniques with which to

combine and compare the data from these models using QGIS software. Notional

entities such as the convex spaces are very useful concepts, which allow us to think

about the individual parts from which the city is composed and to quantify various

aspects of location. In undertaking his study though it became clear that modern urban

morphology does not always present obvious ways to be segmentalised and the original

theory in this case needed to be developed further to provide valid comparisons across

very varied types of surface. The result, though, is a consistent and repeatable way to

analyse a set of locations with regards to urban properties which are relevant to public

art.

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Figure 7: Isovist from C, Crofton Park Library, with intersecting axials in red (QGIS/MasterMap)

Figure 8: Convex spaces & intersecting axials (in red), Deptford (QGIS/MasterMap)

Figure 9: Convex spaces with intersecting segments (in red), Deptford (QGIS/MasterMap

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3. Survey; spatial descriptions of public art

3.1. Introducing the case study

The London Borough of Lewisham and its public artworks

'commissioning art in the public realm can...benefit the borough's urban design fabric, sense of

place and identity, matching opportunities for integrating art with future large scale

developments....to include temporary works, new technologies and considered artistic

approached that engage with people and communities' (Borough of Lewisham 2010, 6)

Figure 10: Borough topographical map with main centres labelled (QGIS/MasterMap)

According to the most recent census data publicised by the council, Lewisham is home

to just under 250,000 people. It stretches from a narrow section of the south bank of

the river Thames between Deptford and Bermondsey to a wide swathe of south

London between Eltham and Sydenham, thus covering both highly 'urban' inner-city

areas in the north to quite green and open suburbs in the south. Indeed the whole

borough has relatively high levels of open space within 'Greenspace' covering almost

23% of its area (Office for National Statistics) and many of its public artworks stand inopen space. Several tributaries of the Thames the rivers Ravensbourne, Quaggy and

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Poole flow through Lewisham in a mix of concrete channels and re-naturalised river

beds and as will be seen often impact upon the morphology of public art locations.

The borough has two main centres: Lewisham town centre being the main commercial

hub and market with a large indoor shopping mall; and Catford the civic centre housingthe town hall and a smaller high street and shopping centre. There are also a number

of local centres: New Cross in mainly a linear centre along the A2 trunk route towards

Dover but is also home to renowned school of arts and humanities Goldsmiths

College; Deptford is a more traditional town centre with a pedestrianised high street,

busy market and a broadway along the main road; Brockley is closer to what is

understood as a village centre with a small number of shops and restaurants along a

relatively quiet stretch of road, off of which the area quickly becomes very residential;Forest Hill is at a key junction on London's South Circular Road and its centre

stretches along the roads leading to the junction, with a number of workshops and

studios in mews buildings just behind the main road; Hither Green is towards the

suburban south of the borough and consists mainly of a small number of shops along a

local through-route amongst traditional housing.

Following Selwood's suggestion that funding is the best way to define public art some

clear categories amongst the sample. Some of the oldest works are murals produced

during the 1980s such as Apocalypse [3], Pink Palace [7] and L.O.G. [10]. These are

mainly grassroots interventions by local groups and residents and can be thought of as

a part of the move by certain artists at the time to locate their practices in

communities rather than as top-down planning. Civic improvements which have been

'linked closely to urban design and the planning system' (Borough of Lewisham 2010,

10) such as the John Maine works ([17], [19] & [23]), are those commissioned directly

by the council, sometimes with financial input from developers such as Desiman Ltd.

These works were executed throughout the 1990s before the introduction of a

cultural economy policy and almost all located in the borough's two main centres at

Catford and Lewisham. In Lewisham notably, these follow the 'town artist' model,

being built permanently into the urban fabric as part of the planning process rather

than as autonomous sculptures displayed in a pre-existing space. A number of later

works were commissioned by the Creative Lewisham agency since the publication of

its cultural strategy in 2002 (Creative Lewisham Agency 2002) and fall into the

category of economically regenerative public art, supporting local artists and aiming to

publicise the area as a cultural destination. These tend more to be located in the

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identified 'Creative Enterprise Zone' in the north of the borough as well as the

'emerging clusters' in Catford and Forest Hill (2002, 17). Meridian [29] was

commissioned as part of a new development by Bellway Ltd in 2007 in the 'Percent for

Art' model.

3.2. Distribution of the sample

Figure 11: Borough topographical map with artworks labelled, demonstrating clustering in six town centres

(QGIS/MasterMap)

Many of the artworks are clustered in the main centres at Lewisham and Catford and

in the 'creative clusters' of New Cross and Deptford in the north of the borough

(figure 11). Three other clusters of artworks are visible north of the main road in

Deptford town centre, plus in the local centres of Forest Hill and Brockley. Only ten of

the artworks, around 20% of the overall sample, lie outside of these sixaforementioned centres even though the council itself lists a total of 17 nameable

neighbourhoods in the borough (Lewisham Council).

The six areas in which artworks are clustered are all highlighted by the council for

regeneration through cultural economy. Creative Lewisham has reported that

'Lewisham's visual environment needs a significant uplift to mark a change of attitude'

(Creative Lewisham Agency 2002, 11) towards its potential as a cultural hub. Themajority of works in Deptford, New Cross, Brockley, Catford and Forest Hill were

indeed created after this point in time when the council explicitly recognised culture as

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a key to economic progress.

The significant bias of both public art and cultural investment towards the north of the

borough (and the slightly more southern hubs of Catford and Forest Hill) reinforces

Miles' claim that public art is used as an image of an area's viability as a destination forbusiness and ultimately for the influx of the middle classes; 'area's image' and 'external

recognition' have in fact been stated as key aims of official cultural strategy. (2002, 6).

The strategy also recognises implicitly a morphological aspect to cultural distribution,

referring to the mainly residential nature of the south of the borough as a 'key

challenge' to cultural development. The significant level of green space in the south is

thought of as a cultural asset by the council but it is council-provided and does not

actively participate in a local cultural economy which gives rise to its own public art.

There are, though, particular kinds of artwork in Lewisham's open space and their

spatial specificities will be explored.

Figure 12 shows the locations of the study sample overlaying a map of segment choice

at n, with the borough boundary shown in white. The long, high-choice routes which

link the main centres to the edge of the borough and beyond, as well as the secondary

routes in orange and yellow which are local thoroughfares, are thought of as part of a

'foreground network' of space facilitating movement at long distances and producing

the main centres of activity (Hillier 1999). The adjacency of most artworks to these

thoroughfares suggests that they are visible to those passing through Lewisham as well

Figure 12: Segment map showing choice at radius n with main centre labelled (Depthmap/QGIS)

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as to local residents. The foreground network can also be thought of as the most

public of public space as, although in legal terms a quiet residential street is equally as

public as the main road, it is there that due to the volume of both vehicular and

pedestrian through-traffic and commercial activity that the most intense mixing of

strangers and residents is likely to occur. If, as according to Hillier, the 'backgroundnetwork' of residential areas which fill in the rest of the city are the 'primary

distributed loci of socio-cultural identities' (Hillier 2001, 10) it might be reasonable to

suggest that populating the foreground network with public artworks, symbolic

artefacts which fall under public ownership, helps to imbue this more generic and

widely shared space with a greater level of cultural specificity and ownership. Figure 13

shows the same segment map but without lines for parks or footpaths in open space.

Most works not adjacent to high choice routes are in open space, away from bothtraffic and economic activity, and several are the Sustrans Mileposts ([13], [18], [26],

[47] & [49]) which have a specific spatial arrangement which will be explored later on.

So already the distribution of public artworks in relation to general categories of

morphology and graphs of the route network begin to show how location could impact

upon or arise from the function of an artwork. Following, more detailed descriptions of

the works' arrangement in space will begin to suggest more refined spatial categories.

Figure 13: Segment map showing choice at radius n with main centres and parks (in italics) labelled(Depthmap/QGIS)

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3.3. Accessibility

Figures 14 and 15 show convex size compared to convex integration at 400m and n

(see appendix 4ii for analysed segment maps). The three largest convex spaces are not

shown on the graphs as they are more than twice the size of the next largest and maskpatterns in the remaining data (see table 1). The graph can be split into quadrants

representing small convex space with low integration, large convex space with low

integration, and so on. In figure 14 a trend line also demonstrates a loose correlation

between convex size and sum integration within a subset of the data, with those

examples further along the convex size axis having extra emphasis on those syntactic

descriptions due to higher synchrony.

Reference Abbreviation

Convexspace(squaremetres)

Convexintegrationradius n

Convexintegrationradius 400m

Convexintegrationradius 800m

8 Laban 3934 129763 2289 5628

26 Milepost Ld'well 4527 415746 5336 15450

34 Circle 8802 125293 1886 4493

4 Moonshot 11380 1216978 19826 55369

49 Milepost Syd'hm 18770 305801 3079 7703

Table 1: Five largest convex spaces with corresponding integration measures. Circle is twice as large as the nextlargest and masks comparison between other data

For example, those convex spaces in the bottom right hand quadrant of the graph

invest high synchrony into a low level of integration and are mostly those in parks. If,

as Hillier argues, investment in synchrony symbolically reinforces a description then

the large 4527sqm convex space in Ladywell Fields containing Milepost Ld'well [26] is

symbolically segregated. Symbolic segregation could be a generic description for parks

themselves; they are spatially expensive state-provided zones which use segregation

from traffic to provide for leisure and health but simultaneously by their size express

society's willingness to invest in well-being. The artwork itself, though freestanding, is

peripherally located and relatively inconspicuous; the dispersed activity and lack of flow

of strangers in a park perhaps means it is ineffective as a location to promote the

'external image' key to policy elsewhere.

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Figure 14: Scatter plot comparing convex size with convex integration at radius 400m. Data split into quadrantsand partial trend line shown

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Figure 15: Scatter plot comparing convex size to convex integration at radius n with data split into quadrants

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The top right hand quadrant represents both high synchrony and high integration and

includes a 2498sqm convex space containing Chariot [43] and Blue Green [42] (fig 16).

There is both convex and linear extension at this point; the main road widens at this

point to create a town centre. In contradistinction to the previous example, the two

artworks are freestanding quite centrally to the space and assert a conspicuous

presence (Blue on Green being light-based does so only at night), enabling them to

remain distinct in the busy town centre and are arguably intended to contribute to an

understanding of the identity of that place as a viable cultural centre. Synchrony here

emphasises integration; a focus of public activity for the local area and as an image of

the area to visitors and those passing through, rather than an arena of retreat like the

park. Indeed the Chariot+BlueGreen convex space is highly integrated at both a local

and borough-wide radius, suggesting the artworks' roles as focal points of both ofthese scales of urban structure. So it appears that a high investment of space around an

artwork can lend itself to freestanding objects whose arrangement within that space is

partly to do with the space's syntactic description.

Figure 16: Chariot [43] and Blue Green [42] located centrally in a convex space (MasterMap/QGIS)

Where does that leave those spaces towards the left hand side of the graph where,

with convex spaces here smaller than 2000sqm there is still the potential for similar

levels of syntactic description but with less 'symbolic emphasis' (ref Hillier)? Clearly the

dividing of the graph in this way is notional and within each section there are variations

in the spatial conditions, but it does point towards further tendencies.

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Fourteen of the nineteen artworks in the bottom left hand quadrant are murals or

wall-mounted pieces. There is a clear logic to using this non-space-consuming work in a

confined space such as a road, where convex extension is limited, but it is also notable

that murals are more likely to be found in relatively segregated locations. There could

be several explanations for this. Firstly it has been demonstrated elsewhere (refMovement Economy) that commercial activity is more likely to occur along routes that

are spatially integrated, as statistically they are likely to attract a flow of pedestrian

traffic. For commercial activity to occur there must be an active building frontage

allowing access to commercial interiors directly from the street, so that there are not

usually the large non-permeable sections of wall required for a mural to be realised.

These tend to be found instead where street frontages are impermeable: amongst

infrastructure like the underpass home to G.T.M. [37] or post-industrial areas such asCreekside in Deptford, the location of L.O.G [10]. Secondly, the segregation of these

smaller convex spaces suggests that they are to be found in residential areas rather

than the main hubs commercial hubs of activity. The mural is the classic form of

community participation art and often, as in the case of Pink Palace [7], involves or is

executed by local residents. We might well expect this kind of mural to be found

where there is less mixing between inhabitants and strangers; residents are in greater

control of this space and perhaps feel more inclined to invest in its appearance than

they would a public space for which the council takes responsibility.

Figure 17: Remains of industry at Deptford Creek (Photo credit: author)

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2.3. Visibility

Figure 18 shows a scatter plot of the size of each isovist compared with the number of

intersecting axials, which could be called its degree of isovist axiality. This

measurement was taken from the 'no parks' axial map so as to demonstrate whetheran artwork was visible from 'urban' space or set back into the spatially segregated

parks. Large clusters of lines around small isovists constituted in urban space and much

more extensive isovists accessible from only a few lines at their perimeter can be seen

from the map. The five largest isovists (see table 2) were so great as to make the rest

of the data incomprehensible in a scatter graph and have therefore been excluded so

that some finer groupings emerge.

Reference AbbreviationIsovist size (squaremetres)

Isovistaxiality

Longest radial(metres)

42 Blue Green 17488 17 471

50 Whisper 19176 11 512

32 Fabric 28783 9 395

4 Moonshot 29749 8 246

18 Milepost L'ham 31060 11 329

47 Milepost Ct'fd 52790 1 731

34 Circle 82599 9 439

2 Circumsphere 142370 20 1529

52 Squirrel 155196 4 809

1 Ancestors 563464 21 1811

Table 2: Ten largest isovists and corresponding axiality and longest views

Towards the origin of the graph works are grouped due to their location in linear

space, with fairly constant proportion between isovist size and axiality. This

proportionality is perhaps to be expected as, assuming that road width is relatively

constant, isovist size from any point on that road would increase with extension the

straighter its course, and intersect with a greater number of adjoining roads. Figure 19

for example shows Newsfeeds [39] the largest and most axial isovist of the group

extending for 400m along a well-linked stretch of main road. A road can offer the

opportunity to convey visual and/or textual information which requiring movement to

be perceived in its entirety and David's Rd [38] a historical portrayal and the text

piece Poem [30] (figure 20) both make use of their locations to convey a linear

narrative.

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Figure 18: Isovist size compared to isovist axiality. Groupings demonstrating artworks with similar isovistproperties

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Figure 19: Isovist from Newsfeeds [39] extending 400m along linear space (QGIS/MasterMap)

Figure 20: Poem [30], a using linear space to convey narrative (Photo credit: author)

Four works Bins [14], Hands [5], Pensive Girl [40] & Horniman [46] are the

smallest isovists of up to around 4000sqm and intersect with a maximum of 2 axial

lines forming a subset of works set back from linear space. They are adjacent to the

street but semi-enclosed in either entrances or enclaves, limiting their visibility to an

adjacent section of street. Bins [14] is a decoration of a functional object, encountered

within an enclave whose purpose is to provide a partially protected space to stop and

use that function (see figure 21). Horniman [46] and Pensive Girl [40] mark the

entrances to a civic museum and the town hall respectively, and are set back from the

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street into the x space attached to those buildings' entrances. The enclave here

becomes a threshold between public and private, the artwork contained by the building

edge and its viewership limited those who choose or are sanctioned to enter that

building.

Figure 21: Bins [15] set back into an enclave from the street (Photo credit: author)

The isovists with the greatest level of axial incidence are those within a constituted

convex space where there is also a road convergence, one manifestation of which is a

town centre. Indeed the four works in this group are all located in either Deptford or

Catford centres and have isovists from around 7,500sqm to 17,500sqm which are

intersected by 14 or more axial lines. Figure 12 shows Catford centre, where a number

of isovists overlap to form a field of influence with a clear 'T' shape covering the convex

space at the convergence of the main roads and a significant amount of the three

approach routes. Waterline [45] and Chariot [43] are abstract objects which have no

obvious functional attributes and convey no visual or textual information. According to

Conroy Dalton's syntactic definition of the Lynchian terminology (Conroy Dalton and

Bafna 2003, 18), we might call these consensus landmarks due to their distinctive

isovist shapes and spatially integrated routes of access (see fig 22). Though denotative

rather than abstract, Anchor [11] displays a similar T-shaped isovist and portrays an

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object symbolic of Deptford's maritime past; it would not be unreasonable to suggest

that this too is a significant landmark. So it seems that in terms of visibility a landmark

site can exist and that it tends to be highly accessible, and in these examples at least

this kind of urban space can support abstract sculpture within this role.

Figure 22: 'Consensus landmark' locations: isovists with distinctive shapes, high axiality and integrated lines of

access (QGIS/Depthmap)

It has been seen that a specific category of artworks, the Sustrans Mileposts, lay in the

highly public space of the park with large, segregated convex spaces. These are

grouped in this comparison with River Life [28] (a set of wind vanes denoting wildlifein the river Quaggy) due to their large isovists and comparatively low isovist axiality.

This particular spatial morphology could be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, these are

artworks with a

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Public art as an urban practice

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