Building a New Public Culture: Public Space and Urban Art

Activist intervwention in San Francisco against NO SIT/LIE in Public Spaces Law, 2012

Public Space and Urban Art

Agreeing on some definitions What is the City Are City and Urban synonyms? Public Spaces

Public Culture and Public Spaces Who Owns Space Owns Culture? The Symbolic Economy Public Culture: justifying its existence The Privatization , Segregation and Dismantlement of Public Space

Re-claiming Public Space and Public Culture: URBAN ART Cidade Cinza trailer Not just Graffitti

JR – Women are Heroes PARKing Day

Reimagining Public Culture BASURAMA

What is a City?

Mexico City, Pedro Pablo Luz

“it becomes clear enough that the city is the geographical locus in which is established the politico-administrative superstructure of a society that has reached that point of technical and social development (natural and cultural) at which there is a differentiation of the product in the simple and the extended reproduction of labour power, culminating in a system of distribution and exchange, which presupposes the existence of: 1. a system of social classes; 2. a political system permitting both the functioning of the social ensemble and the domination of one class; 3. an institutional system of investment, in particular with regard to culture and technology; 4. a system of external exchange.” (Castells 1977, pp.11–12)

What is Urban?

Urbanitas, synonym to Rome, signified “refinement and culture, social life, banquets, courtesy, wit and fashion” (Dupont 1992, pp.76, 81), it also encompassed wealth, politics, power, commerce and most importantly, the sacred: Rome was the domain dedicated to the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus whose temple rose above the city on the top of Capitol hill. Rusticitas, on the other hand, referred to the countryside meaning “austerity, grumpy harshness, squalor, ignorance, doltishness, inelegance” and was not a characteristic considered exclusive of peasants, but of “any Roman not from Rome itself” (Dupont 1992, pp.81–82). Urbanitas and Rusticitas, rather than conceptualize the physical attributes of city and country, served to define divergent ways of life: the village and country conceived as one of backwardness and ignorance while the city was the realm of culture and civilization.

What is Public Space?

Public space encompasses parks, beaches, riversides as well as publicly funded institutions such as museums, libraries, civic centres and swimming pools (Stevenson 2013, pp.52–53), urban spaces that are owned collectively, but beyond the issue of funding or ownership, Stevenson proposes that public space should be understood as any “shared urban space”, whether publicly or privately owned, where large groups of people congregate for a wide range of purposes and where daily encounters with difference takes place.

Public Culture and Public Spaces Who Owns Space, Owns Culture?

The Symbolic Economy

Zukin understands Public Culture as the process of negotiation of images that are commonly accepted by large groups of people, in which public space plays a fundamental role, as it is the place where strangers come together and where the boundaries of urban society are negotiated (Zukin 1995, pp.10, 270). However, the creation of a public culture requires the manipulation of public space for certain kinds of expected social interactions and creating a particular visual representation of the city (Zukin 1995, p.24).

Public Culture and Public Spaces Public Culture: justifying its existence

The Privatization , Segregation and Dismantlement of Public Space

Caracas

Recent theorists like Manuel de Solà-Morales have felt the need to finetune it by pointing to the phenomenon of “collective space.” The latter term may be used to refer to those meeting-places in the city which, though privately owned and hence in some respects exclusionary, continue to form the scenes for various public activities: places like the shopping mall, the sports stadium, the theme park, or the grand café. In de Solà-Morales’s opinion, “Collective space is much more and much less than public space in a restricted sense (as public property). The civil, architectonic, urbanistic, and morphological riches of a city are those of its collective spaces, of all those spaces in which everyday life unfolds, presents itself, and remains as memory. And perhaps these are increasingly spaces that are neither public nor private but both at the same time: public spaces that are used for private activities or private spaces allowing a collective usage.... Public and private disintegrate as categories and no longer suffice” (1992:6).

Re-claiming Public Space and Public Culture

CIDADE CINZA, Sao Paulo, 2013

JR Women are Heroes, Kenya

(2009)

Rebar Group PARKing DAY: Providing temporary public open space . . . one parking spot at a time.

San Francisco, 2005

Adelaide, 2012

Glasgow, 2012

Santiago de Chile, 2012

Rebar Group PARKcycle

CANDY CHANG I Wish This Was (2010)

CANDY CHANG I Wish This Was (2010)

Reimagining Public Culture Garbage City, Cairo, Egypt