Current Issue    (Sustainability) + Pleasure, vol. 1: Culture + Architecture Number 30, Spring/Summer 2009

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Reviewed by Dana Cuff

In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy

By Maartin Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001

OPEN: New Designs for Public Space

Edited by Raymond W. Gastil and Zoë Ryan
New York: Van Alen Institute, 2004

At various points in history, the public sphere rears its head provocatively, potently, unabashedly. Augustus Caesar shaped Rome’s public space as a principal means of displaying power and unifying the citizenry. Napoléon accomplished the former if not the latter with Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris. The great Modernist projects of Chandigarh and Brasília created utopian space that was to symbolize heroic political futures. And when Ant Farm inflated its Clean Air Pod at UC Berkeley in 1970, it was part of the radical tradition of claiming public space for debate. For centuries, if not millennia, public space has been tied to politics, as the realm mediating between citizens and the state, or at least between individual citizens and the collective. Even when Jürgen Habermas extols the public virtue of a street café, the modest space is understood as a breeding ground for political debate.1

Victor Gruen found the answer to that crisis in urban revitalization projects, like the country’s first outdoor pedestrian mall in Fresno, California, where he closed a downtown street to auto traffic in 1964. Coincidentally, my very first architectural job twenty years later was to re-revitalize that mall. It had been abandoned, its boarded-up shops covered with graffiti, and the city decided to relocate its mental health facilities into an old department store—nobody in their right mind had been down there for years, the reasoning went.

Such bizarre design logics cycle through the history of urban public space, provoking skepticism about the value of new books on the topic. What new can be said about the public sphere? Koolhaas has said more than enough on shopping. We’ve abandoned Habermas in principle, yet his principles keep seeping into our conversations. We agree that the boundaries between private and public are murkier than ever, yet we cannot seem to leave the two separate terms behind. We also acknowledge that “the public” is really multiple publics, and that the terms public sphere, space, square, and domain each hold different implications. But these kind of acknowledgments tend to stifle discourse altogether.

In this context, the two books reviewed here are valuable because they contribute new material to work with as we shape our post-metroburban notions about the public sphere. One extends and updates a Habermasian perspective while the other gives us recent design projects to reflect on. In very different ways, each has something new to say and contributes to our understanding of contemporary urban space as a result. OPEN: new designs for public space is the exhibition catalogue from a show mounted by the Van Alen Institute in 2003 that has traveled around the United States, including Washington’s National Building Museum in 2005, the Chicago Architecture Foundation in 2006, and Cleveland’s MOCA in 2007. The focus on open space designs from the past decade sparks thoughtful conversations and short essays by journalists, architects, and scholars. These are interspersed throughout the book, which is dominated by a series of refreshing two-page spreads (one text, one image) about projects from all over the world —Africa, Asia, the EU, South America, and the United States. The catalogue format establishes a glossary of spaces with a global perspective on urban trends in plazas, streets, memorials, and technologically enhanced spaces. OPEN’s utility as a pictorial reference on new public space design is only slightly marred by the absence of an index or world map to show the location of each entry. In addition, because the original exhibition took place in 2003, a number of works presented as projects have since been built (e.g., Barcelona’s waterfront park by FOA, the ICA in Boston by Diller + Scofidio), or abandoned (Hadid’s Science Hub in Singapore, Alsop’s Fourth Grace development for Liverpool), which is not to say that the projects aren’t worth studying, but readers naturally begin to wonder, “What are we looking at? Are these for real?”

Behind the OPEN catalogue lurks a question about what is meant by “new designs for public space.” If the statement by editors Raymond Gastil and Zoë Ryan seems formulaic, that the designs featured “are changing the way we live, work, and play in cities,” their underlying point of view is well-worth documenting: In spite of political, economic, and lifestyle forces that undermine public space, works from around the world demonstrate that opportunities for vital urban life are being designed and built. The essays in the catalogue, like the projects, are a valuable, curated collection of ideas rather than an argument about the public sphere.

In OPEN, “new” implies recent rather than unprecedented, which reflects our historical situation, when the directions for urban change are less clear than they were to Gruen in the 1960s. In the most optimistic light, these projects and perspectives chart a trend that runs counter to the end-of-civic-life urbanists whose world has been gated and malled. But OPEN also stands against the spectacularized version of architectural urbanism ushered in with Bilbao. The projects between the covers of OPEN demonstrate the variety of ways designers are countering simple versions of those two dominant ideologies in the public arena.

If OPEN is a global tour, In Search of New Public Domain is all about the argument. The authors, Maartin Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, build a case, in this short text, that failures of the public domain stem not from the standard excuses but from a lack of “friction.” This double-Dutch view from two urban planners (though Reijndorp was trained as an architect), finds grist for the public mill in the chaos of everyday life. Its potential for a political civic life is strictly neither Habermasian nor utopian, though it is a bit romantic in a gritty sort of way. They argue that the public domain is characterized by cultural exchange in which friction and confrontation are real possibilities. At a later point they offer the provocative definition of the public domain: “An experience at a location where the ‘code of behavior’ is followed by groups with which we are not familiar.” In some ways, this speaks to a current discourse in architecture about experience design, extending it with an infusion of social experience that can enrich the play of media and effects. They hold to a worldview in which difference reigns over homogenization, where social codes vary substantially and in turn energize cities. Be gone, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Disney! Make room for the local oyster farmers’ protest and the pickup game of vacant lot soccer.

Nowhere is the perspective of each text as obvious as from the photos: OPEN is full of unpopulated aerial, abstract views so that the space itself is revealed; In Search of New Public Domain contains eye-level views into the swarm of humanity in airports, at the beach, in the mall. You can’t tell exactly where they are, but you get the feeling you’d like to join them.

The photographs reveal the weakness of In Search of, at least according to its self-stated intention to inform the design of new public space. We can blame the occasionally awkward translation (e.g., the public domain must respond creatively to current trends of “parochialization, functionalization, and aestheticization”), but in the end, this text offers no easy remedies or even diagnoses that architects can act upon. In this sense, their hope of inspiring new forms of design is as opaque in the images as the text—hardly a single work of architecture or landscape is portrayed. When the authors suggest that the public domain depends on different groups of people rubbing elbows, it is an immense leap to say that “the exchange and commingling of those different worlds and their liminal spaces will become the design task.”

It is worth taking time to read between the lines. “Different worlds,” to Hajer and Reijndorp, means homeless and affluent, prostitutes and office workers, transit passengers and street people. There is a plea for democratic space here, but it is not a simple “Can’t we all just get along?” point of view. Instead, they narrow their attentions to a few ideas for the city: stronger “liminal spaces”—in-betweens and transitions particularly between public and private spaces—the reintegration of the car, and the inclusion of the homeless. The indistinct rhetorical line between urban sociology and urban materiality paints a murky picture, but if you squint at it, outlines of an important urban position become clear. The problem is not shopping, or privatization, or crime, but the boring, monotonous spaces that have emerged to deal with them. Since urban renewal swept America and Europe in the postwar era, and private interests came to dominate where the state had formerly operated, public spaces developed with a priority on singular functions and easy control. The authors talk through this problem and create an alternative way to think about the public domain. If architects, planners, and policymakers absorb this way of thinking, they will have a loose but provocative set of objectives to guide them.

Together, these two volumes form a useful and provocative dyad. While OPEN leaves, well . . . opens the underlying principles that guide the design of its disperse examples, In Search of offers those principles, yet we remain . . . yes, in search of design guidance. The two texts converge in at least one geographic location: Barcelona. Now at the 150th birthday of Cerdà’s plan that extended the city beyond its ancient walls, Barcelona is one of the only cities where design has made real improvements decade after decade. Much of this civic quality is due to the rules Cerdà projected to create urbanism (a term he coined) from architecture.

Although Cerdà says in his later text, The General Theory of Urbanization, that the five bases for urbanism are technical, administrative, legal, economic, and political, it is really the formal—those chamfered corners on every block—that he is remembered for. Rather than laying out rules, Hajer, Reijndorp, Gastil, and Ryan offer contemporary views on urbanism. It is worth kindling the embers of our discourse on public space, because recent developments afford opportunities as well as perils. The increase in the perceived threat of terrorism has had a tangible impact, such that surveillance cameras and locked gates are acceptable even within the public sphere. The reconstruction of American infrastructure as an economic recovery strategy is less like the WPA-era projects and more like those of the Army Corps of Engineers. There has been no discussion of public sphere repercussions. The shift from public space to consumer-oriented space has gone hand in hand with a shift from a designed environment to a designed experience. In OPEN we literally see a much wider range of public spaces cropping up all over the world; from In Search of, we gather a compelling new argument against control, whether it stems from new urbanism or state watchdogs.

Victor Gruen thought cities were not planned enough, and Cerdà could be used as evidence that he was right. But that would misinterpret Cerdà because in Barcelona the motivation is not a plan or model, as Choay pointed out, but a series of projects and sets of logics that create its remarkable public sphere. The two books reviewed here give us projects and logics that help us assess where we are as well as where we can navigate forward, past the surveillance society, the shopping society, and the experience economy, into the next public domain.

Note

1. Jürgen Habermas, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1964).