Public, as a noun or adjective, is not confined to a single discipline, practice, narrative, or theory. It is instead a complex construct that a) impacts the rules and regulations that order our cities; b) reveals the cultural, political, and economic priorities of a society; and c) establishes the faultlines of both city form and urban action, either individually or collectively, including who has the right to the city and its spaces. With this in mind, this proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, historically, spatially, and socially: how, when, and why it becomes legible and desirable; who gets the right to create it and for whom; and whether different historical moments or political and/or spatial contexts enable, constrain, or transform the “social production of the public.” Among other things, through lectures, discussions, debates, and design we will interrogate what it means to be public; of the public; in the public; for the public, with the public, or by the public. Each proposition holds a different implication for democracy, processes, and populations when overlaid with the compounding issues of our time, such as economic and social inequality, climate change, population growth and decline, territorial conflicts, health and violence epidemics, aging infrastructures, and eroding trust in democratic governance. These pressures do not stay local, and neither do the publics that form around them, each entangled with wider systems that reach well beyond any single boundary. As publics are increasingly formed online, algorithmic processes reshape how they gather, producing new kinds of hyper politics, spaces and infrastructures that sustain them. The slow, deliberative publics of classic theory now coexist with platform-based publics that assemble and disperse in hours, forming quickly and everywhere at once, yet thinly organized and quick to fragment.

To hold this complexity, the seminar draws from scholars, practitioners, and everyday folk to build foundational intelligence and provocative interpretations of social, spatial, and digital publics: how they are imagined, represented, and brought into view through physical space, media, or collective imaginaries. Beyond reading classic texts, it is conversation-, project-, and design-based, seeking participatory engagement that advances both theory and praxis.