Public Space

Between Reimagination and Occupation

Svetlana Hristova, Mariusz Czepczyński

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472453648
• eBook ISBN: 9781317073291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Public Space: Between Reimagination and Occupation examines contemporary public space as a result of intense social production reflecting contradictory trends: the long-lasting effects of the global crisis, manifested in supranational trade-offs between political influence, state power and private ownership; and the appearance of global counter-actors, enabled by the expansion of digital communication and networking technologies and rooted into new participatory cultures, easily growing into mobile cultures of protest.

The highlighted cases from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America reveal the roots of the pre-crisis processes of redistribution of capital and power as an aspect of the transition from the consumerist past into the post-consumerist present, by tracing the slow growth of social discontent that has led only a few years later to the mobilization of a new kind of self-conscious globally-acting class.

This edited volume brings together a broad range of interdisciplinary discussions and approaches, providing sociologists, cultural geographers, and urban planning academics and students with an opportunity to explore the various social, cultural, economic and political factors leading to reappropriation and reimagination of the urban commons in the cities within which we live.

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Part 1

Concepts and discourses

The resilient public space

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1 Reimagining civil society

Conflict and control in the city’s public spaces

Sharon Zukin

Contemporary ideas of public space reflect an idealized view of the squares and marketplaces of ancient times, where strangers of diverse backgrounds are imagined to mingle freely, debate political views, and engage in a lively bazaar of commercial transactions. Those spaces did, in fact, host a wide range of activities that are common to city life and democratic republics. But they limited access to social groups such as women, slaves, and foreigners who did not enjoy full citizenship rights, and their broad plazas, surrounded by temples and assembly halls for the elite, mobilized awe for, and obedience to, both sacred and secular leaders. From the beginning, then, public space has not only involved collective rituals of display, exchange, and passion, but also issues of social conflict and control.

This should not arouse surprise today, when public space is recognized as a contentious site as well as a unifying symbol of civil society. Protestors often mass in the central public spaces of cities around the world to voice demands for change, from Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 to Taksim Square in Istanbul and Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kiev in 2013. Occupying these spaces, as suggested by the Occupy movement that spread from New York to London, Hong Kong, and many other cities in recent years, asserts a strong claim of the ‘excluded’ to be equal members of society, a claim that goes beyond formal state institutions to challenge the entrenched power of capital on the one hand, and autocracy on the other.

Though central places have no monopoly as a site of protest demonstrations, they carry a significant moral weight in the history of the nation. Located at a node of media networks, they also command widespread attention. For both reasons, collective actions in these spaces have a strong potential to shape public opinion. Yet central public spaces near the halls of power are fiercely defended by the forces of order: the military and police. Challenging the dominant view of who is permitted to occupy them, for how long, and for which goals, may provoke a brutal response.

Even in normal times, use of public space is subject to rules and regulations. In principle, everyone can enter without paying a fee or coming under suspicion. But in the heightened expectation of protest demonstrations and terrorist attacks, cameras, public police, and privately employed security guards exercise surveillance and control (Graham 2010). Specific groups like homeless people, teenagers, and ethnic minorities are often targeted for intensive policing and prevented from gathering in parks and on the streets (Davis 1990; Mitchell 2003). Increasingly, private associations dominate public-private partnerships to both finance and manage public spaces, and are able to set additional rules for their use. By law, moreover, local and national governments determine what can be displayed and said. These conditions subvert the integrity of public space; they threaten its meaning as ‘open’ and ‘free,’ and raise the risk of ‘privatization’ (Low and Smith 2006).

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Yet at the same time, the public in many societies is becoming more socially and culturally diverse. Both transnational and domestic migration bring many ‘strangers’ into the urban heart of the nation. Initially, hostile efforts often aim to exclude migrants from gathering in public spaces, whether they are informal vendors, day labourers waiting for a job, or just people who look different, or are dressed differently, from the majority (Greenberg and Lewis 2017).

But struggles against discrimination take place on the streets as well as inside legislative chambers and the courts. Mass demonstrations for immigrants’ rights use the same symbolically charged public spaces as every other form of political association: in front of city hall, on the steps of the national capitol, in the central public squares. Gradually, just as native-born ethnic minorities are integrated into the everyday life of shopping streets and public parks, partly by changes of law and partly by changes of habit, so transnational migrants also find acceptance. Over time, public parks, shopping streets, and community gardens establish a ‘new normal’ of cosmopolitan tolerance (Anderson 2011; Amin 2012; Hall 2012).

It is not easy to guess the future evolution of public space, for contradictory pressures will continue to grow to make it more “defensible” but also more accessible and socially inclusive. Among the most important trends of social control, however, are privatization in increasingly entrepreneurial forms and incorporation of difference on multiple scales. These have significant influence on shaping the norms and obligations of civil society.

Privatization of publicly owned space

The extension of private governance over public spaces is a historically new form of social control, which emerged in fears of disorder during the 1970s and 1980s in major cities of the world, especially in North America. During those years, social problems like homelessness and disagreeable, sometimes illegal, behaviour, from urinating and drinking alcohol in public to begging for money and selling proscribed drugs, spread beyond the marginalized urban districts where such ‘deviance’ had been more or less quarantined.

One factor in the spread of ‘deviant’ public behaviour was social and political. Increasing poverty, the reduction of the social welfare safety net, and a rising cost of living in the biggest, global cities displaced many people with untreated illness and problems with drug abuse from cheap rented rooms and mental hospitals to the streets and parks. Another factor was cultural. In the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture, public behaviour became looser, more expressive of individual autonomy, and less deferential to authority. Faced with widespread transgression of norms, the police were unable or unwilling to prevent social disorder. Moreover, the financial costs of maintaining order, as well as maintaining the physical infrastructure of public parks and streets, challenged the financial resources of local governments (Zukin 2010).

In New York and other U.S. cities, corporate elites with downtown property interests formed not-for-profit business improvement districts, modelled on a Canadian form of governance, that gave them the right to manage public spaces – mainly shopping streets and public parks – if they paid for their cleaning, policing, landscaping, and promotion. Over time, more local governments were attracted by the opportunity to shift these responsibilities to the private sector. Gradually, the BID model was adopted in cities around the world, a public policy of ‘mobile urbanism’ that was adapted to local conditions (McCann and Ward 2011).

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Beginning with the necessary tasks of keeping public space clean and safe, however, BIDs and public parks conservancies also assumed a ‘civilizing mission’. They aimed to make public spaces into havens of consumption by eliminating all potentially unpleasant encounters.

BIDs do this by explicitly banning disturbing behaviour, from homeless people picking glass bottles out of trash cans for a small cash return to skateboarders zooming through pedestrians on the sidewalk. But they also commercialize and democratize an elitist ideal of consumption, a policy that I have called ‘pacification by cappuccino’ (Zukin 1995). Most importantly, as BIDs have expanded since the 1980s, their upgrading of public spaces has relied on a comprehensive infrastructure of cultural strategies backed by the public, private, and non-profit sectors: street festivals, cultural heritage, farmers’ markets, and aesthetically pleasing landscapes. Together, these strategies establish an ‘archipelago’ of harmonious experiences (Hajer and Reijndorp 2001). While this reshaping of the urban environment can be seen as the result of a concerted ideological campaign against the poor by corporate elites and the more affluent middle class, it is most directly related to the cultural claims of gentrification and the political economy of upscale redevelopment (Smith 1996; Zukin 2010).

The steady advance toward privatized public spaces in the U.S. was marked, at the beginning, by violent struggles over Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of New York City and People’s Park in Berkeley, California, around 1990, and, most recently, by the very successful opening of the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park, both in New York City, around 2010. During these two decades, privatization was institutionalized by the state and seemed to become unstoppable. From post-industrial abandonment and encampments of squatters, a number of the city’s public parks were transformed by public-private partnerships into manicured, programmed, and entrepreneurial public spaces. Ironically, this led to more effective public use, despite continued criticism that the state was giving control to business interests and catering to the wealthy.

Early privatization in the 1990s

For many people in both the East Village and Berkeley, local public parks at the twentieth century’s end represented a rare, remaining ‘free’ space where homeless men and women could camp, self-declared anarchists and political critics could speak, and musicians could play instruments at all hours. Those who advocated this vision were the heirs of the 1960s counterculture and Free Speech Movement. For them, each park ‘was working as it should: as truly a public space. . .a political space that encouraged unmediated interaction, a place where the power of the state (and other property owners) could be kept at bay’ (Mitchell 2003, 123). When the police tried to exercise control by imposing a curfew, as they did in Tompkins Square Park in 1988, or removing the homeless, as they did in both parks in the early 1990s, protests erupted, although many other community members, especially families with children and local business owners, felt the parks had become too dirty and dangerous.

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After 1990, local authorities in the East Village and Berkeley put the two parks on different paths. People’s Park languished under the management of the University of California, which issued periodic plans to review the park’s use and build facilities for students in it. Faced with a hard core of protestors, however, and an activist organization that fed the homeless there, the university administration allowed the park to remain as it was. This aroused strong emotions on all sides. On the one hand, supporters of the ‘free’ space cheered it as an example of social inclusiveness and praised it for giving more privileged people an opportunity to experience poverty and social difference. On the other hand, critics avoided going into the park, fearing its homeless residents’ dogs, illegal drugs, and aggressive verbal and physical attacks.

In New York, the liberal city government insisted on removing the homeless encampment from Tompkins Square Park. Then the parks department closed it for a year to carry out an extensive new design and renovation. ‘This park is a park,’ Mayor David N. Dinkins said. ‘It is not a place to live. I will not have it any other way.’ The parks commissioner shared this view. ‘What we’ve learned is when you start to see that stuff – people putting up tents and tepees – you’ve got to go in and get rid of it,’ Commissioner Betsy Gotbaum said. ‘Otherwise it will turn into a shantytown, and that’s not what parks are for’ (Kifner 1991).

Some East Village community members endorsed this approach, forming an association to build a dog run in the park, and later raising nearly half a million dollars to improve it. Local volunteer work and fund raising to build and maintain facilities were very much in line with the citywide movement to establish BIDs and public parks conservancies. The combination of user-volunteers and public-private partnerships was championed by Dinkins’ successor as mayor, Rudolph Giuliani (1994–2001), and greatly expanded under his successor, Michael Bloomberg (2002–13).¹

In 1995, three local restaurant owners formed the East Village Parks Conservancy, which took as its mission, in partnership with the parks department, ‘to clean Tompkins Square and add plants’ (www.evpcnyc.org/index2.html, accessed August 1, 2014). Today, stewardship of public parkland remains the conservancy’s goal, aided by fund raising and organizing volunteers to keep the park clean. The conservancy even sells sponsorships of individual trees, including, for the biggest donations, the park’s three historic Great Sycamores. Unlike People’s Park, Tompkins Square Park hosts free summer movies and an annual jazz festival, as well as offering basketball courts, children’s playgrounds, a weekend farmers’ market, and lush green lawns. In contrast to Berkeley residents’ continued avoidance of People’s Park, East Village residents make daily use of Tompkins Square Park.

To some degree, generational differences separate the old counterculture from today’s park users. But it cannot be denied that since the 1990s, both Berkeley and the East Village have experienced gentrification. In general, a majority of community residents in both places, including large numbers of university students, seem to prefer a well-managed park to a place that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Public Space
• Design and the Built Environment
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART 1 Concepts and Discourses: The Resilient Public Space
• PART 2 Contestations and Rights: Public and Civic
• PART 3 Management and Governance: Transformation and Control
• Conclusion: Rediscovering Public Space Globally
• Index