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?
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.1112)
Mexico City, Pedro Pablo Luz

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.8182). 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.5253), 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

Recent theorists like Manuel de Sol-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 caf. In de Sol-Moraless 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).

Caracas

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

Glasgow, 2012

Adelaide, 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