Search

In this short paper I question the validity of aligning new public spaces with the idea of a public sphere of democratic determination. I suggest that the current emphasis on public spaces in urban development schemes is nostalgic, repeats the ungrounded advocacy associated with culturally-led urban redevelopment, and masks a widening democratic deficit. Looking to geographical writing on space as a realm of boundaries and exclusions, I ask whether insights from this can be applied to the problem of what constitutes a democratic public sphere (if one exists). I conclude that occupations of urban spaces constitute a proto-public sphere but are necessarily ephemeral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the possibilities for an art of urban engagement in the case of the Nine Mile Run Greenway project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Factors which affect urban development in the 21st century; Factors affecting the function of the state of maintaining an equilibrium between the growth rates of productivity and consumption; Description of the Nine Mile Run Greenway project; Role of art in the post-industrial city.

This essay questions the privileging of the design of public over domestic spaces and buildings in architecture and urban design, and their education, and the identification of public space with a public realm seen as the location of democracy. It cites the case made by Doreen Massey that the division of public and private realms is gendered, allowing men the freedom of public affairs whilst confining women to domesticity; and argues that a dualism of public and private space ignores a third area of transitional spaces which affect patterns of urban sociation. The case of redevelopment in El Raval, Barcelona, demonstrates that public space may be, today, part of an anti-democratic strategy of gentrification. But, if public space constructs a gendered public realm as imposition, there remains, as Hannah Arendt contends, a need for locations of social mixing in which difference is visible. What, if not public space, enables this? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles on the relation of art to the development, regeneration and sustainability of cities.