Definition of Public Space and Public Realm, position paper on creative dissonance

ARCH751
Mazzone Giuseppe


Definition of Public Space and Public Realm, position paper on creative dissonance.



In the process of creation a space, the first approach made by men is the anthropization of a territory that represents the physical translation of the idea of territoriality. Through this action, men determine the separation of an area from the space all around it, creating a boundary between their land and the land that belong to the others; a distinction between a private space and a public one. An example from this point of view can be seen in the Nolli Map, where the representation of the space occurs in two colors: white and black.
The meaning of the Nolli Map (fig.1) is not exactly related with the public and private spaces in the city but with the plain and void that create the syntax of the urban space. However, we can imagine that this type of representation can be read thinking at the different movements that people can experience in the city: the plain (usually represented in black) can be interpreted as places where people stops, while the void (usually in white) as places where people is moving. Giving this interpretation to the Nolli Map, the use of two colors only represents a limitation since the spaces where people interact can exist also where people are suppose to stop. So, if we suppose to use the two colors (black and the white) for representing two extreme conditions in the urban experience, a better representation can be done filling the gap between these two opposite colors by using different tones of gray. Through them, it is also possible to obtain a representation of the different types of boundaries expressed by Groàk “opaque, transparent, and permeable”[1] that can to be interpreted not only as physical boundaries, but also as social and cultural boundaries that people are creating among themselves.
Looking at the typical space related to a neighborhood in Unites States, a generic section shows a transition of spaces:
(A) road;
(B) garden 1;
(C) sidewalk;
(D) garden 2 (related to an house);
(E) house.
The transition from A to E (fig.2) shows a passage from a public space (the road) to a private one (the house), passing through three semipublic spaces where the relationship between public and private assumes different proportions. In B (the garden 1) and C (the sidewalk), the percentage of public space is dominant; however, the presence of a percentage of privatization imposes that people have not complete freedom in those spaces, and especially in C. In D (the garden 2), the percentage is completely reversed, so this space is more related to the private realm than to the public one. It is possible to consider it like an extension of the house affecting also part of the sidewalk and determining its “partially loss of freedom”. Moving into the house (E), we enter in a space that is essentially private, but where it is possible to read anyway a changing percentage between public and private realm, even if with a quality of those spaces that is completely different from the ones experienced outside the house. The porch can be interpreted as a public space; the living room as a transitional space; the bedrooms as private spaces. So, making a representation through the Nolli Map:
- the road can be represented in white;
- the side walk and both the gardens can be represented with different tones of gray;
- the house cannot be represented only by black, but through a darker tonality of gray that from the porch is moving toward the black of the bedrooms.
Shifting those ideas into a context outside the private house and more related to the interaction in a urban scale, Lofland shows that the kind of possible interactions that people can experience in an urban environment is related to the way in which them perceive the public space.[2] Looking at the way in which the space structures human interactions, Lofland determines three progressive steps:
1 - How interactions occur;
2 - Who interact with whom;
3 - The content of interaction.[3]
Through those steps the attention is moved on the social aspect that a space determines on people. A good example is represented by the movie “Do the right thing” where the director Spike Lee shows how groups belonging to different cultures develop and idea of segregation even if they share the same space. [4] In fact, while the neighborhood that constitute the scenario of the movie is an Afro-American one, there are in it at least other two groups: a Latino one and an American-Italian one. Even if all of them share the same space, its use is different for each group, reminding to the idea of Intercalation expressed by Dell Upton in his book “Another City.”[5] The meaning of Intercalation can be best express in the animation filed, where it represents the process of connecting two different drawings for the creation of their hypothetic movement. So, moving in the architecture context, intercalation consists in two different objects or building that “are pretty much the same but not absolutely identical.”[6] This definition is very close to the reality shown in the movie of Spike Lee, where different cultural groups are living in their own heterotopia,[7] with its own un-physical boundaries. The only person in this multi-layered reality that can move among all those heterotopias is a homeless, because his living world is the city itself and not a space cut out from it.
Used in this way, both the idea of heterotopia and intercalation can be considered close one to each other, since both of them are related to the personal interpretation that different people are giving to the same urban space. Using again the Nolli Map, it is like everyone distributes the grayscale in a different way related to their own vision and experience of reality.
The task of looking through those different interpretations of the same reality trying to capture the essence of society is done by the ethnographer, who “reconstructs not the physical space but the social context related to spaces in the present and in the past.”[8] The analysis of the social structure at the base of human interactions[9] gives the possibility to create a “stage” where those interactions happen and where the ethnographer has to recognize the difference between the alteration of reality and the pure reality. This is to say to understand how much the subjectivity of the storyteller is affecting the objectivity of reality. Through this process, it is possible to reconstruct the type of interaction that people are experiencing in the studied context. Further information can be reached looking at the physical aspect too, analyzing how architecture is used in that context for giving emphasis to some particular behaviors, justifying some particular actions, and responding to the idea of microsociology[10] by Sharon Zukin. An example is the different types of not-generalizable interactions that Miles Richardson recognizes moving in a plaza or in a market. While in the plaza, the interactions among people are formal; in a market the same interactions occur in a more informal way.[11] In fact, markets can be considered like a reproduction on a smaller scale of an urban structure, since they usually work on two sides of a pedestrian road showing a similar hierarchization of public and private spaces. The difference from the urban context is in the quality of sounds that they produce:[12] in an urban context we move from a loud space (the road) to a quiet space (the house), while in a market both spaces (the pedestrian road and the stand’s space) have the same loudness, suggesting people to have more informal interactions. In a plaza instead, even if the level of loudness is the same everywhere, usually people tend to create groups maintaining interactions that are more formal.
A similar control on the different human interactions can be moved in a larger scale looking at what Lofland call the “monitoring behavior.”[13] Its purpose can be described as a way to guarantee a “controlled interactions” among people through four different stages of control:
1-Privatization;
2-Shadow privatization;
3-Panopticon approach;
4-Hideway approach.[14] (fig. 3)
Those four stages are moving through spaces whose control became progressively stronger. While in stage 1 and 2 it is still possible to perceive an idea of public space, in stage 3 it tends to disappear for its heavy control, and in stage 4 it is completely gone because the access itself to those areas is almost hidden, transforming those spaces in a kind of “secret gardens” known only by few people. The result is that those type of spaces result to be too much controlled and the types of interactions seems occur in a less natural way.
Moving to a bigger scale, J.B.Jackson, analyzes how natural interactions occur in the American cities’ landscape,[15] where the real landmarks are now represented by places promoting social life and creating a sense of place[16] (like a church); and where the human interactions occur because people choose spontaneously to share the same timetable through social activities, creating a sense of time.[17] So, this idea of natural human interactions results related to values that go beyond the architectural physicality of an urban landscape, showing that the urban experience is something that should be fully experienced with all the five senses.[18]

Personal views affect the way in which people make experience of human interactions and of the surrounding space. Usually in any space is possible to read a percentage of appropriation that can be translated in a kind of semi-privatization’s process. The same idea to give a sense of freedom to everyone experiencing a public space (typical of the American urban landscape) determines their progressive privatization that is justified by the purpose of making them more appealing so that everyone expects to receive in them a precise social experience related to the different level of interaction chosen. The basic idea of those public or semi-public spaces is to give to everyone the illusion of being part of a society. The constant background of music and the sounds of the surrounding people are able to create the idea of a social experience even if someone choose to avoid a direct human interaction, translating in this way the personal view of society that each person has. It seems an interesting controlled way to respond at the plurality of social expectations of people in a landscape where the creation of neighborhoods seems to increase not only the social distance between people but also their physical distance, since every single house has its own surrounding space with its invisible but strong boundaries.






















Fig. 1
The Nolli Map of Rome (detail)















Fig. 2
A typical section of a road in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.It is possible to read the different five spaces of a urban context: (from the right to the left) the road, the first strip of green space, the sidewalk, the second strip of green space, and the house. Each one of these space has a different percentage of private and public quality.











Fig. 3
An example of “Hideway Approach” in the city of Milwaukee. The plaza in the picture (at the third level) is accessible only from the inside of the two buildings on its sides: a building of university housing on the right and a school’s building on the left.






Notes

[1] Steven Groàk, The idea of building: thought and action in the design and production of buildings (Taylor & Francis, 1992),.28
[2] Lyn H.Lofland, The public realm: exploring the city’s quintessential society territory (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998)
[3] Lyn H.Lofland, ibid.
[4] Spike Lee, Do the right thing, 1989. The movie represents the social interaction of different cultural groups in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where are living mainly by Afro-American people. The presence of an Italian pizzeria in it represents a kind of intrusion and an invasion of territory, especially inside it there are references to the American-Italian culture but none to the Afro-American one.
[5] Dell Upton, Another City: urban life and urban spaces in the new American republic, (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2008)
[6] Dell Upton, ibid.
[7] Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces,” Diacritics 16, Spring 1986, 22-27
[8] Rhys Isaac, “Discourse on method,” in The transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 323-357
[9] Isaac, ibid.
[10] Sharon Zukin, “While the city shops” in The culture cities (New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 187-258. Microsociology looks at the public spaces as realms where the interactions among persons occur, but not in a way that is always generalizable.
[11] Miles Richardson, “Being-in-the-market versus being-in-the-plaza: material culture and construction of social reality in Spanish America,” in The anthropology of space and place: locating culture (Setha M.Low and Denise Lawrence-Zunigais [Editors], New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 74-91
[12] Dell Upton, idib.
[13] Lofland, idib.
[14] Lofland, ibid.
[15] J.B.Jackson, “A sense of place , a sense of time,” in A sense of place, a sense of time (Albuquereue: Yale University Press, 1994), 149-164
[16] J.B.Jackson, ibid.
[17] J.B.Jackson, ibid.
[18] Dell Upton, idib.





Bibliography

Groàk, Steven. The idea of building: thought and action in the design and production of buildings. Taylor & Francis, 1992

Lofland, Lyn H. The public realm: exploring the city’s quintessential society territory. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998

Upton,Dell. Another City: urban life and urban spaces in the new American republic. Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2008

Foucault,Michel. Diacritics 16. Spring 1986

Isaac,Rhys. The transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982

Zukin, Sharon. The culture cities. New York: Blackwell Publishers, 1995

Richardson, Miles. The anthropology of space and place: locating culture. Setha M.Low and Denise Lawrence-Zunigais (Editors), New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003

Jackson, J.B. A sense of place, a sense of time. Albuquereue: Yale University Press, 1994
Lee, Spike. Do the right thing. USA 1989