22 minute read
space
The Invention of Public Space
Mariana Mogilevich | University of Minnesota Press | $30
Current debates around public spaces in New York—the future of pandemic-born streeteries, say, or police-enforced curfews in Washington Square Park—assume that these spaces should be for everyone. Within this discourse, public space is seen as inherently democratic and the place where we celebrate the city’s diversity, among other things. But Mariana Mogilevich’s new book upends this wisdom. The Invention of Public Space challenges the notion that the city’s open or free spaces amount to an “unalloyed, universal good” whose civic underpinnings can be traced to the ancient Athenian agora. It emends and dramatically condenses the historical trajectory of the titular spatial invention, dating it to the 1960s and 1970s, during the John Lindsay mayoral administration.
Mogilevich insists on the point. “New York City in the early 1960s did not have ‘public space’ as such,” she writes. “No one referred to it that way,” here or in any other city. It was only through experiments in inclusive space-making and public participation that the constellation of spaces that are now commonly understood as making up “public space”—parks, plazas, vacant lots, sidewalks, waterfronts, streets—came to be identified by that name. These efforts took on outsize meaning against a backdrop of urban crisis, where design proposals, big and small, could open a door to utopia. “Each space,” Mogilevich writes, “was conceived not as a part of the city or as a space apart from the city but as a metaphor for the city as a whole.”
Through careful presentation of spatial and political experiments that continue to shape the fields of architecture and planning to this day, Mogilevich shows what was and is at stake in urban life. The Invention of Public Space invites the reader to see the city not as a static object, but as the product of ongoing negotiations among people. Indeed, the book’s great strength is the compelling portraits it renders of city officials, residents, designers, and advocates, all with their own assumptions and ideas about what a city should be and how it might be used (and by whom). Throughout, Mogilevich’s precise, engaging writing delivers complex concepts and histories in a tangible way, giving the reader the chance to inhabit the perspectives of this diverse set of actors.
Rather than analyzing shades of publicness—who owns these spaces, really?— Mogilevich foregrounds the processes behind the designs and depicts these places as “physical, lived space.” Introducing the fertile urban design currents that came out of the immediate postwar period, she shows how these reference points guided planners and urbanists inside the Lindsay administration to develop “experiments in open space.” The book drills down into these experiments, with each chapter devoted to a different spatial type, ranging from residential plazas and vest-pocket parks to pedestrian streets and waterfront landscapes. Examining three threads—psychology, participation, and urban scale—through a series of dramatic episodes, Mogilevich shows how ambitious ideals met urban realities to produce results both concrete and ideological.
JOHN VLIET LINDSAY PAPERS, MANUSCRIPTS AND ARCHIVES, YALE UNIVERSITY
Produced for his 1965 mayoral campaign, this comic depicts John Lindsay as an advocate of public parks.
Urban Design as Public Policy
Reading Mogilevich’s study, architects will likely salivate over how much power and influence designers had in the Lindsay administration. Elected in 1965 as a liberal Republican and reelected in 1969 as an independent, Lindsay understood that space is political and politics is spatial. He was adapting to the times: Amid mass migration and suburbanization—one million Black and Puerto Rican residents moved to New York between 1960 and 1970, while a similar number of non-Hispanic whites moved out—the city saw an increase in economic inequality and calls for racial justice. The urban crisis followed top-down urban transformations and renewal schemes implemented by Robert Moses during his decades-long rule.
Lindsay countered the status quo with a unique formula equating urban design with public policy. In a white paper on the city’s housing crisis, he promised “to make this city—its housing, its parks, its community facilities—for its people.” Mogilevich describes the approach as a “model of fun, freedom, and diversity, enlisting designers and planners in concerted municipal experimentation to create the spaces that would prove it was so.” In a first, Lindsay established the Urban Design Group within the Department of City Planning as a “design experiment laboratory.” Staffed by 15 architects, the group led design and planning studies, conducted design reviews, and coordinated private development.
This was a time for creative bureaucrats such as Thomas Hoving. While in his mid30s, Hoving made the now-unthinkable career jump from art historian working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval wing to city parks commissioner on the strength of a single white paper. That sketch, for the construction of playgrounds in overlooked areas and marginalized communities, would blossom into an ideological program grounded in “learning and self-actualization rather than standardization and conformity,” Mogilevich writes. Under Hoving, the city hosted Central Park “happenings”—participatory events like costume parties and dance contests—and built adventure playgrounds by architects like Richard Dattner.
As Hoving was busy remaking the city’s playscapes, others in the administration made headway on early sidewalk cafe regulations and experiments in pedestrianization. Lindsay appointed a Sidewalk Cafe Study Committee, which suggested allowing cold-weather enclosures to “bring people back to the streets, thereby reducing the likelihood of crime,” and the Urban Design Group even developed a study of design standards for outdoor eating on Second Avenue. Gay Talese satirically commented at the time that New Yorkers could finally live the cafe life as they would abroad, as long as they were “not allergic to bus fumes and … not poor.” In 2020, streeteries reappeared on Second Avenue, though their future is uncertain.
In another foreshadowing, the first Earth Day celebration, on April 22, 1970, triggered temporary street closings across the city. Designed to reduce air pollution and promote public transport, these closings resembled the Open Streets program Bill de Blasio introduced during the COVID-19 lockdown and were as energizing and politically fraught as their counterparts are now. The near disappearance of manufacturing space, particularly in Manhattan, can also be linked to design and policy decisions of the Lindsay era. Shared spaces in housing developments were contested then as they are now, ranging from super-public plazas to areas minimized in the name of “defensible space.”
Public Participation
If Mogilevich’s book turns on singular visionary bureaucrats, it also pays mind to evolving modes of public participation in the creation and maintenance of open spaces. These passages are among the most exciting and tragic in the entire volume, revealing how grand ambitions and good intentions can easily falter—especially when sufficient planning and resources for maintenance are lacking. The city’s “vest-pocket” parks program is a paradigmatic example of this denouement. Named for their small size, vest-pocket parks attempted to turn vacant lots from “eyesores into amenities,” Mogilevich writes. The result of disinvestment, white flight, and landlord neglect, empty lots in poorer neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx were “visible signs of political disenfranchisement.” Already, public space designs of the time moved to privilege user experience over aesthetics; for instance, at Jacob Riis Plaza, fences protecting pristine New York City Housing Authority lawns were torn down and inhabitable, actively programmed play- and landscapes installed in their place. Public participation in design was the logical next step.
The first vest-pocket park opened in Bed-
Stuy in 1966. A collaboration between the city with the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council and the Pratt Center for Community Development, funded by two private foundations, the park was greeted warmly by the architectural press, which labeled it a “neighborhood venture.” The characterization was not unearned. Community members participated in design meetings; local children helped with small construction tasks and served as play equipment design “consultants”; and unemployed men from the neighborhood were hired to build the park. Designed by Pratt Institute professor M. Paul Friedberg, the park also featured murals by Pratt art students. Local activists hoped parks like this one would serve as catalysts for further community-led development.
But the new parks quickly fell into disrepair, as the city expected low-income residents to handle facility maintenance. Mogilevich quotes Pratt Center founder and community planner Ronald Shiffman’s damning 1969 evaluation of three years of vest-pocket park experiments: “If it is the intention of any municipality, or community development corporation, to buy time or create a highly visible, but one-shot palliative by undertaking a beautification program, they are in for a rude and well deserved awakening.”
Learning from “Failures”
Many of the spaces profiled in The Invention of Public Space were ultimately perceived as failures, even by their designers. Following Nixon’s cuts in federal funding for cities and the 1975 New York City financial crisis, they were fenced off, neglected, graffitied, and sometimes demolished. What few were deemed successful, such as South Street Seaport and Battery Park City, were and continue to be “spaces for a circumscribed, generally white and middle- to upper-class public,” Mogilevich pointedly observes. Time and again, she questions for whom these emergent public spaces were designed and for whom they were not. Despite the utopian streak evident in the work of the Lindsay administration, old prejudices persisted.
Portions of this review were written in a COVID sidewalk cafe enclosure and a Bloomberg-era pedestrian plaza maintained by a business improvement district—examples of newer forms of New York public space that are rightly criticized for their commercialization, inequitable distribution across the city, and limited access. Mogilevich acknowledges the validity of these concerns and decries the move from ambitious experiments in democratic space-making to today’s focus on “innovation,” data collection, and an “almost mystical belief in the agency of movable chairs.” But she also invites those who might reject any compromised public space to ask, “Did a noncommercial, geographically distributed, ecumenical urban space ever exist, or had it just briefly appeared possible?”
Mogilevich’s portraits are wonderfully nuanced. Her outlook is ultimately hopeful. Every public space is compromised in some way, and none are as inclusive as we would hope. But that is not a reason to give up. She might agree with architect and theorist Craig L. Wilkins, who writes, “Space is life.” Mogilevich calls contemporary fights for the “commoning” of urban space potentially “revolutionary” and celebrates recent public space designs that welcome diverse gender identities, respond to the concerns of recent immigrants, and support human and nonhuman species. Architects looking to join in the fray must accept that transformations in urban space will not “leave a physical legacy so much as an ideological one.” This timely book squashes naïveté and inspires, leaving the reader energized and better prepared to pursue spatial justice anew.
COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
This 1972 study, prepared for the Gateway National Recreation Area, highlights public transit routes to and from marginalized neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey.
Karen Kubey is an urbanist specializing in housing and health.
Over the Moon
A biennale encompassing everything from ecology to platform capitalism romance makes a radical—and radically tender—case for life on “Planet Love.”
Design-research studio Superflux created an indoor forest—complete with 400 blackened pine trees—for the 2021 Viennale Biennale for Change.
About halfway through the 2021 Vienna Biennale for Change—somewhere between a striking indoor forest by Anglo-Indian design-research firm Superflux and a cartoon film about political optimism by illustrator Molly Crabapple and featuring the voices of Gael García Bernal and Emma Thompson—viewers may suddenly stop and ask themselves: What the hell is all this doing in Austria?
Well might they wonder. The show, open through October 3 and subtitled “Planet Love,” takes as its particular subject the problem of climate change, tackling the issue from every imaginable angle, including but not limited to abstract sculpture, visionary schemes for urban transformation, imaginary space-travel tourism posters, and at least one portrait of activist Greta Thunberg rendered as a series of blood cells. It is, in other words, a lot to take in, and its presence in Austria makes it all the more confounding, given the country’s overall reputation as a place of considerable charm and character, but with little in the way of hip, politically conscious culture-making.
And yet a certain strident, even hectoring progressivism is fast becoming a favorite national export. The Vienna Biennale opened in June almost simultaneously with the debut, just a few hours’ drive to the south, of the Austria Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; the installation there riffs on related themes in a similar tone, and indeed it appears in a miniature satellite form back in the Vienna show, occupying a downstairs room of the main exhibition space at the Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK). Considered together, these Siamese-twin initiatives seem to suggest something is very riled up in the state of Österreich.
Upstairs, the agita at the Biennale for Change expresses itself through an incredible density and diversity of climate-related material occupying every inch of available space. Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, the director of the show, commends the exhibition to its audience with a stirring invocation: “May this Biennale be successful in not only turning us into PLANET LOVERS but also into committed CLIMATE CARERS!” The all-caps attitude carries over into much that follows: in Julia Schwarz’s Unseen Edibles, a piece examining lichen as a potential food source, with real-life specimens presented in gourmetish array; in Thomas Romm’s “Urban Mining,” a proposal for ecological use of former built sites (complete with an exemplary patch of gravel); and in local team Architekturzentrum Wien’s “Land for Us All,” a fairly conventional exploration of urban land use presented in alluringly trippy, Milton Glaser–style display. The show truly appears to have everything, except perhaps subtlety.
It even has the bite-size version of the Venice show, compressing the pavilion-scale edition into a small annex space but conveying more or less the same idea. In both locales, curators Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer take a searing look at what they refer to as “Platform Austria,” using video, supersize wall text, and infographics to illustrate how online media have succeeded in privatizing—in the name of the “frictionless,” consumer-friendly urban experience—so much of city life, heedless of the costs to the environment or social equity. The Vienna iteration conveys most of its critique in two serried rows of video monitors, though it hardly seems less bombastic than its southern counterpart, with its cheeky banners dangling from the pavilion skylight declaring, “Access Is the New Capital” and “The Platform Is My Boyfriend.” In a Venice Biennale marked by pervasive, ho-hum earnestness, Mörtenböck and Mooshammer’s installation stands out for its spiky oppositionalism.
So what has gotten under the Austrians’ skin? In the accompanying catalogue for the Biennale for Change, a forward from the country’s secretary of state for arts and culture hails the government’s Ecolabel project—an environmental certification rating that MAK itself was recently awarded— as part of a “European showpiece project” being guided by the state. Perhaps the Venice and Vienna shows are part of the same drive: Austria—and with it its grand old capital, long overshadowed by other European cities as a destination for culture—could be setting itself up as a new center for activist-oriented art and design. It’s an unlikely development, but not bad as rebranding efforts go, especially for a city and country (“at the very center of Europe,” as the writer Robert Musil once wrote, “where the world’s old axes crossed”) looking to find a new place in a changing world.
SUPERFLUX
Against the Smart Worldview
Smartness already defines our cities, just not in the way Sidewalk Labs and others like it would have you think.
COURTESY SIDEWALK LABS
In 2020, Sidewalk Labs canceled its much-hyped “smart city” for Toronto. Earlier this year, the company squashed a similar project for Portland.
In May 2020, facing mounting criticism from privacy advocates, Sidewalk Labs CEO Daniel Doctoroff announced that the Google-owned company was scrapping its smart city project in the Quayside neighborhood of Toronto. With its passing, there was a sense among critics that some sort of evil had been defeated—that the little guy had won and Alphabet/Google had been routed. When Sidewalk formally discontinued its parallel Portland, Oregon, project earlier this year, the response was similarly jubilant, if more subdued.
In the aftermath, Sidewalk itself appears to have gone to ground, quietly patenting out some of its bespoke technologies and setting up others, like population modeler Replica, as sister companies. Likewise, the smart city dream it piloted looks to be dead as a doornail, now that Waterfront Toronto (Sidewalk’s erstwhile governmental collaborator for Quayside) is actively shopping around for a new development partner. Hopefuls will jostle in an international competition that compels proposals to take “into consideration the experiences of 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic, growing social inequality, economic insecurity and mounting climate crisis.”
It’s easy to read the new Quayside competition criteria as a direct rebuke of the virtues espoused by Sidewalk Labs’ bid. Nearly all mentions of smart technologies have been scrubbed, replaced by an ethos of community, inclusivity, and resilience. The vestiges that do remain, such as an interest in mass timber construction and, funnily enough, Sidewalk’s own dynamic storefront proposal called Stoa, have been pressed into the service of a “people-centered vision,” as The Guardian put it. (That the news outlet could make such a value judgment in the absence of any definitive project materials is telling.)
Yet in celebrating the demise of Sidewalk Toronto and its replacement by Waterfront Toronto, activists and journalists alike have misread the situation. The former Quayside project, imagined as a timber arcadia designed by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio, was never the official avatar of the smart city but a relative outlier. Its aims were unlike those of the real smart city, which, far from being defeated, remains in its infancy.
All along, Sidewalk Labs presented its project as an urban innovation beginning and ending in space, but this is a fundamental misdirection. The spatial component of any given smart city—Quayside or otherwise—is only the visible eye of a vast leviathan; were one to manage to blind it, it would continue unabated in its grim work.
Still, this beast is boring. All the flashy renderings, scintillating buzzwords, and exhibition-ready prototypes are there to obscure the smart city’s true function as a bog-standard development guide. As a 2017 Bloomberg Smart Cities panel asserted, the overarching goal of smart city projects is not one of techno-imbued construction but of “leveraging creative models of financing and public-private partnerships to navigate financial barriers and help achieve infrastructure improvement goals.” This is a far cry from the heroic vision peddled by Sidewalk. Consider that the bulk of the company’s research and proposals entailed radical re-imaginings of existing urban infrastructure, from roads to buildings; consider also the promises of urban dashboards and responsive environments pitched to prospective residents. Altogether, Quayside was an attempt to position the smart city as a gussied-up lifestyle product on offer to the striver class. Meanwhile, in the hushed back rooms of the public-private urban regime, the smart city evokes any number of interrelated optimization or austerity projects.
That is to say, the real power and money to be made in the smart city market lies not with the relatively local and easily lambasted technological futurity of Sidewalk Labs or, more recently, Toyota’s flamboyant Woven City in Japan, but in think tanks, trade publications, mayors’ consortia, university programs, and post-Covid reset conferences. Realizing a fully furnished “test bed” urbanism along the lines of the BIG-designed Woven City (construction on which is said to have broken ground this past winter) pales in comparison with the prospect of universalization—i.e., the reduction of existing cities to pure quantification up until the point any may be assessed alongside any other. The goal, then, is to reconceive cities and “cityness” as an economistic array of parseable criteria, development targets, and smartness rankings that ultimately determine the availability of funding and willingness of potential investors.
The Eden Strategy Institute and other industry watchers indicates as much when it asserts that smart cities have entered a new phase, dubbed Cities 4.0, thereby heralding a shift in focus from technology qua technology to people. The 20-odd locales that have earned the designation thus far all pursue a myriad of smart city projects (an average of 14!), invest in better infrastructure, have incorporated insights from the pandemic into planning models, and hew closely to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The “Resident 4.0” percolating within the City 4.0’s sensible and ecofriendly transit hubs, parks, co-working spaces, and so on is likewise a model employee equipped with “smart skills” who takes advantage of talent-learning opportunities and an appropriate amount of cosmopolitan life (work schedule permitting).
Outside this retinue of smart city projects, nearly all of them in the Global North, smartness is deployed everywhere else according to long-standing developmentalist lines. For all their popularity among policy wonks, SDGs reenact the same classic play of dangling the developmental carrot on the end of the political-economic stick. (The UN and World Bank continue to act out their classic parts, no less.) However, the shrinking of scale from developed/undeveloped nation to developed/undeveloped city deepens uneven patterns of development. Take, for example, Medellín, Colombia, which publications such as Newsweek and Foreign Policy and countless white papers have celebrated as a “city of innovation.” Foreign Policy points to the Metrocable gondola as a sign of the times, claiming that Medellín, a place hobbled by a century of civil war and drug trading, now radiates the glow of smart, innovative policy. Which raises the question, does all contemporary urban development equal “smartness”? And should an improvement in a city’s fortunes automatically bestow upon its mayor or municipal cabal the status of genius, as happened in Medellín?
But never mind the geniuses—the heroic age of the smart city ended with the death of Sidewalk Toronto. This in itself means little, least of all a victory. The smart city has never been “object-oriented,” so to speak, but an ethos founded in the idea that politics itself behaves according to scientific principles of development (or technology). Even as smart city principles take root everywhere—not just in Toronto or Tallinn but in Columbus, Ohio, and Erie, Pennsylvania— they amount to little more than standard environmental improvement programs, such as the installation of traffic cameras or roadwork. The charismatic selling points of smartness—autonomous cars being the paradigmatic example—are nearly always either a fool’s errand or, as in the case of Columbus, the first element of a smart city project to be discarded.
And yet smartness already defines the world: in it is a new watchword for governance, for policy, for austerity, and most of all for economic growth. It has, perhaps most insidiously, been bolstered by its capture of a coterie of self-styled progressives (YIMBYs, eco-urban types, 15-minute-city acolytes, etc.) who believe the invasion of capital into urban space is the only way to build a more “inclusive” city. All are united under the banner of development as capital prosecutes yet another back-to-the-city movement in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those of us seeking actual, substantive change—activists, radicals, and, yes, even critics—must change tactics, lest we be labeled incurable naysayers. Our critique must first and foremost contend with smartness as a new phase of capitalist development.
Because there are no isolated smart projects. It is useless to discuss them as such, or as the actions of particularly aberrant bad actors applying this or that bad technology or policy. Combating the smart worldview first requires the development of an equally holistic view of the world or else resigning ourselves to, at best, win certain battles while having already lost the war.
Rooms with a View
Andi Schmied is a Hungarian photographer living primarily in Budapest. But while in New York for a short-term artist residency in 2016, she began to go by her middle name, Gabriella. For snatches of time, she would slip into another identity—that of a billionaire Hungarian, newly arrived in town—to gain access to the heady world of Manhattan’s elite. Not to mingle with any of her would-be peerage, mind you, but to get a better look at their homes.
Almost immediately after landing in New York, Andi-as-Andi did the “biggest cliché thing” one could do as a first-time visitor: go to the top of the Empire State Building. From those heights, she noticed even taller buildings, nearly all of them made of plate glass and sharp-edged and lined up in a row along Central Park. At the uppermost registers of these supertall luxury residential towers, she realized, were even better viewing points. “But none of them were public,” she said. “I wanted to figure out a way to get in and document them.”
Hence the prénom. Andi-as-Gabriella was a mother and an architect (albeit one with a lot of time on her hands) charged by her husband, Zoltan, with scoping out a Manhattan aerie for parents and toddler son (nameless). She drew up a list of addresses and scheduled viewings. She carried her vintage film camera, ready to snap photos of these mysterious spaces. But beyond the initial gambit, she discovered that her wile was superfluous. The only people she might have needed to convince or impress—real estate agents—were disinterested, distracted or hesitant to break with their own character roles. “Some of them were very good actors,” Schmied recalled.
As for the architecture, which generally conformed to the same formula of monstrous living rooms and tucked-away living spaces, she was relatively unimpressed. The views were soon drained of their stimulus. Agents would drop the names of architects, sometimes to pit one of their creations against another: “432 Park is great, but here [at 277 Fifth Avenue], there are no columns blocking your view,” one said to Schmied, referring to two Rafael Viñoly buildings.
After briefly resuming her alter ego, on a whirlwind visit to New York in February 2020, Schmied returned to Budapest with hundreds of photographs “and two kilos’ worth of promotional materials, mostly hardcover books with really expensive paper,” she said. In its design, Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan (VI PER Gallery, 2021) mimics this literature, but its contents (including critical essays from the likes of geographer Samuel Stein and the late critic Michael Sorkin) depart from the format. The pictures themselves are matterof-fact, not touched up.
In a fitting end to the project, Schmied said her gallery has reported sales from some of the 25 luxury buildings included in the book: “I like to imagine my book on a coffee table in one of those penthouses.”
ANDI SCHMIED ANDI SCHMIED VI PER GALLERY, PRAGUE