We Are Public Space
The issue of public spaces itself implies, in its essence and in its relation to architecture and larger wholes, a generalizing perspective. The discourse surrounding it is focused primarily on maximally generalized statements and formulations easily understood by everyone from investors, cost estimators, architects, and theorists to municipal clerks and inhabitants, all of whom use the term. The problem with this approach is that it is largely based on implicitly masculine coding (Grosz 1999: 383), which can be understood as designing the environment not for the requirements of those in need, physically or socially vulnerable, but for a productive part of society.
With the metaphor ‘We are public space’, I am indicating a paradigm shift and transforming the established perspective (that public space is found around us) into its opposite. Thanks to a focus on internal processes, with an emphasis on relations with physical experience, a new and broader field of thinking about public spaces is opening up. Related to this is a more general level of understanding of public spaces as a public sphere, i.e. a space of public meeting and communication, whether in an urban or virtual environment. Participants and users perceive and experience their environs quite differently through technology, and it is also they who, through their trajectories and activities, give rise to a mass of data that is related – among other elements – to space and time. We find ourselves at a point at which it is no longer possible to search for a sharp divide between the spheres tied to real spaces versus online spaces, as both are closely interlinked. There is a transformation taking place in the manner of orientation and the choice of priorities of the individual, whose thinking is more closely geared to digital data, adjusting to the way in which the technology is created. What takes place is a loss of the possibility to create a purely autonomous experience that would help form identity through relying on one’s own judgment and simply being with oneself.
This thesis implies that it is not only the mighty public spaces built up over decades or even centuries, but that it is we who live it here and now, experiencing and creating it. This is the starting point to turn our attention to ourselves and to what is taking place both in our minds and in our physical bodies, by perceiving our corporeality and searching for imprints in our surroundings that are inscribed in the internal processes of our own thoughts and bodily experiences. In a broader sense, we could speak about a complex perspective on humans and their physical state, perhaps even using the term ‘psychosomatic’. This holistic approach attempts to take into account psychological, biological, social, and other factors, using experiments at selected sites to suggest a path to a more complex, holistic approach to the environment that surrounds us.
The Psychosomatics of Public Space
What happens when we involve our entire bodies in perceiving a space? Our movement through the city is usually defined by an attempt to move from a starting point to somewhere else. What results are both planned and random trajectories whose span of time is filled with many experiences? They do not take place in some kind of timeless or virtual space: they take place in real spaces. How do cities and their forms imprint themselves into our experiences from the urban environment? What takes place in the heads and hearts, stomachs and bladders, and other bodily organs of participants in the operation of cities? And what ideas and feelings are manifested through corporeality?
Moving through the city, we give our body to the public and, through this movement, demonstrate our capacity to inhabit it (Foucault 1995: 152). Leaving the ‘hidden’ zone of private space for the ‘being seen’ zone in public spaces is preceded by a series of preparations and rituals, often entailing extensive care and a considerable financial burden. All this in order to allow us to appropriately and regularly visit public spaces – if we also generate the requisite capital, that is. The issue of a right to housing is inscribed in every square centimeter of the city, along with an ergonomic system that dictates an order built up over centuries. Through architecture, the presence of the body and the adaptation of spaces to the human scale becomes a speculative technology of the ergonomics of urban models based on the normalized human body, with the aim of preventing crime and maximizing control, thus, cyclically producing and reproducing the visible and invisible borders between subjects, cities, and territories (Pujals 2016: 22).
In opposition to these massive structures, the psychosomatics of public spaces focuses on drawing attention to the present moment, the space, and on making present ideas and associations through the physical body and through an experiment, continuing the tradition of psychogeography and its playfulness (Chtcheglov 1993: 168). What happens when we involve our entire body in our perception of a space? And when, through making present certain parts of the body, we describe its link to public space? Ideally, we would do so from the perspective of intimate subjective experiences that have the capacity to mirror their surroundings in a unique manner.
Reading of Empty Cities
Cities are not currently empty but, following a period of several lockdowns, this experience is now not entirely foreign to us. The empty city is an image and an experience that few will be able to wipe from their memories. In this text, however, it functions as a measure of what cities could be like if the increasing tendencies of the state and corporations to control and predict the behavior of the users of public space continue their rapid development.
The polarity between the private and the public is often described as the elementary substance of the city. Many of the various definitions of ‘public space’ agree on a foundational characteristic: public space as a ‘meeting place’ or a ‘publicly used space’ (Marcuse 2003). Nevertheless, the contrast between the varying and often opposing interests of the public and the private sectors (Acconci 1990: 904) is manifested in many areas and is gradually becoming more and more apparent. This tendency is most often criticized for excluding minority groups (Krivý 2020: 5) or for a strong commodification of the space, prioritizing consumers over inhabitants (Bishop 2017: 3). As Bishop further elaborates, parks and plazas that appear to be public, but are actually owned by corporations, severely limit the type of activities that can take place there. She observes that art is moving from public space to the safety of institutions, and questions whether artists are attempting to create alternatives or are merely a supporting symptom of the neoliberal and surveillance technologies of today.
The trend toward restrictions limiting the behavior of people in public is currently possible to grasp through the phenomenon of privately owned public spaces (POPS), which has been growing since the 1980s as an accompaniment to neo-liberal urban policy, which increases investment by the private sector in comparison to the decreasing expenditure of the state sector (Gielen 2015: 284). These areas contain a foundational conflict as to what services they should provide and what goals they should aim for.
Although POPS provide barrier-free access and a well-maintained environment that looks attractive in visual representations, a closer look often reveals a number of questionable points:
- exclusion of minority groups, carried out directly and indirectly through the services of security agencies which, through constant petty coercion, displace the lowest social classes of the population or minorities who, based on these experiences, do not visit such spaces (Pospěch 2013: 770), thus, indirectly excluding and enforcing social stratification;
- hostility in the form of slightly uncomfortable furnishings which, if made of concrete, are so cold that one can only sit for a very short time [Fig. 1], or other ways of preventing the possibility of spending time comfortably (among other things, preventing lying down position, etc.);
- constant surveillance or monitoring by hidden cameras, ensuring a permanent pressure for increased self-control;
- exclusion of contact with nature which serves as a decoration, thus applying the concept of a clear separation of culture and nature (Grosz 1999: 383);
- restriction, a set of rules to prevent public gathering or production, the purpose of which is to ensure the predictable and smooth operation of the spaces in question.
As Gielen states, control escalates into repression, creating, in his words, a ‘creative-repressive city’ (2015: 273). Gielen puts the instrument of control in direct relation to the interpretation of global political trends, such as rampant neoliberalism and spreading neo-nationalism. The purposeless encounter with the unknown or with otherness is ruled out.
A Hostile Invitation to the Future
In the past three years, public health recommendations on physical distancing brought about by the pandemic have radically changed how we perceive the physical space around us and how we interact with others within post-pandemic public spaces. The idea of wearing an imaginary mask, giving vent to selectively chosen personifications by manipulating certain recognized and conscious paradoxes (Napier 1986: 17), is a notorious concept that has been amplified by the pandemic. There is a mental burden connected to wearing a face mask, but also to acquiring it, caring for it, storing it, and handling it. All these tasks are, to an extent, deeply intimate experiences. Yet, they are also simultaneously exteriorized and mandatorily proclaimed to the outside: ‘Exposing oneself to the exterior leads to an experience in which the masks play no smaller part than anonymity and impersonality, which are the foundational aspects of public spaces’ (Mongrin 2017: 38). Interiority mixed with exteriorization, inside and outside, center and periphery. These define the tension between opposing terms, creating the elementary urban experience of the globalized city. This experience of sudden contrasts is even sharper after the pandemic. Interaction with other people is severely limited, often on the basis of such arbitrary obstacles as the two-meter distance, difficulties reading the facial expressions of others, fear of saying hello, coughing, and so on. Transparent screens, Perspex barriers and shields, thermal temperature scanners, disinfectant application stations – all these elements create not only a functional barrier against the spread of the virus, but also a new experience closely tied to corporeality which is inscribed into our perception of ourselves and other individuals, and the ways in which we approach physical space within our disciplinary dispositive: a compendium of practices, institutions, laws, norms, and regulations (Foucault 1995: 197–198).
From my point of view, thanks to the ubiquitous commodification, non-economic themes are disappearing from a public space, hand in hand with hostile architecture. Their absence easily causes the neglect of ecological, solidarity and social care issues.
Is the situation I have outlined above – a situation of escalating control and restriction taking place in the newly constructed zones – too dystopian, or has it grown stronger under the conditions of the pandemic? The outbreak of Covid-19 has uncovered how fragile the networks of relationships in public spaces are, and the extent to which these spaces are crucial for the operation of society. The experience of the empty city has influenced all those present, both positively, through the perception of empty and quiet cities, and negatively, particularly through the restrictive conception of public spaces.
References
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