Matthew Schexnyder - Case Study

The Virtuous Agenda of Public Space

The full range and reality of public space, Tiananmen Square, 1989. The capacity for violence and social protest is matched, more frequently, by a rather stable and perhaps benign image of state power. Is global practice equipped to deal with any of these idealizations of public space

Protests in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan, 2011 (top); Proposal for Kazakhstan National Library by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) (bottom images). Global practice flirts with the expression of public space but rarely differentiates between the socio-political realities of how power is exercised. Renderings of public space are meant to imply that the exercise of progressive, civic power will naturally follow.

Military ceremony (top); proposal rendering by architects (middle); architects, Herzog & de Meuron (bottom). There is an asymmetry between the public space of the client-state and the public space of the designer; public space is then presented inconsistently to different audiences.

1 Jacques Herzog suggesting that public park space for the Beijing Olympic stadium "will radically - transform -the society." From Graham Owen, ed. "Introduction," in Architecture, Ethics, and Globalization.

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On the morning of December 16, 2011, police and protesters in a public square in Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan clashed as state authorities tried to set up a holiday tree for a children’s, New Year celebration. The protesters were striking oil workers and had been occupying the public space for weeks demanding better pay and the right to form political parties; their protest and the subsequent violence seems to have had very little to do with a decorated tree. But as the New York Times reports, the use of previously unscheduled, state-organized events in “politically important public spaces” has become a routine method for suppressing opposition against the agendas of authoritarian rule.[1]  By the afternoon, ten people were dead after police shot into a crowd of protesters, buildings were on fire, including the headquarters of the state oil company, and the tenuous relationship between public space and power had once again been exposed.

There is an affinity within the Western construct of public space between physical space itself and the aspirations of participatory, political, public life. Public space, envisioned as conforming to the core expectations of democratic politics, is offered by planners, politicians, and activists as the citadel of the democratic tradition. Partly because the architecture of our cities and institutions aspire to the symbolic contexts of democratic rule and partly because of the presumption that the quasi-public spaces of state or even corporate power must ultimately yield to the public good, the role of public space in urban planning and the civic consciousness goes unchallenged. It remains that public space has, for many trained in a democratic world-view, become the architectural primitive of liberty itself.

However, this construct offers little to the planner or architect operating beyond the borders of democratic tradition. First, it is clear that architecture itself, and the spatial quality of public place by extension, has a tendency to be appropriated to a variety of political uses. Within the context of global architectural practice, confidence in the public space as arbiter of democratized social agendas is clearly misplaced; designers continue to market the efficacy of public space and the democratic potentials it might embody, regardless of socio-political externalities.[2] Second, the fidelity of the public nature of space rests solely in the balance between the public and its relationship to power. In the Marxist tradition, this might be characterized as the “right to the city” which affirms the public’s right to individual and collective action through the public space.[3] Or, in a neo-liberal paradigm, the individual has a right to public space in as much as that space can accommodate a public dimension. The proliferation of both of these situations (among countless others) is enough to upset the rudimentary notion of public space in the context of an emerging global design practice.

How different then from the complex public space of Zhanaozen are the delightful, promising plans and renderings of Western architects working abroad today. If Zhanaozen illustrates the corruptibility of democratic notions of public space, should we not think deeply about the images of smiling children and couples holding hands that we use to sell, to ourselves and our critics,  the promise of a progressive public sphere? For architects descendant from the avant-garde social progressivism of Modernism, it is difficult perhaps to shake the feeling that architecture (and the architect) should justify itself with work for the public good. In this spirit, it seems that public space has become a programmatic solution which pleases all constituencies.

But, as global practice brings more designers (of all political persuasions) into contact with authoritarian regimes, it will become more crucial that we challenge the construct of public space; ask not what it means to the designer, but what it means in the context of its relationship to power. Designers may never have this conversation with the client-state or the autocrat, but it is clear that we must ask ourselves if we have overstated the capability of public space or relied on it too often to justify our ambiguous and sometimes complicit bond with authority.

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[1] Andrew Kramer, “At Least 10 Die as Police Clash with Strikers in Kazakhstan,” The New York Times, December 16, 2011, accessed Novenber 28, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/world/asia/deaths-in-rare-violence-in-kazakhstan.html?_r=0.

[2] Graham Owen, ed., “Introduction,” in Architecture, Ethics, and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2009), 9.

[3] David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to City to the Urban Revolution, (London: Verso, 2012), 4.

Works Cited

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012.

Kramer, Andrew.  “At Least 10 Die as Police Clash with Strikers in Kazakhstan,” The New York Times, 

December 16, 2011. Accessed November 28, 2012,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/world/asia/deaths-in-rare-violence-in-kazakhstan.html?_r=0.

Owen, Graham, ed. “Introduction,” in Architecture, Ethics, and Globalization. New York: Routledge,

2009.

Works Consulted

Brenner, Neil. New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004.

Demos, T. J. “The Cruel Dialectic: On the Work of Nils Norman,” in Spatialities: The Geographies

of Art and Architecture, edited by Judith Rugg and Craig Martin, 116-143.  Chicago: Intellect, The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012.

Yoshihara, Naoki. “Prologue” and “Ambiguity and Globalization,” in Fluidity of Place: Globalization and

the Transformation of Urban Space, translated by Minako Sato, 1-24. Trans Pacific Press, 2010.