This paper explores the question what kind of educational work can be done in attempts to reclaim or reinvigorate the public sphere. Through a discussion of the intersection of public sphere and public space, it engages with the work of Hannah Arendt in order to outline a conception of the public sphere as a space for civic action based on distance and the conservation of a degree strangeness rather than on commonality and common identity. The discussion of the educational work that can be done to support the public quality of common spaces and places focuses on three interpretations of the idea of public pedagogy: that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy for the public, that of public pedagogy as a pedagogy of the public and that of public pedagogy as the enactment of a concern for the public quality of human togetherness. The latter form of public pedagogy neither teaches nor erases the political by bringing it under a regime of learning, but rather opens up the possibility for forms of human togetherness through which freedom can appear, that is forms of human togetherness which contribute to the ‘becoming public’ of spaces and places.
Fear in public spaces negatively impacts women’s lives. Even when danger is low, the idea of women as endangered in public space endures—due, in part, to its centrality in the construction of gender identity for men and women. In this article, the author examines the construction of contemporary, masculine gender identities and men’s perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in public space. Through interviews with 82 male students in Irvine, California, USA, the author examines how men’s construction of masculine identities builds upon perceptions of women as fearful and endangered in Irvine public spaces. Though they regard Irvine as safe, men see women as vulnerable there. The author investigates this apparent inconsistency in light of men’s performances of two masculine identities—the youthful ‘badass’ and the chivalrous man—which depend for their construction on opposition with women as fearful. Recommendations include suggestions for continued research on the spatial construction of masculine identities.
Urban design scholars denounce the recent trend towards the privatization of US public space. Critics emphasize the negative consequences of privatized public space, tied to private ownership, an emphasis on consumption, leisure and security, a targeted audience, and controlled behaviour and design. Yet these key qualities of privatized public spaces have meaning only in the context of one's identity. The same qualities shape experiences of privatized public spaces that can be understood as constrained, as constraining or as a form of resistance, depending on one's gender, race, class and sexuality. This paper challenges the prevailing design critique by examining women's experience of privatized public spaces, drawing on interviews with 43 middle- class women and behavioural mapping in five privatized public spaces in Orange County, California. Recommendations address changes to research and practice to better reflect and accommodate diverse experiences of public space.
This paper explores the place-based meanings of an urban public space, MacArthur Park, in a Latino and immigrant neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. Both quantitative and qualitative data analysis revealed a broad range of park experiences that were both positive and negative and produced meanings that were individual, social, cultural, and political. The study found that MacArthur Park affirms traditional national, cultural, and ethnic identities for immigrants and supports their construction of a new, translocal and Central American identity in Los Angeles. Although the study found that the park also serves as a restorative, entertaining, and social space for park goers, these positive experiences were accompanied by negative experiences and meanings of the park related to maintenance and crime and conflicts associated with inequality and access, confirming the importance of considering the full range of social, cultural, and political meanings associated with place.
This study examines a behavioral model using latent variables of leisure involvement, place attachment, and destination loyalty among recreationists walking their dog in urban parks. A total of 928 usable questionnaires were collected. The confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were analyzed using LISREL 8.70 for Windows. Empirical results indicate that leisure involvement (i.e., attraction and self expression) and place attachment (i.e., place identity and place dependence) accurately predict the destination loyalty of recreationists walking their dogs in urban parks. Findings of this study demonstrate that the proposed behavioral model is a highly effective means of examining the causal relationships among leisure involvement, place attachment, and destination loyalty. A series of managerial implications and recommendations for further studies are drawn.
People reside in homes; however, they live in neighbourhoods comprised of parks, sidewalks, restaurants, shops and other everyday places. Whether current or potential neighbourhood residents feel at home in these places remains an under theorised aspect of neighbourhood change. Rather than housing policy or real estate development, this essay explores public space as a mechanism of neighbourhood change. Drawing from ethnographic research in the Latino barrios of North Denver, It deconstructs the history of one small yet vital public space—la Raza Park. During the 1970s, this park, its pool and the many events it grounded, built community cohesion and fostered cultural identity. In 1981, city authorities went so far as to deploy a SWAT team to la Raza Park to enforce a permit violation. The following summer, they demolished its pool. North Denver is now gentrifying rapidly. This essay stitches these disparate-seeming events into a story of neighbourhood change.
The article explores relationships among urban form, human activities and socio-economic-cultural features in Danwei compound. With Jingmian compound, a typical Danwei compound in Beijing, as a case study, the researcher studies urban form in open spaces from a socio-economic-cultural perspective. In addition, residents' activities are discussed. The research shows that open space form reflects features and transitions of Chinese society from sociological and economic perspectives. This article also proves the validity of thorough micro space form investigation.
In the public-space discourse Los Angeles is usually portrayed as more "anti-city" than city. Its landscape is overrun by houses, "private-public" squares and plazas, theme parks, shopping malls, and so on and lacks inclusive public places. Yet this discourse has essentially disdained to contemplate a major public space that contradicts its general thesis: the Los Angeles coast. The coast is meaningful public place in two specific senses. First, it symbolizes Los Angeles as a whole and therefore provides a basis for regional public identity. Second, Angelinos themselves take the coast seriously as a public place, and they have striven to make it inclusive in prac- tice.
Sense-of-place writings have proliferated in recent years, yet research suffers from a relative lack of construct clarity and hypothesis testing. This research presents a model of sense of place based in conventional social psychology: cognitions, attitudes, identities, and behavioral intentions located in and fundamen- tally about place. A survey of property owners in Vilas County, Wisconsin, revealed the importance of symbolic meanings as underpinning both place satisfaction, con- ceptualized as an attitude toward a setting, and attachment, conceptualized as per- sonal identification with a setting. In turn, attachment, satisfaction, and meanings all have independent effects on willingness to engage in behaviors that maintain or enhance valued attributes of the setting.
Geographers have made important contributions to scholarship on the lived experiences of masculinity, highlighting the ways in which identities emerge through embodied and emplaced performances that are shaped by intersecting dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, class and religion. While a small number of studies have considered masculinity in relation to physical disability, more work is needed to examine other experiences of disability and the ways that they intersect with gender. In this article, we draw from feminist and queer disability theory to explore the social geographies of men with intellectual disability. We draw on in-depth, participatory research in Toronto to examine how men labeled/with intellectual disabilities imagine and enact masculinity in domestic settings and public places. Our analysis highlights that men confront multiple constraints and pervasive paternalism in public and domestic settings that frustrate their efforts to craft an adult identity. Partly in response, many men aspire to a normative heterosexual masculinity as a way to militate against the disabling conditions of everyday life. This reflects the tremendous pressure the men confront to ‘fit in’ but it also forecloses opportunities to imagine and enact other forms of disabled masculinity.
This article offers a detailed analysis of a neighborhood dispute over fencing a public park. Unlike the archetypal turf battles between longstanding and new neighborhood residents described in previous research, here the daily visits of Latino “outsiders” coming into a local public space produce conflict over park usage and control. The usually cited conditions for conflict, such as reactionary residents resisting ethnic transition and protecting their backyards, do not apply in this case, as the park sits amidst a relatively stable, affluent, white “liberal” neighborhood. This case study shows how sources of tension and trouble extend beyond the property interests and actions of the park users to include the more symbolic and indirect concerns about identity as reflected in park use. Together with longstanding concerns over neighborhood reputation and property values, changing demographics and greater sensitivity to the perception of racism distinctively shaped the unfolding of conflict in this case. The bumpy course of conflict and shifting opinions about the fence shed light on the new complexities and contradictions of contemporary social diversity and exclusion in city parks and other public spaces.
Postmodernity and economic globalization incite countries, regions, and cities to compete for investments, consumers, and resources. In aspiring for a new position in this global market, cities utilize new urban practices that lead them to rediscover and reinvent identities and traditions. In Rio de Janeiro, the mythical dimension of the South Zone is inseparably incorporated to its identity. In evaluating the history of the imagery linked to the beaches and the projects for the waterfront, one may observe a social construction of a reality that is marked by a continuous redesigning of symbols but also by a discontinuity in the history of urban interventions. Although tourism and marketing continually praise the waterfront as a fundamental factor in the image of the city, a continuous public management process never really existed. The city managers must understand the beaches, the waterfront, and development along the shoreline as important resources in a continuous process of social construction of a reality that should not only address their images as commodities but should treat them as inseparable from the city's daily public and social lives.
This paper analyses the importance of commercial signs in contemporary cities, and explores the theoretical concepts that might be helpful in understanding the operation of commercial signage controls in historic places. The focus is on issues that cluster around theories of consumer culture, as well as on the practices of city centre management, city marketing and urban tourism. The discussion is predominantly concerned with commercial city centres because these are places where different functions and meanings coexist. They are often places where different commercial and non-commercial interests have to be managed or reconciled. City centres are also public areas where human experience is given meaning and valorised through signs, symbols and patterns of behaviour, which result from a combination of physical and symbolic factors of the built environment. In many cases, the commercial city centre
coincides with the historic core of a city, and the challenge of the local authority is to combine all functions with the preservation of historic buildings and places. At the end, this paper discusses how forms of aesthetic control over commercial signage can be applied to preserve local identity and stimulate commercial and touristic activities simultaneously.
Journal of Architectural and Planning Research (2001)
Skjæveland, O.
This study investigated influences of residential street layout on neighboring. The study design was quasi-experimental with one pretest and two posttest measurements in an intervention group and two control groups. Data were collected using a recently developed questionnaire (MMN) and through field observations. The intervention implemented in this study was a transformation of three sections of residential streets into street parks, entailing considerable changes in street floor and spatial layout, provisions of street furniture like benches, planting of trees and flower beds, installation of play equipment, and prohibition of traffic and parked vehicles. Supportive acts of neighboring, neighbor annoyance, and children's play showed an overall increase in the intervention streets, interpreted as a sign of increased involvement in the neighborhood. Weak social ties and neighborhood attachment showed more complex patterns of changes, depending on demographic factors. It is suggested that symbolic effects of the changes may be more significant than functional effects, and thus that a change of neighborhood identity is an important mechanism.
The Knowledge Viennese have of their public parks and private gardens re-enforces their sense of belonging to the city. While place attachment may account for identification with a neighborhood or district, the sense of connection to the larger metropolis is another matter. Identification becomes possible through a "metropolitan project"— a mission or goal set by city leaders. The project's emphasis changes over time, yet commitment to it often transcends class, gender and ethnicity. Parks and gardens are shaped by the same forces that shape the metropolitan project in any given era. Green spaces become a medium through which their designers or gardeners express identification with the project, and through it, with the metropolis as a whole.
Geographers have effectively examined girls’ reactions and resistances to adult control in public space, but the ways that girls learn about and rein scribe social differences like race and class through ‘hanging-out’ practices in public, urban space have yet to be sufficiently explored and theorized. Therefore, in this paper I consider the normative productivity of girls’ spatial practices, as well as girls’ resistances to adultist space. I examine the case of consumption space and focus on how girls utilize, create and reproduce myriad social identifiers as they hang out in public, urban space. Consumption space and consumerism dominate the urban spaces and hanging-out practices of teenagers, and while girls complain about the ubiquity of consumption space, girls’ public social-spatial activities inevitably involve consumption space. Therefore, consumption’s symbols and spaces are central to the normative production of girls’ identities like class and race, and of social difference more generally in urban space.
This paper examines intermediate, semi-enclosed urban spaces and investigates the potential creation of environmental diversity when such spaces are integrated in urban design. More specifically, it focuses on the links between architectural characteristics of semi-enclosed spaces and their thermal performance. The paper identifies major types of semi-enclosed spaces and monitors their thermal performance in northern and southern Europe. The results showed that a wide range of thermal conditions, namely cooler conditions during summer and warmer conditions during winter can be experienced in both regions. Moreover, the thermal variation, which was identified, is linked with the spatial identity of each space and it is argued that the degree of enclosure as well as the orientation and the urban context are significant temperature determinants. Intermediate, semi-enclosed urban spaces should be regarded as important urban components that could increase the thermal and spatial diversity of the urban fabric and therefore contribute to a more fulfilling and comfortable environment.
This essay considers public art practice in post-apartheid Cape Town within the notion of symbolic reparations—a concept deriving out of South Africa’s Trust Reconciliation Commission. The paper situates developments in public arts practice in the context of developments in cultural politics in South Africa and globally. More especially, it discusses new genre arts projects, which focus on a range of issues related to identity, space and place. The projects—the District Six Museum, District Six Sculpture Project, PTO, Y30, BLAC, Returning the Gaze, and the In Touch Poetry Bus Tour—focus on issues such as rethinking monuments, the memorialising of ‘hidden histories’, engagements with racism and the abuse of power, and the reimagining of the city. The paper asks how these contemporary and often ephemeral projects, critically engage with issues of history, geography, memory and transformation and, in so doing, mark the landscape of Cape Town, making spaces for dialogue and/or standing as poetic symbols and challenges to the inequalities of the city.
People are satis®ed with their environment as long as they understand the physical character of it. Because of this, in order to design understandable, clear and acceptable environments, designers have to increase the meaning of spaces. When open and semi-open spaces are mentioned, plants become an important space component. In accordance with this point of view, the aim of this study is to de®ne the role of plants in constructing prefered environments and to ®nd out which plants have suitable semantic value for planting designs that express the identity of buildings and spaces with dierent functions. The study consists of two parts: (1) The theoretical part deals with how plants became a symbol and the signi®cation they take. In this part, samples of symbolic plants are given together with the de®nition of signi®cation by using ``Sign Theory''. (2) The application part examines whether the idea that spaces and buildings having dierent functions can be associated with plants. In this part 10 spaces and 24 plants are used to form an inquiry and cross-tabulation of plants with spaces and the reasons (the concept de®ning the feelings associated by a plant) are investigated.
