My
aim is to reconsider the idea of the public square: the idea
of the public square (not cases of public squares) because
the public square is now mythicised as a necessary element
in the public understanding of a free society. The mythicized
public square is often traced to the agora of classical Athens, imagined as a place of social
mixing where political opinions were once - or once upon a
time - freely exchanged. The reality is that public squares
are a product of modern cities. They are spaces for the display
of power through public monuments and public buildings designed
to remind members of a society of the values they are required
to uphold. In periods of civil unrest these monuments may
be attacked or destroyed. Then, if ephemerally, a public square
may become a site of social re-formation. The ephemerality
of such moments, and their performative character, may be
instructive, suggesting that public squares are where citizens
are active agents of social, cultural, economic and political
change. The public square, then, is a material form of a public
sphere in which members of a society determine its values
and organisation for themselves. Yet this, too, follows from a disputable
legacy of liberal humanism: a freely acting subject who has
agency for change. Is this image viable in the conditions
of late capitalism, or as the concept of agency is questioned
in post-structuralist discourses? At least there is a need
to reconsider the alignment of the idea of the public sphere
in relation to public spaces and a public realm of institutions.
I begin by looking at a recent public square, Millennium Place,
Coventry. I then set out issues around a reconsideration of
public squares. But I refer also to moves to privatise public
urban spaces, but read this as subordinate to the interrogation
of the idea of the public square, or the imagination of a
viable public sphere.
Millennium
Place, Coventry
Commissioned
by Coventry City Council to mark the millennium, Millennium
Place was not unveiled until 2003. It includes an open arena
for public performances, and marks one end of a walk through
the city centre beginning at the Cathedral (an icon of wartime
destruction and post-war reconstruction). Next to Millennium
Place is a statue of Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet
engine. At the side is the Transport Museum. Together these
institutional presences denote the city's history of motor
and armaments manufacturing. A public video screen was attached
to the wall of the Transport Museum in 2011. Along the wall
below a curved stone bench, and above it are hundreds of small,
red metal plates inscribed with pairs of names – a project
by the artist Jochen Gerz, titled The Public Bench,
unveiled in 2004. The artist's aim was to create a public
monument for ordinary human relations. Gerz writes,
The
reasons for the choice were not revealed. The second name
could belong to a person either living or deceased. It could
recall a fictitious figure from a novel, a myth, a dream or
a fairy tale. In order to understand the inscriptions more
fully one had to contribute oneself. Emotions such as sympathy,
admiration, support, memory or love determined many choices.
Each contribution was one person's choice. Whatever the choice
was, it did not need anyone else's approval.
Most
names were drawn from private rather than public life, indicating
a society functioning at the level of the domestic and the
everyday – though to say this implies a dualism of public
and private spheres. Leaving that aside, Millennium Place
is multi-layered, its design shaped by different aims –
history, future aspiration, regeneration after de-industrialization,
creating a public open space. If Whittle's statue implies
a conventional regard for those members of a society taken
as exemplary in character or achievement, Gerz's installation
is a monument by other means. And if the Transport Museum
invites visitors to study the collection of vehicles it preserves,
the public screen shows sport for more immediate consumption.
The difficulty is that not many people use the square, at
times difficult to access across a busy road. Until the construction
of the Museum and a sign-posted route from the Cathedral through
the restored city centre to it, perhaps there was no need
for Millennium Place: it is in a way a non-place, more the
product of an architect's design than a response to pre-existing
patterns of use.
In
contrast, Victoria Square in Birmingham, also in the West
Midlands, is a well-used public space, not least because it
is situated between the city's Victorian town hall and art
museum on one side, and the shops and route to the main railway
station in New Street on the other. It is used by commuters,
shoppers and tourists throughout the day. Nearby Centenary
Square is also well used, a pedestrian route to the city's
redeveloped business quarter, with a theatre, a television
company's offices, two hotels, and the new convention centre
and concert hall. In December 2011, Victoria Square was used
for a German Christmas Market. There are issues around the
design of both squares, and the funding of Centenary Square
drained resources for services in outer-city areas. Most jobs
produced by the scheme were low-paid, unskilled and temporary. But my purpose is not to discuss urban
economies but to ask if city squares are sites of urban democracy
– spaces in which citizens mix and exchange opinions,
rather than merely pass each other by. Even the street was
until recently gendered, and the square more so. Anyone can go to
a Christmas market but can anyone participate in the public
square? Or are some more present than others?
Sites
for Democratic Exchange
I
want to question the assumption that the public square is
a precondition for the articulation of social equity. In early
modern cities (from the sixteenth century), a prominent use
of open urban spaces was for public executions, attracting
a good crowd but not inspiring democratic exchanges. In Sixtus
V's remodelling of Rome, vistas were opened between pilgrimage
sites, creating a model of circulation between iconic nodes.
In the plan for Washington DC, Charles L'Enfant took circulation
as an end in itself, allied with transparency and equality,
expressed in conjunctions of arterial avenues, a grid, and
open spaces seen as the city's lungs. The plan, however, echoes
that of cities such as Potsdam, Karlsruhe and Versailles –
all constructed for despots. Today, large numbers of people visit or
occupy The Mall, in front of Washington's sites of political
power, or visit the various memorials there. It may be that
not all are tourists, and major demonstrations have occurred
there - against the war in Vietnam, for AIDS; but power remains
inside the White House. The Mall is not a public square but
a site of public viewing. The viewers, the audience, are not
necessarily empowered by their experience.
Most
European public squares are marked by monuments erected from
the late nineteenth century onwards. A proliferation of monuments
lent historical or mythical inevitability to regimes which
were either new (Germany, Italy) or under internal stress
(France, Austria-Hungary, England). For instance, the Millennium
Monument in Budapest celebrated an imagined continuity from
medieval King Stephen of Hungary to nineteenth-century Emperor
Franz-Joseph. It was completed only a few years before the
Empire fell in 1918. The new regime changed the statues. When
it in turn fell, they were changed again. Today it exhibits
old Hungarian kings whose names are known by few who visit
the square -
which is the point: history as tourist backdrop. During insurrection,
however, monuments are dismantled and squares occupied, radically
reconstructing spatial meanings. In 1871, Paris Communards
occupied Place Vendome and dismantled a column carrying a
statue of Napoleon Bonaparte in Roman dress to demonstrate
the end of the regime of his Nephew, Napoleon III. When the
statue fell it was kicked and abused as if it was the Emperor
himself. Similarly, a statue of Stalin was toppled
in Budapest in October, 1956, hit with poles, the head dragged
across the tram-lines. Perhaps to abuse monuments allows citizens
to participate in history. So, it is acts of resistance, not urban
design, which produce public ownership.
In
the seventeenth century, the city gate remained as likely
a site of unplanned social mixing as the city square. But
these were not democratic spaces. Michel Foucault describes
them as where lepers once assembled (who were not permitted
to enter the city) and when leprosy had vanished where the
vagrant and the mad resided: 'wastelands which sickness had
ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable'
at the city's gates In these margins, the rich and powerful
might encounter the marginalised; yet the encounter was only
visual - a fear of tactile contagion was real and prevented
more. Similarly, foreign bodies were excluded in the ghetto.
While it enabled the rise and political inclusion of the bourgeoisie,
the modern city is, and always was, a site of confinements
and exclusions. Restrictions of social mixing occurred in
classical Athens, too. Sennett notes the importance of being
seen in open space, but takes speech as the defining act of
citizenship and follows Hannah Arendt in asserting that in
the polis, action and speech were separated:
The
emphasis shifted from action to speech ... as a means of persuasion
rather than the specifically human way of answering, talking
back and measuring up to whatever happened or was done. To
be political, to live in a polis,
meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion
and not through force and violence.
Arendt
explains that outside the polis, which meant for women, slaves, strangers, sailors,
and travelling sellers of goods, the right of speech was withheld,
while the polis was defined as the opposite of the private household
ruled by a patriarch, where free speech was also absent. For
Arendt, the dualism is not between public and private in the
way it might be understood today, however, as the public and
private sectors, but between the realm of publicity and the
twilight zone of family life.
Originally,
then, the political city was a division, almost a division
of labour, within the city. It was not the product of specific
spaces, but made use of them for its purposes. In particular,
as Sennett writes, the colonnaded stoa
on the north side of the agora
in Athens, built in c.460ACE, housed discussion. Other shaded
sites housed eating and drinking, making deals, and undertaking
religious observances. Banking took place in the open, where it
could be seen, in the orchestra. But the free exchanges which took place in the stoa were not open to anyone. Sennett elaborates that citizenship was a privilege:
...
most of the ceremonial and political events that occurred
here [in the agora] were out of bounds to the immense population of slaves and foreigners
who supported the economy ...the number of citizens in Attica
during the fourth century B.C. [was] 20,000 – 30,000
out of a population of 150,000 to 250,000 ... [and] never
more than 15 to 20 per cent of the total population, or half
the adult male population.
Sennett
adds that to participate in the assembly (pnyx), where persuasion by words led to decisions (policies),
a citizen had to own a talent of silver (about 1,000 days'
pay for a labourer) and to be vouched for by his neighbours.
The
wasteland outside the city gates described by Foucault is
like the space of those denied speech in Athens. But, as Foucault
describes, the inhabitants of the margins were increasingly
confined, through the Age of Reason, in a series of new, specialist
spaces: the asylum, the poor house, the clinic, the prison,
the school .... At the same time, the Enlightenment equivalent
of free speech was also housed in specialist sites and institutions.
These constitute the modern public sphere for the rising commercial
class, the bourgeoisie. Political action took place in open,
public spaces only in times of upheaval or during election
campaigns (often drunken occasions in the nineteenth century).
The origin of the idea of the modern public square, then,
is partly in the site of open-air discussion among a privileged
class in the stoa, and partly in the interiors of bourgeois institutions
such as the professional association or academy. Debate was
certainly conducted in the latter, giving rise to an imagined
public sphere which was (and is) open, at a future time, to
democratisation. The idea of a public square is inherently
ambivalent - an idea denoting an imagined free future; and
a material site designed for social ordering.
The
Modern Square
If
the dualism of classical Athens juxtaposed the public and
familial, in the modern city the axis is between the state
as agent of regulation for the public good and the interests
of the
owners
of private property and wealth. In the bourgeois tradition
– re-cast in an excessive form of neo-liberalism –
the owners of capital seek to limit state regulation. The
rise of a professional class, meanwhile, produced a protective
mentality among its members, who regulated new admission to
institutions by exams or introduction by an existing member.
Jurgen Habermas expresses an ambivalence which reflects this
situation's contradictions:
The
usage of the words ÒpublicÓ and Òpublic sphereÓ betrays a
multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back
to various historical phases and ... fuse into a clouded amalgam.
Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem
inappropriate appear to require these words ...
He
notes that public buildings house state institutions –
like the public library – and that there is little affinity
between this use of the term public in relation to the state,
and another use of it in public opinion. But public opinion
is supposed as the product of debate in public spaces, of
mutual acts of persuasion undertaken rationally, without concern
for private interests. He also notes that the idea of a public
sphere derived from classical antiquity retains an unusual
status:
Since
the Renaissance this model of the Hellenic public sphere,
as handed down to us in the stylized form of Greek self-interpretation,
has shared with everything else considered Òclassical a peculiarly
normative power. Not the social formation at its base but
the ideological template itself has preserved continuity over
the centuries – on the level of intellectual history.
Hence
the public square has become a template for the space designed
for acts of democratic exchange, but never was that. The idea
of a public sphere is, as Habermas assumes in the sub-title
of his book: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society,
essentially modern.
The
categories public space, public realm, and public sphere are
also modern, and denote three different entities. A public
sphere is a metaphorical site, a series of acts which produce
new meanings for the geographical sites in which they take
place. A public realm is the site of the mediation of public
issues, often in institutions housed in specific buildings,
a set of interactions in pursuit of understanding but also
tending to protection. A public square, as an archetype of public
space, is where a society's dominant ideology is presented
for the public gaze. The extent to which such mixing in the
square is outside conventions of social ordering, until recently
with clear divisions of class, race, and gender, is very limited.
A work such as The Public Bench might seek to overcome those limitations, but I am
not sure how far it does that in ways which have any consequence
(except possibly for participants who remember the experience).
Transitional
Spaces
Of
greater interest, to me, are transitional spaces. These are
neither public nor private but situated between the polarities.
For example, the balconies which overhang the narrow streets
of Mediterranean cities are extensions of domestic space also
used for exchanges between dwellers across the street. Again,
the cafŽ is a form of space used by groups within a society,
such as artists and writers in Paris or Vienna in the late
nineteenth century, as movements were formed by the association
of like-minded individuals outside official institutions.
The dualism then was between the public and the personal,
as artists and writers took their own states of psyche as
subject-matter (as in French Symbolism).
Habermas
and Sennett both discuss coffee houses as sites of verbal
exchange. In England in the late seventeenth century some
coffee house proprietors were also publishers, and political
pamphlets circulated first in their coffee houses. The coffee
houses thus played a key role in constitutional debate, and
enhanced the conditions in which the Glorious Revolution of
1688 could occur. Habermas saw coffee houses as central to
bourgeois democracy, noting that there were 3,000 in London
by the early 1800s; the writers Dryden and Addison met their
followers in specific coffee houses, and their writing was
thus legitimated in the contacts made there between them and
members of the governing class. Habermas continues,
Thus
critical debate ignited by works of literature and art was
soon extended to include economic and political disputes,
without any guarantee ... that such disputes would be inconsequential
... .
Habermas
adds that only men were allowed into coffee houses, and he
could have mentioned the requirement to pay on entry, but
his main point is, 'The coffee house not merely made access
to the relevant circles less formal and easier; it embraced
the wider strata of the middle class, including craftsmen
and shopkeepers.'
Sennett
draws out another aspect of coffee-house verbal exchanges:
the production of equality in a specific way of speaking:
As
men sat at the long table, telling stories of great elaborateness,
describing wars or the demeanour of leading citizens ... they
have only to use their eyes and tune their ears to ÒplaceÓ
the stories or descriptions as coming from one with the point
of view of a petty-minded clerk, an obsequious courtier, or
a degenerate younger son of a wealthy merchant. But these
acts of placing the character of the speaker must never intrude
upon the words these men use to each other, the long periodic
sentences flow on, the familiar descriptive phrases which
everyone has heard a hundred times before are invoked once
again ... Coffeehouse speech is the extreme case of an expression
with a sign system of meaning divorced from ... symbols of
meaning like rank, origin, taste, all visibly at hand.
As
Sennett says, free conversation – without reference
to rank - also occurred in the coaching inns of the new turnpike
roads, where travellers met. But in the eighteenth century
the coffee house was overtaken by the gentlemen's club, where
members were admitted on the say of existing members; and
by the rise of the street as public thoroughfare, a site of
informal relaxation, strolling, and conversation between those
who recognized each other. The street, however, remained off-limits
to women not in the company of men until well into the twentieth
century. My point, however, is that transitional spaces, between
public and private, played a crucial role in political re-formation
by suspending social rank - though the suspension, like suspension
of disbelief in the theatre, did not apply outside –
and by offering a safe place for subversive persuasion.
The
Departure of the Public
Given
the ambivalences of the public square, is it necessary to
defend public space against privatisation? If social change
arises in the cafŽ, why protect the piazza? The two, of course,
have been merged. Most new public spaces are spaces for consumption.
Liverpool's main shopping centre has been re-categorised as
L1, an open-air mall regulated by a private security force
employed by the developer. At the same time, social housing
is increasingly influenced by the idea of defensible space
promoted by Oscar Newman, leading to gated compounds for the
poor just as the rich have theirs – both designed to
state a social class in unmistakeable terms. Anna Minton writes
of an award-winning social housing scheme with small windows,
reinforced steel doors, iron gates, and a grey aluminium roof
'with a military feel to it'; she adds, 'It ticked all the
requisite boxes – security grilles, electronic security,
anti-climbing paint and perimeter fencing ... [and] looked
like a prison.' So, open (public) and enclosed (domestic)
spaces are increasingly constrained within the dominant economic
order's categorizations of social groups, under an imperative
to consume or be marginalised. Zygmunt Bauman writes,
...
such urban spaces where the occupants of different residential
areas could meet face-to-face, engage in casual encounters,
accost and challenge one another, talk, quarrel, argue or
agree, lifting their private problems to the level of public
issues ... are fast shrinking in size and number.
Bauman
argues that public space has been deserted by the agents of
democracy, and that the task of intellectuals now is to repopulate
it. I take this as a metaphor for the reintroduction of politics
into public debate, but I also think of the Occupy movement
in late 2011, for whom taking over public space had the revolutionary
significance assigned to taking over the means of production.
But
while the defence of public space is necessary, it was never
where movements for social change occurred. Although sudden
moments of transition did occur, such as the pulling down
of statues, the ideas which informed and led to insurrection
were discussed elsewhere, often in transitional spaces. While
all this goes on, still, new public spaces – like Millennium
Place in Coventry – are ubiquitous in re-development
schemes. As real freedom is erased, its badge is promoted
in ersatz spaces which connect nowhere with nowhere else,
and are little used.
Returning
to Millennium Place, the intention of the artist was to draw
out personal meanings in a public space, as if to re-occupy
the city-centre regardless of consumption or the exercise
of power. The project addresses everyday life, and states
an implicit democratisation in that there are no hierarchies
of class, race, gender or age in how the names are displayed.
Yet I ask if this represents a democratic gain when no political
question was asked. The personal may be political, and the
political certainly affects personal life, but the qualities
of a public sphere, even in imagination, include speech and
action, not just visual display frozen in time.
Does
The Public Bench follow
a common practice of siting bronze likenesses of literary
and historic figures at street level as if the passer-by might
meet them by chance? And does being named in public constitute
an intervention in the conditions by which we are conditioned?
If it does, I am not sure where it goes.
The
Public Bench has not met
with universal acclaim. Questions were raised as to the possibility
of controversy following the artist's previous work in Hamburg
(subject to hate graffiti), and because the names were uncensored.
The city's Press Officer commented, 'Gerz's work is thought
to be extremely thought-provoking, and public art ... is never
intended to be liked by everybody. It ought to be disliked
by as many people as like it.' That's interesting. Perhaps to provoke
is as much as art can do today. To bring personal life into
public space is a form of occupation – a reassertion
of lived over conceived space in the terms of Henri Lefebvre's
critique of spatial production - and a rebuke to the impersonality of
much public space. Still, I return to Bauman's remarks on
the shrinking public sphere, and note that Krzysztof Nawratek
writes,
Why
is the disappearance of the political community crucial in
understanding the crisis of the City? Because the lack of
a political community is the lack of any community. ... What connects the City's inhabitants?
Shopping together in a suburban mall? The fact that we were
all in a multiplex once? So what? The potential in this cinema
or that shop to meet others? That's clearly absurd.
Looking
at Millennium Place, does the personalisation of public space
contrast with the presence of the public screen above it?
What, in any case, is to be owned: space or the image of the
city? On 17 September, 2011 demonstrators occupied a public
space in New York to refuse the power of global capital over
their lives. The Occupy movement had no structure of leadership,
and no manifesto. It rejected the system by which 1% of the
population own most global capital and construct the
economy to increase their own wealth at the expense of the
other 99%. Perhaps Occupy created a public square as the material
form of a public sphere, a site of self-regulation and consensus
for a new society shaped by direct action, where a sense of
being present among others was transformative (at the time,
perhaps after). Occupy was criticized for a lack of policies
but perhaps Occupy offered a glimpse of living the revolution
before the Revolution which is far more valuable than a manifesto.