Post #3: Public Space Reflections

Pragmatic Parks

The smart city will not change publicly owned public spaces all that much for one simple reason. The way people use parks etc has not changed in the last hundred and fifty years. Maybe public wifi in a park will change the demographic from book readers to people on computers and phones, but that does not matter in any larger sense.

Neither Setha Lowe’s “rights” [1] nor Donald Mitchell’s rules for Marxist public spaces [2] take any heed of technology or the change it might bring. Public space is important because it is a physical gathering space for people. Everything else is secondary.Mitchell is so willing to make a park a place for public gathering that he is willing to walk a very fine line Marxist in favor of rights saying, “‘Rights’ must be at the heart of any Marxist and socialist project of urban transformation, even while the limits of rights, and the need to continually struggle over them, must constantly be acknowledged.” [3]

I think that this is one of the weakest parts of their arguments. Both demand complete public control over public spaces. The problem is that those techniques do not work. Walking through Portland there were many parks that were completely controlled by the public via the state and utterly unused. Unless you have an ideological understanding of what makes a park and public space “good” these parks are massive failures. No one goes to Lincoln Park not because it has somehow been corrupted by reduced public ownership. There is nothing to do there and the physical plant is falling apart. Only an ideologue would argue it is successful.

A public-private partnership is the alternative. The public sells part of its control of a public to private hands and in return gets a place people will use. I think the authors we have read deify the public and their unadulterated control and sacrifice short term gains to the public like having usable parks. Unlike a Parks Department, private enterprise can only make money if the public space is actively used. They are the only ones with real motivation to improve the space.

Maybe I am too cynical, but it genuinely seems like Mitchell does not care about the usefulness of public space.[4] He seems much more likely to think about it through the lens of Marxist revolution than from the average member of the public in a city like New York. If we want useful ideas about how to make our parks better, maybe we should get ideas from practical people instead of ideologues who only view things through bright red lenses.

  1. Setha Low, Spaces of Reflection, Recovery, and Resistance: Reimagining the Postindustrial Plaza165
    1. Don Mitchell, “To Go Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice” 195.
  3. Don Mitchell, “To Go Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice” 195.
  4. Don Mitchell, “To Go Again to Hyde Park: Public Space, Rights, and Social Justice” 193.