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number 30 fall
2013 ethics + publics
ethics and publics 30
$16 Canada/USA news stand display until April 2014
guest editor: Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
ON SITE r e v i e w
Francis Alys.‘Sometimes doing something political can be poetic’ , video still from Green Line , 2004. francisalys.com/the-green-line/
fall 2013 ethics and publics
used with permission from Francis Alys, Creative Commons Licence
PERFORMANCE pouf! Cynthia Hammond and Thomas Strickland Shauna Janssen Corey Schnobrich Ted Landrum Steve Chodoriwsky
4 10 13 22 24
Biting Back: art and activism at the dog park, Montréal Le Dalhousie, Griffintown: reimagining anOther public space, Montréal Public and Publics: the Occupy Movement, Berkeley and New York Park(ing) Day Word Park, Winnipeg Notes on ‘Exhausted Figure’
HOUSING Virginia Fernandez Rincon Hector Abarca Caroline Howes Duncan Patterson ENVIRONMENT Michael Leeb Jessica Craig William Kingfisher Julian Haladyn
26 30 36 40
GroundTower: critical infrastructure, Caracas Revisiting PREVI: housing as a basic right from Lima to Vancouver Urban Resiliance: Maynard Lake, Dartmouth On Windows: liminal panes
42 43 46 48
City: near Hillcrest Mines, Alberta Positive Tension: terrain vague as public space, Toronto Urgency and the aesthetics of sustainability, Toronto Ethics and Politics: Ron Benner’s Transend: Metting Room, London
POST INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES Sarah Walsh Dustin Valen
52 76
Urban Hagiography: Saints of the City and the aftermath of utopia Fresh Perspectives on Foul: Fresh Kills Landfill
TRACES OF WAR Joshua Craze Novka Cosovic Dick Averns Jeffrey Olinger SPACES OF DEBATE Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
56 60 66 68
Is a building a witness? The Museum: how trauma reaches us 9/11 Architectural Artefacts: questioning the ethics of nomenclature Interstitial: the International Criminal Court
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2 18 80 82 84
Introduction to issue 30: opening thoughts Saint George’s Dragon , Guelph Mary Tremonte: reconstruction the commons Housing: an architecture of turbulence Who I design for; signs that things are not right
Adrian Blackwell Michael diRisio Reza Aliabadi Ron Wickman
DETAILS calls for articles: issues 31 + 32 subscription form masthead
86 87 88
who we all are
opening thoughts
introduction | ethics and publics by thomas - bernard kenniff
design agency responsibility representation practice
The key ethical responsibility of the architect lies not in the refinement of the object as static visual product, but as contributor to the creation of empowering spatial, and hence social, relationships in the name of others. — Jeremy Till
Sometimes doing something poetic can become political
Like every spoken word, every line drawn is a social act: a division, a wall, a river, a connection, a window, a bridge, perhaps all at the same time like Michel De Certeau’s spatial narrative ambiguity. Every such act is social because it constitutes a proposal to redistribute social relations in space. Doubly so because it takes place within particular sets of social circumstances, modes of communication and production: a line drawn as threshold in a design studio, another drawn as a strategic security fence between geopolitical regions. As Francis Alÿs’ The Green Line (opposite) poignantly shows, the simple act of drawing a line can be deeply political indeed. The idea is excruciating, inescapable, but in the best possible way. It forces us to take position, to take responsibility and to answer. The single most important question you can ask a design student, Kathryn Moore once told me, is ‘why?’ and then ask it again, and again. It is with this in mind that the double topic for this issue of On Site review was developed. Ethics and publics not as separate issues, but as inseparable aspects of any intervention, proposed intervention or interpretation of the built environment. Transformation and interpretation, from any disciplinary position, inevitably involves these two things. First, a deep sense of deliberation fundamental to any design act (either thinking before, or thinking through, action) whether a line, a room, a conversation, a critique or a text. Every design act, in this sense, constitutes the turning of values into form. Second, an inescapable relation to other people. No act can exist outside the relations it has with others (a fictional user, a real client, a new public, an audience, an already existing dialogue); no project is without its publics. Within the many disciplines that deal with the built environment there is indeed neither individual alibi nor social isolation. As I write these notes from Québec City, new allegations are emerging from the Charbonneau Commission on corruption in the construction industry. With moral failure and criminal behaviour in both the public and the private sectors intricately tied to the transformation of our built environment, it becomes increasingly urgent to take position and assert everyone’s right to the city, however difficult. It is both urgent and important to never stop questioning what we are producing, how we are producing it, why and for whom. Two seemingly unrelated issues appear highly relevant in this morning’s paper. The provincial government just published its controversial lists of values, re-opening
the debate on the public display of religious symbols and raising valid questions on those spaces we qualify as public. Simultaneously, Québec City’s mayor, who we thought had supported the dialectic between good urban design and civic identity over the last six years, is backtracking on the city’s Sustainable Mobility Plan with Rob Ford-like plans for increased car-oriented development (elections are looming). The point is that like the Charbonneau Commission, these two developing issues have potentially significant social, and thus spatial, consequences. The polyphonic landscape of spatial production, as Mireya Folch-Serra reveals, is ‘a dialogue whose outcome is never a neutral exchange’. The call for articles on ethics and publics opened with Giancarlo de Carlo’s 1969 rhetorical question, ‘who is architecture’s public?’ which he answered himself saying that the public of architecture is anybody who uses it. The quote can be understood in its historical context as a humanist counter to the abstraction of Modernism’s Universal Man or what Adrian Forty identified as the ‘subject of the welfare state’. Aside from the construction industry’s relationship with state-supported housing programmes, ‘who is architecture’s public?’ is still relevant for any project of transformation or interpretation of our current built environment. It forces our reflection toward those affected by our actions, their right to the city, and our modes of practice. As Jeremy Till suggests, responsibility runs deep within design. If we accept that the built environment has any effect on social behaviour (and vice-versa) then treating design other than a social act might amount to what Jean-Paul Sartre disparagingly called bad faith. What On Site review ’s open call sought to capture was what might be called an ‘ethical turn’ that has developed over the last twenty or so years. Quite positively, reflections on practice, responsibility, agency and representation are now common and fundamental. There is a rising interest in modes of practice that integrate critical participation, and in interdisciplinary methods that open up possibilities for collaboration. Design acts, rather than being seen as end products, are now seen as actors in larger networks. The reflection is both timely and vitally needed. The range of subjects that are addressed in this issue of On Site review indicates the importance of such reflection, whether it is at the scale of one’s own window or the scale of war crimes. We have evidence of the current significance of what Jane Rendell calls critical spatial practices in the assembly of unheard voices
and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.
– Francis Alÿs
The Green Line , Jerusalem 2004
In collaboration with Philippe Bellaiche, Rachel Leah Jones and Julien Devaux 17:34 min
www.francisalys.com/ greenline/
Francis Alÿs traced, with a dripping can of green paint, 24km of the Green Line that in 1948 had been drawn on a 1:20,000 map of the Jerusalem area. It signified the position of the Israeli front line after the agreed cease-fire.
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in the midst of urban development and in the theatre of development dynamics. Relational art practices, the concept of the Commons, infrastructure in informal settlements – all are reminders that indeterminate territory and basic needs and services can be common ground. On the other hand, the failure of representation of both the city and its multiple publics – the paradoxes of public space and the relationship between architecture and dialogue, point out the difficult task of transposing particular collective connections, institutions and traumatic experiences into architecture. Ultimately, this issue is about the assemblage of public space and the agency of its publics. * Tim Beasley-Murray writes that ‘dialogue bears the imprint of its own failure’, meaning that, quite positively, dialogue fails to signify completely because it leaves room for response. The call for articles that went out was more the messy text of a conversation between Stephanie White and myself than a cleanly wrapped call, and one that indeed generated some reflection and exchanges on the ethics and publics of On Site review itself. The proposals that came in covered a wide range of subjects in the best possible messy way. Some had direct relations to ethical dilemmas and aspects of public representation, others teased out the latent ethical and representational issues within projects and processes. What stands out is the degree to which each contributor deals with critical self-reflection and sets up their own particular capacity for response. Each raises specific questions about assumptions, methods and hypotheses, courageously failing to signify completely. Whether it is in inviting critical reflection on ethical dilemmas at varying scales, or inviting a performative yawn/bark in the best dialogical way, the words and lines assembled here are opening thoughts, begging for response. c Beasley-Murray, Tim. Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin: Experience and Form. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008 de Carlo, Giancarlo. ‘Architecture’s Public’ in Architecture and Participation , Jeremy Till, Doina Petrescu and Peter Blundell- Jones, editors. London: Spon Press, 2005 Folch-Serra, Mireya. ‘Place, Voice, Space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical landscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , 8, 1990. pp 255-274 Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000 Till, Jeremy. Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009
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View of Griffintown, 1947.The white circle indicates the location of Parc Gallery
urbanism | participation by pouf ! art + architecture
Biting Back art and activism at the dog park
publ ics community montréal animals developers
Parc Gallery was privatised in 2007 in preparation for condo development (opposite, top). Our two-year collaboration with the users of Parc Gallery asserted the publicness of Parc Gallery, using art and outreach to show its history, present use and future importance. Our motivation was to present a counter-argument to city officials’ and developers’ claims that the park was empty space, and to create a rationale for saving the park. In Elizabeth Grosz’s term, we ‘made visible’ Parc Gallery’s inter-species vitality, its meaning as shared space and what we discovered about its surprising heritage.
In 2010 , pouf! art + architecture began a site-specific project under the rubric of Urban Occupations Urbaines (UOU), a year-long, neighbourhood-based curatorial platform located in the rapidly gentrifying, post-industrial neighbourhood of Griffintown, Montréal (above). Curator Shauna Janssen, also a contributor to this issue of On Site , devised UOU to engage artists in an urban space of dramatic transition. The site of pouf! ’s intervention was a well-used dog run known as Parc Gallery. Yet, beyond the humans and dogs who frequent it every day, this green space is little-known and is thus vulnerable (below).
View of Parc Gallery, Griffintown, 19 August 2012
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Devimco urban plan view for Village Griffintown development, by Arbour and Associates, 2007
Economic decline and depopulation followed the closing of the Lachine Canal in 1959. In 1962 Griffintown was re-zoned light industrial and the City no longer maintained social services in the area. By 1967 one public document described Parc Gallery as abandoned. Despite the absence of lighting and water fountains, the park remained in continual use as a baseball field and, by the 1990s, an official dog run. 1 People from across the southwest of Montréal bring their dogs to this space for fresh air and exercise. The chain-link fence that surrounds the park today marks the exact borders that activists created eighty years ago. Rosalyn Deutsche argues that publicness is not a given or a natural feature of urban parks and squares. For Deutsche, and David Harvey, it is only when space is the site of conflict, not consensus, that its publicness is exercised and is thus meaningful. Taking this critical stance as our guide, pouf! called upon park users to resist the City’s decision to strip Parc Gallery of its public status and to insist on their collective ownership as citizens of Montréal. 2 In this way, the moment when the imminent loss of the park entered its users’ awareness became the moment in which its ‘publicness’ began to actualise. 1 All official dog parks in Montréal have signs on their gates identifying them as such (there are many informal dog runs too, which do not have these signs). Although Parc Gallery lost its standing as public space in 2007, the sign remained, one of the reasons why the park’s users didn’t realise the space was slated for development. 2 The normal social contract between a city and its citizens is buried under the grandiose legacy projects of politicians, a mafia- driven building trade and widespread corruption. Citizens believe that power in this city is not looking out for them — roads are a commonly-cited example, poorly built and then re-built at great expense by an industry that through huge campaign contributions directly puts mayors and councillors into power. The Charbonneau Commission has made this open secret more open, but so far there has been no change.
Griffintown’s urban morphology and social history are part of Montréal’s larger transition from a hub of industrial production and shipping in the nineteenth century to its current emphasis on leisure and consumption. Since 2005, the re-purposing of Griffintown’s industrial urban landscape for waterfront parkland and upscale condominiums has signalled this shift. In the late- nineteenth century, labourers lived and worked in this heavily industrialised district, separated from the city’s salaried and professional classes by a steep slope and several railway lines. The impoverished living conditions of French, Irish and English immigrant workers inspired Herbert Brown Ames’ 1897 book, The City Below the Hill: A Sociological Study of a Portion of the City of Montreal . pouf! ’s intervention took place on a lot that was once at the centre of this district. Archives indicate that after the Ogdensburg Coal and Towing Company closed towards the end of WWI, this rectangular plot of land was abandoned. Heritage specialist, David B. Hanna notes that Irish community activists fought in the 1930s to create the first public green space on this site, called the Basin Street Playground (below). In 1945 the City of Montréal purchased the land and it became known as Parc Gallery.
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Plan view of Parc Gallery, indicated by the large dark rectangle at centre- left of the map. St.Anne’s Church is directly above the right-half of Parc Gallery. detail, St.Ann’s Ward, Land Use Map of Montréal, 1947
There are also wildly different rules regarding public space from one district to another. For example, you can be fined for sitting on the grass in public parks in the Central South borough while in other parts of the city these laws either do not exist or are not enforced.
Thomas photographing Maurice for his portrait, 2011
Portrait of Maurice, 2012
In September 2010, pouf! took a team of graduate students from Concordia University to interview park users about their knowledge of and experiences in the park. 3 In exchange, we offered photographs of the dogs (who proved to be charming subjects, above). This delightful day led to the accumulation of interview matter from twenty-five individuals and hundreds of photographs of dogs, dogs and people, and the park itself. pouf! then did archival research about the history of the park, through which we discovered its activist origins. To keep the project in circulation during our research phase, pouf! built a blog: fifty posts provided updates, links, photographs and archival findings to the growing community of concern about the future of Parc Gallery. As time went on, we diversified our efforts. In addition to creating a petition, launching a letter-writing campaign and producing several documents for the City of Montréal’s Office for Public Consultation (OCPM) 4 , pouf! designed, wrote and published a bilingual publication, below, about the park’s history and present use, detailing the uncertainty that threatened the park’s future.
5 Thomas Strickland and Evan Kirkland were the portrait photographers; Shauna Janssen documented the event; Cynthia Hammond, Marie-France Daigneault-Bouchard, and Nuria Carton de Grammont undertook interviews. 4 The office for public consultation is a supposedly non-partisan group that acts as a liaison between the public and the city with regard to new development, construction and major changes to the urban fabric. One of the major controversies surrounding Griffintown’s development was the lack of public consultation – the OCPM only became involved after several rounds of proposals from developers were accepted and revised, and only then after a lot of bad press. The consultation was reluctant at best and, for many, came in too late to have any effect. Another facet of this issue is that the OCPM has no power to actually change outcomes. They can only advise the city on public opinion and provide venues for the expression of that opinion. Yet even this is weak, in practice. At the OCPM meeting about Griffintown in January 2011, for example, politicians were given the microphone at the start of the talks, and left before members of the public spoke. At another event organised by the OCPM in the same year, again the competing political parties were given the space to speak first, without any limit on their time, and only after they had finished (and some left) did the public have a say.
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dog parc gallery publication. pouf! art + architecture, 2011
above: Invitation to dog parc gallery vernissage. pouf! art + architecture, 2011
below: dog park gallery vernissage at Parc Gallery, 27 August 2011
Cynthia Hammond presenting dog parc gallery, Maison de l’architecture du Québec. À qui profite l’espace public? Café des z’architectes, 21 February 2012
In all cases, we undertook these initiatives as artworks; the visual and symbolic aspects of everything we produced had intentional aesthetic qualities, top, designed to give continuity to all facets of the project. These vectors aligned in our August 2011 exhibition, dog parc gallery, a selection of twenty-five dog portraits, enlarged and printed on weather-proof vinyl, facing page top right, and hung on the fence so important to the park’s morphological and activist origins. The opening event brought over sixty people and just as many dogs to the park, above, reinforcing the fact that it would not only be humans who would lose this special place if condos were built here. Park users began to extend the activities that pouf! had begun; an inter-species community began to self-identify and mobilise around this half-acre of grass. In 2011-12 we accompanied a core group of park users to meetings with politicians and supplied materials —images, publications, powerpoints, right — to the community in their outreach efforts. As one regular park user, Jesse Fuchs told us, “before your project, we didn’t know we were a community. With your photographs, you helped us to see what we had in common.” 5 From the beginning, pouf! ’s aim was to foster and eventually hand the project over to the community. As the group solidified and gained confidence, we were able to step aside, ensuring that official response would be to local taxpayers and voters, not to us. We saw in real time how community forms; not, as Rosi Braidotti points out, around some essential idea of shared identity but rather around a matter, object, or place of shared concern. The Parc Gallery dog run was one such place.
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5 Jesse Fuchs, conversation with Thomas Strickland, 27 August 2011.
Description of Parc Gallery found on the ‘District Griffin’ website.The text box and image pop-up when the little tree located on the park — to the left of the text box in this image — is selected.
aftermath
dog parc gallery is a success story in many ways. In 2012 the city, in agreement with developers, responded to our pressure and re-zoned Parc Gallery as public, green space once again. On 4 July 2013, borough representative Véronique Fournier addressed a press conference in Parc Gallery to announce that this land would continue its existence as a dog park for the foreseeable future. However, by making the park’s history of activism and current- day vitality visible, pouf! unwittingly contributed to a celebratory discourse on post-industrial redevelopment. The major developer in the area, Devimco, plagiarised one of our publications to promote their heritage-conscious, ‘green’ approach.
The company’s website today quotes directly from, but does not acknowledge, our 2011 exhibition catalogue. above. Prospective condo-owners will find our own description of the value of the park as they peruse images of Devimco’s newest project: Sur Le Parc - District Griffin . In this way, pouf! ’s assertions of the value of Parc Gallery were deftly folded into the very development scheme we had aimed to critique. Devimco’s appropriation of pouf! ’s text is a clear example of what Ipek Türeli describes as “the free or near-free labour of the architect-artist” and how such labour can, despite intentions, “be used to generate capital”.
Plan of Griffintown in a booklet prepared by the Office de la consultation publique Montréal for a neighbourhood “open house” and planning workshop held on January 20-21, 2012.The white circle indicates Parc Gallery.As of January 2, 2012 it was being represented on public documents as an existing park!
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In the end, then, what did we accomplish? Is saving a public green space enough compensation for the ways in which dog parc gallery ‘generated capital’ for the forces we would otherwise have hoped to challenge? While it is undeniable that our work was co-opted and the now-protected park was exploited for private profit, there are several distinct results from our process that deserve a final underscore. First, in an irreducible, material way, the park as historic space remains. For those who wish to learn more about its activist heritage, our public artwork, publications and blog are accessible traces. Second, the project foregrounded a type of urban resident very rarely prioritised in planning and development initiatives: dogs. In saving the park as a space of inter-species connection, dog parc gallery made a small but meaningful contribution to the greater recognition and inclusion of urban animal dwellers — in particular what Donna Haraway calls companion species, in Montréal’s built environment. Despite the intensification of capitalist processes around the park, the collaborative efforts of artists and resident-activists prevented private development on this citizen-created place. For us, dog parc gallery has inspired a sustained reflection on the process and consequences of community-engaged, site-specific work. While one cannot ignore the risks of interventionist spatial practice, the rewards in this case inspire us to continue to work through the ethics and rewards of the ongoing creation of truly public space. c
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Braidotti, Rosie. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. Grosz, Elisabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth . New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness . Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. 2006; repr., London: Verso, 2008. Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Latour, Bruno. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Tureli, Ipek ‘‘Small’ Architectures, Walking and Camping in Middle Eastern Cities.’ International Journal of Islamic Architecture 2, no.1 (2013): 5-38.
validation | performance by shauna janssen
theatre mega-planning intimacy erasure resistance
Le Dalhousie Griffintown reimagining anOther public space
left: Dalhousie Street,1909. Fire Insurance Map,Volume One, No.13582 - 02 below: satellite version of Le Dalhousie, 2013. James Lane is perhaps the only point of reference here.
at the bottom: Corridor Dalhousie Plan of 2009
The urban public sphere is constituted differently depending on the time and condition of a day. After dark, boundaries between what is public and private slip away; weather patterns, seasons and a city’s morphology have much to do with the conditions from which public spaces emerge. The publicness of urban space reminds us of Rosalyn Deutsche and her examination of the public nature of subjectivity, where social relationships are critical to the meanings given to the public sphere: ‘What does it mean for space to be public – the space of the city, a building, exhibition, institution, or work of art?’ 1 I consider how the concept of publics, and publicness, may not always be a product of the designed built environment and ask: under what urban conditions are spaces being re-imagined as public? In September 2009, the City of Montréal announced preliminary plans for a regional bus corridor expected to move approximately 1400 buses and 42,000 commuters daily between Montréal’s south shore and the city centre. This bus corridor coincided with the city’s plan to revitalise its harbour front and to reorganise the Bonaventure Expressway, one of Montréal’s major transportation routes on and off the island. The site of the bus corridor was on the remains of Dalhousie Street, located in Griffintown, one of Montréal’s former working class neighbourhoods. Located west of Old Montréal, a popular tourist destination, and just north of the rapidly gentrifying Lachine Canal district, Griffintown is resonant with Canada’s pre-industrial history. In the nineteenth century Dalhousie appeared as a short street running four blocks along a north-south axis. It was transformed from a street into a cul-de-sac with the construction of a Canadian National Railway viaduct in the 1940s. The Dalhousie cul-de-sac now sits between the massive concrete wall of the railway viaduct to the east and to the west, the façade of the iconic, historic, nineteenth century New City Gas buildings.
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1 Rosalyn Deutsche. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998
right: Le Dalhousie cul-de-sac, a wedge of space between the CNR viaduct and the New City Gas buildng
below: a still from Théâtre Nulle Part .’s ‘L’espace quotidien’
The transformation of the Dalhousie cul-de-sac was just one of many debates over the city’s contentious plan to revitalise Griffintown. Local stakeholders — business proprietors, residents and members of the ad hoc Community for the Sustainable Redevelopment of Griffintown (CSRG) opposed the Dalhousie Corridor project and circulated a petition to stop its development. 2 Key issues were increased air and noise pollution, high density traffic, the projected and prohibitive cost of the project (originally estimated at $119 million) and how the change would compromise the integrity of existing historic buildings in the neighbourhood. These concerns were presented to city officials through a series of public consultations. In June 2010, the community initiative Le Corridor culturel de Griffintown named this cul-de-sac ‘ Le Dalhousie ’, and launched a number of community events on the site. Between July 2010 and August 2011, Le Dalhousie became a site that invited creative responses, rehearsing its own publicness. The site’s reclamation for public and social activities appeared as an act of resistance to municipal plans for the bus corridor. Equally, those temporarily using the site were determining another kind of space that
reorients the discourse away from the tropes of historical preservation and resistance, and towards a re-conceptualisation of what constitutes public space. Spatially, Le Dalhousie is a wedge that defies those spatial boundaries typically associated with what constitutes a public space, such as the public square. Le Dalhousie is shadowed by two historically modern structures that frame this recess in the city. From a performative point of view, the surfaces of Le Dalhousie’s edges provide a number of scenographic possibilities. The mouth of the cul-de-sac increases its volume. Its texture is characterised by a bruised and cracking surface on the remains of the New City Gas building and rust etching itself into the skin of the Canadian National Railway viaduct. Le Dalhousie has an evolving ecological life: a tree grows out of the viaduct façade and peeling asphalt reveals weeds pushing through the street’s original nineteenth- century cobblestones. From an architectural perspective, Griffintown, and likewise interstitial urban spaces like Le Dalhousie , while perceived to be indeterminate, are in fact determined by more than the residue of the site’s urban morphology.
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2 As a result of the public consultations the original proposals for the Dalhousie Corridor were revised in 2010. To date, it appears the Dalhousie Corridor project has been terminated. See www.griffintown.org
left: Théâtre Nulle Part. ‘Fenêtres murées/ Daylight Robbery’ a site-specific performance, based on images of condemned buildings and boarded up windows, that explored the dialogue between a building’s interior private spaces and the public exterior environment. below: Théâtre Nulle Part is a collective of four artists: Mélanie Binette, Maryse Beauchamp, Roxanne Robillard and Catherine Dumas.
Urban Occupations Urbaines is a curatorial platform that I developed for creative and critical engagements with unresolved urban and architectural conditions. 3 In September 2010, I invited Théâtre Nulle Part , a site- specific theatre company, to create a performance at Le Dalhousie . Théâtre Nulle Part used Le Dalhousie as a site to examine, over three weeks, the memory of place, the history of Griffintown’s working class community and the politics of displacement. In the public performance, the façade of the Canadian National Railway viaduct was used for a narrative of shadows, evoking the spectres and history of a bygone community. The performance encouraged spectators to move freely within the cul-de-sac whereby a certain shared, communal and public empathy with the site was elicited. In this way, Théâtre Nulle Part ’s spectators collaborated with the spatial agency of the site to form, temporarily, a new political and public space. 4 Distant traffic and city sounds ricocheted in whispers, loose rubble crunched under foot, the brrrring and restless flapping of pigeons reverberated in the rafters — all this collaborated in shaping a social, sensory, spatial, collective and public consciousness. Théâtre Nulle Part ’s performed interventions restore a tradition, largely eradicated in the nineteenth century, of using streets for theatre.
The urban stage, or the city as a theatre of social action, calls to citizens to drop their dependence on cultural institutions to revisit and reflect on the performative qualities of public spaces. Le Dalhousie is not ‘public’ by definition. Its reputation as a public site is as a site of public interest for artists, the community and spectators which evolved with its temporary and tenuous occupation. Cynthia Hammond says that ‘the publicness of space is not a given; rather, it is something to be continually rehearsed and negotiated, exercised, and sometimes lost’. 5 The temporary use of Le Dalhousie shows that although there are spatial practices that feed dominant divisions of power and space, there are also dialogical processes that contest and negotiate these divisions. Le Dalhousie ‘s public identity was cultivated by the imagination of its users. Despite the initial controversy regarding the reuse of the cul-de-sac as a bus corridor, the economy of public exchange that occupied the site of Le Dalhousie in 2011 showed what dialogical processes hold for the production of publics. Participation and dissent, social processes, contingency and contestation (re)write relations between multiple subjects. They also outline a wide ethical concern for the future of marginal and interstitial urban sites such as the Dalhousie cul-de-sac. c
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3 www.urbanoccupationsurbaines. org 4 See Spatial Agency , an online initiative created by Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till, for an evolving critical discourse and archive on the subject, theory and practice of spatial agency. www. spatialagency.net 5 Cynthia Hammond. ‘Urban ‘Truths: Artistic Interventions in Post-Socialist Space’, in The Post Socialist City: Continuity and Change in Space and Imagery. Marina Dmitrieva and Alfrun Kliems, editors. Berlin: Jois Verlag, 2010
Public and Publics the Occupy Movement
public space | rights by corey schnobrich
commons protest encampment community democracy
Police and protesters face off following Occupy Oakland’s eviction, November 14, 2011
This was not the first time Occupy was accused of failing the public good. Though the movement was ostensibly inclusive, epitomised by ‘We are the 99%’, the encampments themselves were seen as an unlawful, exclusive appropriation of public space. Critics upheld the protesters’ right to freedom of speech and assembly, but argued that the way the protesters exercised those rights, through continuous occupation, impinged on other people’s ability to do the same — the many groups that participated in the Occupy movement did so to the detriment of the greater public. The rights of a few usurped the rights of the many, so the criticism went. This argument has an intuitive, almost unobjectionable appeal. But it is a dangerous one, both for rights generally, and specifically for the exercising of those rights in public space. By privileging the majority preference over minority protest, democratic participation can be squelched. And by barring this protest in public space, voices that have no other public forum, no presence in the media or political lobby, can be silenced. The idea that individual or group rights should be subordinate to collective or societal rights stems in part from the notion of a singular public. ‘The public’ is a broad term, encompassing all people of a place and time. In contrast, the term ‘publics’ better captures the ever shifting group identities we each either subscribe
On November 9, 2011, protesters with Occupy Cal attempted to establish an encampment next to Sproul Plaza, the Berkeley campus’s symbolic heart. A handful of tents were barely up before police in riot gear clubbed their way through a line of protesters to pull up the stakes. The police broke several students’ ribs and pulled to the ground, by the hair, a professor presenting herself for arrest. Videos went viral; international media covered the ensuing outrage. The following day all students received a message from Robert J Birgeneau, the university chancellor. He called the protesters’ actions ‘not non-violent civil disobedience’, and urged them ‘to consider the interests of the broader community — the tens of thousands who elected not to participate in yesterday’s events’. What he meant by ‘the broader community’ remains a mystery. Student and faculty councils condemned the police violence and the student senate passed a resolution supporting the goals of the movement — but by invoking the ‘interests of the broader community’, the chancellor implied the protesters were a minority at odds with their peers and the common good. At best misguided, at worst, selfish, radical and exclusive.
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to or are placed in by others. The theorist Nancy Fraser best articulated this: if the public is a homogenous entity interested in consensus, then publics are diverse, predicated on difference and willing to argue and agitate for their concerns. And while a rule governing a public space may be desirable for the public , such as ‘No Sleeping Overnight’, it may not be good for a public , such as the homeless. Occupy’s critics often invoked the interests of the public as a way to isolate the protesting groups and, ultimately, their messages. I will look in detail at how this criticism impacted two encampments – Occupy Wall Street in New York and Occupy Oakland. Though the same argument was waged elsewhere, these two cities received intensive media coverage and, thus, greater condemnation. In both places civic leaders successfully appealed to the public to close the encampments, though their subsequent actions showed little regard for any public.
with, as the park has been taken over by protestors, making it unavailable to anyone else.’ The New York Daily News concurred, arguing that the protesters excluded all other people: ‘The need for eviction would be true no matter the message. No one group — whether they are doing Tai Chi or playing piano or lambasting capitalism — has a right to commandeer a public space to the exclusion of others for an indefinite period.’ Even the judge that heard and then denied the protesters’ appeal of the eviction cited the public’s interest: ‘The movants have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park . . . to the exclusion of the owner’s reasonable rights and duties to maintain Zuccotti Park, or to the rights to public access of others who might wish to use the space safely.’
One of Occupy’s publics, families, gather in Zuccotti Park on October 22, 2011
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Not much media coverage accompanied the call for Occupy Wall Street, announced by Adbusters in July of 2011. Neither did the original occupation of Zuccotti Park which began two months later on September 17. Only as the occupation persisted, and the days stretched into weeks, did the movement’s momentum grow, along with the voices of its detractors. Nearly two months after the occupation began, the park’s private manager posted new rules banning lying down and the use of tarps and tents. On November 15, police cleared the protesters from Zuccotti. In a statement later that day, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave this reason for the eviction: ‘The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day. Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied
Critics levelled similar arguments at Occupy Oakland, despite differences between the protesters’ tactics and their relationship with the city government. Unlike New York, Oakland’s mayor supported Occupy’s goals and one city council member even slept at the encampment in Frank Ogawa Plaza. Instead, local business organisations led the condemnation, claiming the encampment scared customers away. Perhaps because this argument alone seemed too self-centred, they also invoked the interests of the public versus the interests of the protesters. In a letter to Mayor Jean Quan, the Downtown Oakland Association and the Lake Merritt/ Uptown District Association wrote: ‘Unlike Zuccotti Park in New York, this is a public space — to be enjoyed by all the people of Oakland, not just a minority who have now had their moment and the headlines; it is time
for them to move on.’ The mayor’s most vocal critic, city councilman Ignacio de la Fuente, also supported the encampment’s removal by appealing to the rights of all citizens: ‘I believe we have the duty and responsibility to protect not only their [the protesters’] rights, but other people’s rights – businesses and people that work downtown in the City of Oakland. So at some point you have to take action because you are responsible for that.’ In the arguments against both Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland, critics always affirmed the protesters’ rights to freedom of speech and assembly. But they contested the particular practice of those rights, in the form of occupation. The courts agreed, showing
goal – instead, this mindset leads to suppressing differences and marginalising voices that obstruct consensus. A better-functioning democracy takes precedence over a truer democracy, in which every individual or public has a voice. It is the singular notion of community or public, and privileging the rights of the many over the rights of the few, which troubles me about Occupy’s critics. While they affirmed ideals of speech and assembly, the evictions helped silence debate and stop coordinated action. In fact, the evictions did little good for either the idealised public or any other publics. First, many spaces chosen by the protesters were little used before their occupation. Zuccotti Park and Frank Ogawa Plaza were not household names and like many Occupy sites, were chosen because they were central, not because they were popular. Jon Stewart described Zuccotti Park as ‘the park
Portrait of a Occupy Wall Street protester on November 2, 2011
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the strict limits to this type of expression. When ideals ran up against annoyance, the latter usually won. The disjuncture between ideal rights and practiced rights puzzles, particularly because they are so esteemed, almost revered, in democracies. So too are the public spaces in which they most often occur, whether the agora of the Greeks, the forum of the Roman Republic, or the streets and squares of modern cities. In their ideal, these are places where all citizens can gather to discuss, debate and protest. But this ideal of the public space, much like the ideal of freedom of speech and assembly, is often compromised. To theorists such as Nancy Fraser and Iris Marion Young, this comes as no surprise. It is a by-product of striving for an unachievable social harmony, or assuming all social concerns can be decided by the public, together. But it is not just an impractical
no one, even those of us who live across the street from it, had heard of until the Occupy Wall Street movement’. Certainly there were many more publics using these spaces during the movement than before or after. Second, the Occupy encampments were largely inclusive, in both the ideas debated and how space was used. Far from excluding the public, Occupy accepted and reached out to many publics, from libertarians to union members, students to retirees, and lower to upper-middle class. The behaviours at Occupy sites varied greatly as well — from drumming to teaching to praying. As before, publics ate lunch there. Third, the squares that were to be immediately returned to the public were not fully open to anyone in the aftermath of the evictions. Zuccotti Park was cleared on the morning of November 15 with promises from Mayor Bloomberg that the park would re-open later in the day.
But the fences checking the entry of the protesters, and everyone else, did not come down until January of the next year. Frank Ogawa Plaza was cleared on the night of November 14, but it wasn’t until January 10 that the private security firm charged with protecting the damaged lawn finally left. During these periods, no publics freely used these spaces, regardless of ideology or behaviour. In retrospect it seems clear that civic leaders used the public as a straw man to close the camps, presumably to cover less palatable motivations for doing so. The occupations were an emphatic expression of speech and assembly — the best way to counter their democratic appeal was to argue that they actually limited the rights of others. But there is little reason to think that the public’s rights, and the places of their enactment, are better off as a result. Zuccotti Park and Frank Ogawa Plaza, along with the thousands of Occupy
pushed boundaries and raised questions about the purpose and limits of public space. Should occupation be considered a form of speech or assembly? If the government does not or cannot provide a solution to homelessness, can sleeping in public space be banned? Can active protest and passive recreation coexist? When does claiming a public space become exclusive use? Occupy’s goal was to debate these types of questions openly and horizontally, in a forum and space that all publics could theoretically access. Over time, though, the encampments became bigger issues than the reasons they began, and many publics began to lose patience with Occupy’s publics.
Occupy Cal protesters re-establish their encampment on November 15, 2011
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sites throughout the world, have largely returned to their previous states. For better or worse, they are much less intensely used than in the fall of 2011 and no longer host the continued democratic debate, sometimes absurd and chaotic, sometimes meaningful and inspiring, that they did for two short months. This debate, in which many publics participated (and not always genially), may have embodied the highest and best use for those public spaces. They became, if but for one season, more than a place to eat lunch. None of this is to say that the encampments should have persisted. Some Occupy sites had legitimate health and safety concerns, with violence directed by or against residents. At others, tents covered almost every inch of common space, damaging vegetation for months. Constant policing taxed local governments, even if it often did more harm than good. However, the movement
On November 17 I walked down with a group of my classmates to Sproul Plaza. Several were carrying already-erected tents, intending to create a scene. By this date, most Occupy encampments had been evicted and the movement seemed to be losing steam. Adbusters suggested two days previously that Occupy Wall Street ‘declare victory’ and refocus its efforts. On the Berkeley campus, police had dismantled the few remaining tents the night before. There was still enough tension though that a camera crew and a few police officers milled around the plaza. As the students entered the space, chanting loudly, they let go of the tents and got the reaction they were hoping for.
A tent and large banner float over Sproul Plaza, centre of Occupy Cal as well as the 1960s Free Speech Movement
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The half-domes floated slowly upward, climbing until they reached the top of Sproul Hall. Lifted by hundreds of balloons, they sauntered slowly overhead, as a large banner unfurled between them read OUR SPACE. A local reporter quipped that it ‘flew in the face’ of the administration’s ban and represented a takeover of the plaza. Perhaps it was a bit pompous. For me, it was just one group, one public, staking their claim for many to follow. c
Fraser, Nancy. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’ Social Text no. 25/26 (1990): 56–80.
Young, Iris Marion. “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference.” Social Theory and Practice 12 , no. 1 (Spring 1986): 1–26.
Saint George’s Dragon
counter - publics | instantiation by adrian blackwell
installation conversation process assemblage ideology
Saint George’s Dragon is an unrealised installation for Guelph, a small city in southern Ontario.The project was developed over two and a half years from its initial commissioning by the Musagetes Foundation in the fall of 2010. The proposed work consists of three parts, a temporary plywood and steel sculpture to be located in St. George’s Square in downtown Guelph, a newsletter focused on the uses of public space in the region, and a series of conversations to be held in or on the structure, focusing on the questions raised in the newsletter. The project was designed to investigate the contradictory nature of capitalist public spaces through six paradoxes: affinity/disagreement representation/presentation people/things materiality/immateriality
The contemporary paradox of public space
Over the last few years we have seen a resurgence of political demonstrations around the world that have re-animated the concept of public space. In each case, citizens gathered in squares and streets to protest today’s political economy of austerity and inequality. In the face of a pro-market neo-liberal ideology that privatises public assets and encloses common resources, it is no surprise that recent political resistance demands the right to occupy the city. Since the 1970s countries have reversed the redistributive agenda of Keynesian economics, in order to govern according to the rule of the market. Neo-liberalism has wrought a two- headed assault on authentic public space: it has privatised and commodified it while at the same time implementing a regime of surveillance and control over it. These two forms of enclosure, one generated by the free market, the other by the state, function as complementary dimensions of society, opening new markets while policing consequent social instability and economic inequality. Although this duality of openness and violence is obviously contradictory, many people accept these public/private spaces as the unified horizon of our possibility. Real public space is constructed through active struggles that name and demonstrate the contradictions that structure it. By thinking of public space in terms of its essential polarities, it becomes a contested field, providing a conceptual and physical space for discussion and disagreement. Public space is constitutively paradoxical. Public space is nothing but the terrain of its ongoing negotiation.
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privacy/publicity city/urbanisation
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