The Uncensored City
The conventions of urban life often risk blotting out the public space involved in overcoming the barriers built by the urban managers
Iain Borden
Skate wall photo © Iain Borden
Shopping malls, particularly large ones, are increasingly becoming like mini-cities, providing not only a myriad of fashion shops and other retail outlets, not only ample parking for all, but also such facilities as multi-screen cinemas, outdoor plazas, food courts, night-time bars, public art works and even the occasional rock-climbing wall or tennis court. They offer architecture of an apparently high quality, with an artful blend of wide concourses, historical styles, large sculptures, variegated colours and playful light. On marbled floors stand public art, while atop high walls sit neo-classical cornices boasting figurative friezes and poetic inscriptions.
We need a city which is simultaneously strange, familiar and unknown to us
Yet while such malls are – for many people today – ideal places in which to shop, are they really good public space? For above all, they actually offer few of the qualities which real cities offer, none of the vitality, dynamism and downright unpredictability of the full-on urban experience.
Malls also bring with them political curtailments, for they propose that we are happy to be provided for, to be serviced, and to give up our individual powers and rights to the private concerns of the retail mall and its managers. To give one example of this passivity and asymmetry of power, nearly all shopping malls continually film and photograph us, but always go out of their way to ban and prevent visitors from using cameras or videos in return.
Furthermore, it is not only shopping malls themselves which are becoming like this. We now have museums, railway stations, airports and galleries which are increasingly becoming shopping opportunities, and to give but one example of this, BAA, the owners of the majority of British airports, now make more money from retail than they do from landing fees. Economically speaking big airports Heathrow and Gatwick are now shopping malls with runways attached.
How then to offer a different view of the city? How can we assert that shopping is not the only public activity, that urban space is a product not just of consumerism but of a whole range of human actions?
left, Bluewater mall, London; right NY Pocket Park, photos © Iain Borden
The answer to this comes from two realisations. Firstly, it is we ourselves as social animals who make urban space – through our own actions, thoughts, ideas, creations and practice, all of us can contribute to what public space is now and might be. Secondly, all aspects of our everyday life can be part of the public realm: not just the potentially boring and repetitive acts of commuting and shopping, but also all kind of acts of imagination, profound desires and feelings, all that is truly lived in people’s lives.
So what does this mean for public space? On the one hand, there are all of those different kinds of discrete spaces which conventionally make up the public realm. That is, not just shopping malls but also neighbourhood parks, public transport stations for buses and trams, parks, squares, old industrial buildings turned into bars and restaurants, symbolic public buildings like town halls, art galleries, bridges, Ferris wheels, sports stadia and so forth.
But even here we need to be careful. In many propositions for public space we often find an underlying model of urban life that rests firmly on the ancient Greek notion of civilisation as the art of living in cities: the art of traditional art, music, theatre, galleries, opera, grand public squares. In such versions of public space, while there is often the occasional nod to everyday life a certain model of polite society frequently permeates through. Such public space is, above all, the city of public squares, gentle wanderings, spoken conversations and square-side cafés. It is the city of lattés, big Sunday papers, designer lamps, fresh pasta and tactile fabrics.
It is not, however, the city of all the disparate activities that people do in cities. It is not the city of shouting, loud music, running, sex, pure contemplation, demonstrations, subterranean subterfuges. It is not the city of intensity, of bloody-minded determination, of getting out-of-hand; nor is it the city of cab ranks, boot sales, railway arches or street markets; nor is it the city of monkish seclusion, crystal-clear intellectualism, strange oppositions, or ephemeral art interventions; nor is it the city of virtual projections, digital media or hybrid constructions of the real and the imagined.
Venus Fort, Tokyo photos Stefano Mirti
Above all, then, we must realise that public space – space that is truly public – acknowledges three kinds of differences, three alternative ways of making public space not the same but variable, alternating and unusual. The first of these differences concerns ourselves as human beings, accepting that we are not all the same, and that people of different backgrounds, races, ages, classes, sexuality, gender and general interests all have different ideas of what is public space, and that they subsequently use and make their own places to foster their own identities as individuals and citizens.
The second kind of difference is physical, and is a realisation that public spaces should look and generally feel different from each other. Beyond the square, piazza and avenue, cities need hidden spaces and brutally exposed spaces, rough spaces and smooth spaces, loud spaces and silent spaces, exciting spaces and calm spaces. Cities need spaces in which people remember, think, experience, contest, struggle, appropriate, get scared, fall in love, make things, lose things and generally become themselves.
And the third kind of difference is then the experience we have of it. We need spaces in which we encounter otherness and sameness, where we are at once confirmed and challenged, where space is perceived, conceived and imagined, where space is at once real and propositional. Otherwise we too are erased from view, removed from the square, censured from ourselves, denied the right to the city. We need a city which we do not know, which we do not understand, which we have not yet encountered, which is simultaneously, strange, familiar and unknown to us. This is public space which is common to all of us, but always a surprise, a unique place, a stimulation.
