What does “public” in public space mean? What behaviors and uses of public space are permissible, and who gets to decide? This course explores the design, regulation, and phenomenological experience of public life, including streets, sidewalks, parks, plazas, public transit, and other common spaces.
Students will consider insurgent, grassroots, and formal planning processes used to support well-being, reclaim space, build a sense of place, and daylight unacknowledged histories embedded in the public realm. Through our shared studies, students will build awareness of how material, social, and historical conditions shape the variety of publics in which they participate, and how publicity is enacted, contested, and subject to revision and reinterpretation.
Our work draws on a range of practices, including visual art, poetry, creative writing, public survey, and above all close observation. As scholars coming together in study at a public institution, we engage with themes of publicity with a shared awareness of the temporary public that forms in the classroom, where public is both a site and a relation.