Several questions and provocations ground this course: What does the “public” in public space mean? What behaviors and uses of public spaces 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. We will explore tensions between order and self-expression, inclusion and exclusion, and the competing interests of the state, capital, and various publics.
Students will consider how formal planning and insurgent tactics can support collective well-being by addressing needs for comfort and hygiene, fostering interaction among strangers, supporting safe and equitable transportation, ensuring fair access to green spaces, providing opportunities for respite, devoting space for children’s play, enabling the elderly to age in place, and upholding the freedom to move, the freedom to stay, and the freedom to be. These inquiries will draw from official planning processes, as well as grassroot approaches for reclaiming space, building a sense of place, and daylighting 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, understood, misunderstood, and always subject to revision.
The scholarly materials for this interdisciplinary course draw from Critical Geography, Urban Planning, Architecture and Urban Design, Creative Writing, Ethnography, Environmental Psychology, Cultural Criticism, and beyond to pursue its animating inquiries.
Our work draws on a range of approaches—including visual art, poetry, creative and speculative writing, close observation, and public survey—while remaining grounded in the enduring pedagogic modes of writing, reading, and collegial conversation. The terms collegial and conversation signal a shared practice of thought and attention and echo other collective acts—collaboration, communication, cooperation, coordination—all gestures toward gathering to think and act alongside others. 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 as well as a relation.