Spacemakers: Speculative design, public space and monuments

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron D. Knochel ◽  
Alvaro M. Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
Embodied Learning ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Matters Of Concern ◽  
Speculative Design

Controversies in current events highlight the important role that public space and monuments may play in demonstrating community values or conversely projecting status quo articulations of inequity. With this in mind, we felt compelled to develop curricula to unpack the complex relationships between public space and place identity through the shared ownership and development of public monuments. We started a curricular project called Spacemakers to engage learners in arts-based reflections on public space, identity and social justice through the generation of proposed monuments as matters of concern. Through frameworks of history and memory, design practice and cultural geography, we articulate the unfolding of the curriculum as we consider the monument as a curricular object. This article reviews the curricular activities we developed for the Spacemakers project, their theoretical and pedagogical foundations, and the potential for making use of speculative design and critical making as powerful vehicles for reflection on public space and embodied learning.

scholarly journals How Public is Public Art? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Racial Subtext of Public Monuments at Canada’s Pier 21

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-136
Author(s):  
Patience Adamu ◽  
Deon Castello ◽  
Wendy Cukier
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Nova Scotia ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Canadian Multiculturalism

AbstractMuch of the literature on public space focuses on physical inclusion and exclusion rather than social inclusion or exclusion. In this paper, the implications of this are considered in the context of two monuments, The Volunteers/Les Bénévoles, and The Emigrant, located outside the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These monuments, while perhaps designed to celebrate Canadian multiculturalism, can be read instead as signaling Canada’s enduring commitment to white supremacy, Eurocentricity and colonization, when viewed through the eyes of racialized immigrants. Thus the “public space” becomes exclusionary. In the context in which the monuments are situated, the racial subtext cannot be ignored. This article purports that images, text and placement, regardless of intention, have significant implications on public space and public demeanor.

Liberté, Laïcité, Pluralité: Towards a Theology of Principled Pluralism

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Chaplin
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
The State ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Charlie Hebdo

While the Charlie Hebdo attacks unleashed a highly distinctive national debate within France, that debate also serves to throw into sharp relief the deepening tensions generated by increasingly complex relationships between the state and religion across much of Europe, not least due to the arrival of immigrant minority faiths wishing to advance claims in what is widely assumed to be ‘secular’ public space. After reviewing these tensions, the article distinguishes five current European responses to them and proposes a model of ‘principled pluralism’ as a theologically defensible option. The original theological roots of such a model are outlined and six indicative contemporary practical implications proposed.

scholarly journals Red Corpses: A Microhistory of Mass Graves, Dead Bodies, and Their Public Uses

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
François-Xavier Nérard
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cost

What happens to corpses produced by armed conflicts? This question may seem simple: most bodies are buried, more or less quickly, in mass graves. However, the time between death and the moment when the human remains are inhumed deserves to be studied. This article focuses on the situation in the Urals at the end of the Civil War (1918–1919). The fights between the Bolsheviks and their opponents resulted in many casualties. The Bolsheviks gave a fundamental, and rather unusual, importance to the bodies of ‘their’ dead and attached a specific political significance to them. They developed a politics of corpses, using them in public space to assert their power. The bodies of dead Red fighters were brought back to symbolic places, resulting in impressive public funerals across the city of Yekaterinburg in 1918. Their burial sites became contested territories, protected by the authorities but derided by their opponents. After their final victory in 1919, Bolsheviks displayed their dead as proof of the cost of their struggle. Mutilated bodies were shown to carry the stigmata of sacrifice. The inventory and identification of victims became a central and immediate requirement. Inquiry commissions questioned witnesses and looked for mass burials and abandoned corpses. Mass graves were searched, cadavers exhumed and made visible. The public use of corpses was, however, not limited to identification purposes. The display of dead bodies, which is not unusual in Orthodox culture, took on a special political dimension. There was mass dissemination of the sight of death through these public monuments and the use of photography. We must especially stress the topographical importance of the displayed death: the exhumed bodies were used to tell of victory, to make control of the territory explicit. The memorialisation of some mass graves completed the process. In Yekaterinburg, but also in more distant localities, monuments were erected. They were meant to materialise the sacrifice of so-called ‘communards’ and the peculiar place of the Civil War in the narrative of the new Bolshevik regime, honouring the memory of the dead and mobilising the living.

When Environmental History Goes Public in China

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Na Li
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Illustrative Case ◽  
Environmentally Conscious ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
West Lake ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
China Today

This article starts out from looking at what is missing from environmental history in China today, and then goes on to ask a particular set of questions: How does one interpret environmental history with the public? How does one present environmental history in public space? How does one engage with an environmentally conscious public? And ultimately, is it possible to establish public environmental history as a new mode of knowledge? In answer to these questions, it focuses on relationships, including the relationships between nature and culture, the environment and people, and history and memory. Using the dredging history of West Lake in Hangzhou as an illustrative case, it explores nature as material culture, calls attention to the rhetorical power of nature, and argues that environmental history should be interpreted and presented as public memory.

scholarly journals In the Shadow of the Public: Enlightenment and the Pitfalls of Modernity

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 256-277
Author(s):  
Antoine Lilti
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
New Public ◽  
Current Events ◽  
The Media ◽  
Collective Dimension

Abstract The Enlightenment has often been presented as the ideological programme of modernity, the set of ideas and values from which modern, democratic and secularized Western societies have emerged. This reading, however, fails to account for the diversity and polyphony of the Enlightenment. Another reading, that of Michel Foucault, insisted on the ethos of modernity that the Enlightenment would have brought: a critical relationship with the present and current events. Conversely, this interpretation neglects the militant and collective dimension of the Enlightenment that favoured emancipation through knowledge. This article suggests, rather, seeing in the Enlightenment a way of problematizing modernity, of thinking about its contradictions. It develops this argument from a case study: the philosophes’ reflections on the public and its ambivalences. The optimism of the Enlightenment’s fight against prejudice was counterbalanced by a more pessimistic analysis of the new public space and of the media obstacles to the dissemination of knowledge and critical thinking.

scholarly journals LINKages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Caitlin Lambert
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Negative Trend ◽  
Rural Setting ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Town Development

<p>Currently, there is a negative trend in the way small New Zealand towns are developing, ignoring community values and a sense of identity. New Zealand, a country renowned for the beauty of its small towns and wild natural landscapes has also experienced a negative trend in small town developments. Coastal and rural settlements are growing and changing to cater for expansion while neglecting significant and unique character. These aspects hold a considerable amount of value concerning the identity of the town and what makes it unique to the community.  Kapiti Coast, specifically Waikanae, is a place within the Greater Wellington Region of New Zealand which presents an ideal location populated mainly by retirees and elderly (50%) as well as young families (35%) seeking affordable housing. The landscape form is unique as it is composed of both an attractive coastal edge with proximity to a lush rural setting. The suburban town was once a cohesive region with an ‘Olde beach’ character that is now highly disjointed through infrastructure developments. The implementation of new highways combined with the continuous development of residential neighbourhoods has influenced a decline both socially and ecologically.  This thesis investigation aims to explore how landscape architecture can re-inject values and character through design interventions within coastal environments. Highlighting unique elements within the coastal landscape while considering both the needs of younger and older generations, public space can be provided as a way to foster social cohesion and assist with future coastal town development.</p>

scholarly journals Teaching Baltimore Together: building thematic cooperation between classes

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-102
Author(s):  
Samuel Gerald Collins ◽  
Matthew Durington ◽  
Nicole Fabricant
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Baltimore County ◽  
Baltimore City ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
The People ◽  
Current Events ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Moment

One year ago, Baltimore citizens took to the streets to protest not only the death of Freddie Grey, but the structural inequalities and structural violence that systematically limit the opportunities for working-class African Americans in Baltimore.  The protests, though, were not just confined to Baltimore City.  Borne on sophisticated understandings of intersectionality and political economy, the moral imperatives from the Baltimore Uprising resonated with students at our university in Baltimore County, where campus activists moved to both support the people of Baltimore while using the moment of critical reflection to critique racial inequalities on campus.  Since students were displaying a holistic, anthropological understanding of race and inequality in Baltimore, we decided to structure our classes accordingly and brought together several courses in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice in order to examine the interrelationships between power, race, class, public space and urban development.  We taught common texts, visited each other’s classes, and planned events that brought students together with community leaders in Baltimore to discuss common concerns and to learn from each other.  This paper reports on that experiment and suggests that a pedagogical model premised on drawing thematic linkages between existing courses is one way to address current events that impact us all while allowing students to direct the course of their own education. 

scholarly journals Future Housing Identities: Designing in Line with the Contemporary Sustainable Urban Lifestyle

Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Ana Nikezić ◽  
Jelena Ristić Trajković ◽  
Aleksandra Milovanović
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
Sustainable Urban Development ◽  
City Image ◽  
City Center ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Over the past decade, urban housing typologies have evolved from being a feature of modern life to an essential postmodern issue, questioning future housing identities. One of the ways in which architecture can become engaged in this ever-changing process of urban regeneration is to challenge the inherited traditional housing typologies with the newly recognized values of contemporary lifestyle. This paper presents research and design aimed at exploring contemporary sustainable urban lifestyles as a resource for positioning housing structures as cultural urban infrastructure. The main focus of this study is design principles and strategies for generating future housing identities in accordance with sustainable urban development and sustainability of life in urban areas. It is about finding housing conceptual models for an interaction between housing and identity as a response to the impact of increased cities, changed lifestyles in contemporary cities and the requirements for the preservation of the city image and the public space within the housing areas in the city center. The main goal of this study is to understand whether and how an architectural design can preserve a sustainability of life within the city center and become a valuable agent of place identity in the process of urban regeneration. The paper indicates that the contemporary development of society requires a new architectural paradigm, in which lifestyle and architecture create a unique elastic open-ended system with the ability to adapt and change over time and throughout the place.

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