For the first episode in our Perspectives on Public Space series, Sara Ivry speaks with Setha Low, Distinguished Professor, Psychology, Anthropology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Links to some of the research mentioned in the conversation can be found at the bottom of the page.

Transcript

Sara Ivry: Hi everybody, I’m Sara Ivry, features editor at JSTOR Daily. When you’re standing at the Lincoln Memorial, it’s pretty obvious you’re in a public space. The same is true when you’re hiking at the Grand Canyon or having a picnic in Central Park. But what about when you’re walking on a sidewalk, or you’re lounging at a lakefront that’s only open to town residents, or doing laps in a shopping mall in the wintertime? What is public space? How does it function? And what does it have to do with democracy and justice? These are questions that have compelled Setha Low for much of her career. Low is a cultural anthropologist and director of the Public Space Research Group at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She’s written many books on this topic, including Why Public Space Matters, out from Oxford University Press, and we’re delighted to welcome her as part of our podcast series on public space. You can find out more about that at our website, daily.jstor.org. Setha, hello, welcome.

Setha Low: Hi, nice to be here.

Ivry: Tell me, how do you define public space?

Low: That’s always a tough question. I define public space as any place that people have 100 percent access to, and that is generally understood to be in the public domain. But really, I think of any park or plaza or street or sidewalk or market—and sometimes libraries—as public spaces. I also consider all those in-between planning spaces, spaces under the ramps, under bridges, all of those are public space. But that’s me, and I’m a researcher. And in fact, I’ve been known to really criticize myself and say that “It’s not all public space in the same way.”

In fact, I’m beginning to think that maybe that word “public space” is confusing us, because really, a sidewalk and street is a different kind of public space than a plaza or a park or, as I was saying, a library, that these all have different levels of access to some degree. And sometimes access is direct or indirect.

But there’s one other way to think about public space rather than thinking about all these locations, which is, I know, that’s what most of us think of, is “What space is made public?” Kind of the reverse. Where do we go and take our communalness or our publicness to? I mean, you gave the great example of a mall, all right? In the winter, where you do your laps, but a mall we know is private. And there are police who can throw you out. So, from my first definition, it’s not public. It would fit under the more indirect access kind of category.

But what about everyone going to the mall and walking? In that act of walking and talking, are they making that space public, so that…do we want to begin to think a little more broadly about what are our public spaces and the power we have to make spaces that are somewhat privatized, more public than they are? That confuses, I know, maybe for some of us, but also think about the fact that we are the public, therefore, to some degree, we can make spaces public.

Ivry: You said that libraries aren’t entirely public, and I’m so curious by that, because I think of that so much as a sort of prime example of the most public space that we can possibly imagine short of just the outdoors.

Low: There still is a door and an entrance to a library, and there are steps that you might not be able to get up. And the doors in libraries are always closed for a certain amount of time. They aren’t really open all the time as, say, Prospect Park, if we were in Brooklyn. There are no gates, at least at this point, to Prospect Park. And in fact, I know that the Europeans, for sure, are thinking more about what we mean by access.

The other thing is we take for granted our embodiedness, and yet, who we are physically has a lot to do with what we really have access to. So, it’s not that the library isn’t institutionally open or public in that sense. It’s just not exactly the same kind of publicness that my walking out of my building and onto the street. And I’m beginning to think that we should mark that, because for some people, the threshold, the going up the steps, the front, or what that door looks like, or whether it’s open or not, or whether it’s too heavy for you to pull open, might be a deterrent that we weren’t thinking about. So suddenly we’re now beginning to imagine people and people as having their bodies and involved that I could walk up to a library, and it could look very forbidding and the door very closed and very hard to open, maybe I can’t get up the steps, maybe it doesn’t seem like such a public place to me.

Ivry: Let’s step back for a minute. Why is public space important? What kinds of contributions does it make to society?

Low: Let me put it this way. If you were a city manager, I think more in terms of city, I’ll be honest, I’m an urbanist. And you had to make a decision about what to put money in. And you didn’t have a lot of money, and you had many, many, many choices. And there’s so many things that we need. We need education, we need housing, we need this, we need that, we need better energy. I would argue that public space does so much for us that any investment in it will cover the widest number of human needs that we have. It’s important for people coming together and knowing one another in terms of creating a society and democracy. It is the place where 60 percent of people in the rest of the world actually work. It is a workplace. Public space is where the informal economy occurs. It is the space of sustainability. It’s where we have trees and grass and hopefully, in many cases, and places within cities that cool off our heat out things. It’s the place where we socialize our children, and I could go on and on and on. So public space gives us everything from democracy, a sense of inclusion, a sense of belonging, a sense of being a citizen, that we’re all together in some way, a recognition of one other, but all the way to being places of work, play, recreation.

When I interview people in parks or plazas or sitting on a street, particularly on hot summer days, people will tell me that, “You know, I don’t know what I would do without this space. I live in a tiny apartment in a city, I live on a hot street in a city, and this is somewhere I can go, I can reflect, I can relax, and I can have a whole other level of enjoyment of my life.” So, I would say that it contributes to everyone in a multiplicity of ways.

Ivry: Setha, when did you become aware of the idea of public space and interested in it? How did you come to this work?

Low: I think I was just like everyone else, that I took public space for granted, which is one of the reasons, I think, that we don’t defend it as much as we should. You know, we grow up, we go outside, we play in the street, whatever, and we don’t think too much about it.

But my sister moved to a gated community. I think it was in 1992. And I went to my sister’s, where suddenly you couldn’t enter the whole neighborhood. And not only in this place, it’s in Texas, where there are fences all around it that you had to enter, there were fences around each of the houses, and there was no public space. Even the street and sidewalk was private. It’s all private.

And I thought it was really strange. I mean, I grew up in California. Sure, I’d never really, to be absolutely honest, I really hadn’t thought much about it, just like I think most of us. But once I saw that it was shut off, and that— and then as I began to look, that gated communities could have within them great resources, and they could have ponds and things that everyone should go to. I thought, this is really strange. I need to really understand it.

So, I studied first gated communities and private parks, and as I did that, I began more and more than to focus on public spaces. And the first piece on public space was On the Plaza, that’s in 2000. So, that’s the other impetus of all of this, and maybe another way to answer your question is, I’m a cultural anthropologist, as you said, and I work in Latin America, not just in California and New York, and I went to Latin America and spent, you know, years in the plaza. And one of the other things I began to realize is we had nothing like the plaza in LA, at least where I grew up, and there was nothing much like a plaza really  in New York, not the same way. And I studied life in the plaza and began to realize what it offered its inhabitants. And I also watch what happens when they’re closed.

Ivry: What do they offer their inhabitants?

Low: A place to go every single day and meet with everyone, a place to discuss politics, a place for children to play, a place for men to make their living and some women making their living. They offer a microcosm, at least in Costa Rica, which is where I worked, and I worked in San Jose, which is the capital. That plaza really became a microcosm, a little world that reflected everything that was going on in Costa Rica and culture in general. I mean, from a more theoretical point for listeners who are interested, you know, the other thing about public space is that if you look very carefully, you can see everything that goes on in the entire city kind of represented in that space. You can learn so much about a culture from the built environment and the ways in which people are interacting with one another in that environment that just by studying it, you get a view into the entire sort of Costa Rican culture and life.

Ivry: Now, in your view, there are three essential components to a working or workable public space. Can you walk us through those components?

Low: Sure. One of the things I found doing the research, which sort of spans, you know, it’s probably thirty years, really, of research, but seven just for that book, that most everyone who works on public space and who are designers think about public space as a place of contact. As a place where you would encounter someone that you would not necessarily encounter them. And contact and contact theory has been around seventy years, and the idea about contact is that it produces greater tolerance, a broader world view…

A lot’s been written about contact. The problem was, when I did my work, is contact alone doesn’t make a particularly successful public space. And you say, “Why?” Well, contacts can be hostile or not or fleeting or whatever. And I found that a second component that I call “public culture” is equally important.

Now, what do I mean by public culture? I keep saying it’s not a perfect word, I keep waiting for someone to find a better word. But the idea is that as you’re in a public space, whatever it is, including your library or including the sidewalk, that you learn how to be with other people, that they teach you how to be a correct participant in this space. And there’s a lot of accommodation that occurs. So, in Costa Rica, I used to, one day I sat on a bench, and a woman said, “Hey, you know, you can’t sit on the bench.” She said, “Eh, mijita, no puedes.” And I said, “Well, why?” She said, “Well, it’s Roberto’s bench.” And I go, “But Roberto’s not here.” She said, “No, no, no, Roberto will be here at such and such a time, and, and this is his bench.

Any time you go into a new environment, people will interact with you, and by doing that you learn how to be. And that’s what I’m calling public culture. It’s not so static, but once you know it, you can be very comfortable in a space. But the making of that, the making of a temporary culture with a small “c” is a very important part of having a really productive, democratic, integrative, belonging kind of space.

So those two things, I think, contact, public culture—there’s a third that actually was written about initially in the UK. Anna Barker writes about it around Victorian parks. And she calls it “atmosphere,” and I call it “affective atmosphere,” a big word, but all it means is what the park feels like. The French call it “ambiance.” They have been writing about it—never traveled as a concept here—but of what a place feels like and that the feeling of a place which designers do have some part in, as do we, as does the government, as does lighting, as does everything else having to do with design. The atmosphere can really change the kind of social interaction.

And I use the example of being at Yankee Stadium, that’s the baseball team in New York, and they win. And you go out of the stadium and people are high fiving, and they’re bumping into each other, and they’re laughing and they’re interacting a lot. But when they lose, there is kind of silence. There are no cars honking. There are no people talking into each other. The atmosphere, the affective atmosphere completely changes, and it changes whether or not people will interact.

I think everyone knows what I mean, but what we don’t think about is a positive affect can be very pro-social, can really increase the possibility of people interacting in this public space and making it into the kind of place that I’m advocating for and saying is so important to having a healthy city and a healthy life.

Ivry: To what extent have the ways that we use public space changed over time?

Low: Well, the most obvious is that there are fewer people working on the streets, say, in the United States. The relationship between informal work and, say, vendors, vendors would be a great example, but it’s much more than vendors. Think of restaurants on the street. Think of, well, actually, there’s still a lot of work done on the street. Think of all the nannies taking care of children, thinking of all the adult care that happens. There’s a lot of care still going on in the street. But there has been a reduction, at least in the United States, and a lot of controls over how much work can occur on the street. And there’s a lot of debates.

Second would be another change is that there is more pressure that people not live on the street. I mean, people have lived on streets in times of depression and used the streets and public parks and public spaces as tent cities during the Depression, right? And there’s more and more control. And in fact, what’s interesting about COVID is suddenly we put outdoor restaurants back on the street, now we’re taking them back off.

So those kinds of changes…the other big, I mean, I’m just thinking about who’s there and what’s there. As cities change and as they become more touristic, I think that there is a kind of pushing out of the local population. If you think of even, you know, you go to a place like India, everything takes place on the street, all life. There is no public–private you feel sometimes because it’s so continuous. There is the continued separation of public and private and controlling of spaces.

I want to say that there wasn’t as much hostile architecture as we’re beginning to see in public spaces. There were other forms of a hostility against people, but as our cities become more and more segregated, I do think that means that the way we live in a big city like New York, we do see each other in public space and subways, and I’m arguing that’s important, but where we live tends to be more and more segregated by socioeconomic class. As that happens, public spaces are also changing. Many of them in neighborhoods are becoming more homogeneous. Everybody being like everyone else, rather than the kind of heterogeneous plaza that I was talking about in Costa Rica or that one might imagine in someplace like as large as Central Park.

So, more homogeneity, believe it or not, and much more pressure to keep the sidewalk clean from food, from vendors, from work, from sleeping, from that, that thing. And I’m not so sure that…where that’s going to end. I think that’s part of the pressure of privatization.

Ivry: You’ve spoken about threats to public spaces like privatization seems like the most obvious one, but I wonder what are some less obvious threats that exist?

Low: I mean, the most, I don’t want to gloss over the privatization. I, only because if cities do not have the money to build public spaces, which is kind of what has happened in lots and lots of places, then the only way we’re going to get public spaces take, again, you know, Brooklyn, so maybe every, so, Gowanus Canal, that means that the city or any city of the municipality will invite in developers to build buildings and to provide us with public space. Us, meaning us the city collectively or neighborhood, if you want to think about it that way. And if that’s the only way we get new public spaces, they will all be to some degree privatized or at least feel privatized because they will all be privately built public spaces. And people who are living in those buildings won’t want necessarily out—back to the homogeneity—won’t want outsiders.

So, the threat of privatization is a threat that urban development won’t be a publicly funded kind of endeavor, that it’ll all come from the private sector. Then it won’t just be that it’s private with gates, but it’ll be private in all kinds of other ways. It will cost money, it will look like a place that you don’t want to be, there will be policing, or there will be private guards, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Or, as what’s happening with beaches, which is now my new sort of public space that I’ve been working on most recently, is that you won’t be able to get access. In other words, there’ll be public spaces in the middle of buildings, and you won’t be able to get through.

But I think everyone really needs to understand that the threat isn’t just like, we’re going to put gates all around it, it’s that the whole process of producing public space will get more and more handed to the private sector because of the paucity of money for public space development and maintenance in the public realm.

But there’s all the subtle stuff. I mean, you heard me mention hostile architecture. I mean, that the amount of hostile architecture that’s going up, all the millions of ways of the built environment or a bench can say, “Sit on me,” or “Don’t sit on me,” or “Don’t stay here long, don’t stay longer than five minutes.”

Did you read about in, I think it’s in the new Grand Central Station for the Long Island Railroad, which I tend to take, you know, they’re putting in slanted benches or leaning benches that you can’t sit on—and it’s  a public space, a place where people wait for trains or subways or whatever—to make them as uncomfortable as possible. So, that’s one subtle way to make a place not very public. Make sure there’s nowhere you can sit down. Make sure there’s nowhere you can be comfortable. And then in doing that, you also minimize the amount of, again, encounter or contact that occur, and it makes the atmosphere really feel fraught.

And any of the sort of aesthetic decisions that are made can do a lot to communicate who should be here and who should not be here. And at least here in New York and LA and the big cities that I work in, Washington, Baltimore, Costa Rica, San Jose, people read the cues in the environment very, very clearly. You know, if they don’t see people who look like themselves, or activities that they could do, or invitations to sit, and, you know, for a space to look welcome, that’ll kill a public space as well as anything else.

Ivry: Can I ask you, though, what do you mean specifically by hostile architecture? Can you give us some examples?

Low: Okay. A bench that has arm bars every three feet so that nobody could lay down. Or, more overt hostile architecture now is a seating ledge, let’s say on an edge of a building that has spikes on it. I mean, that’s hostile architecture. I think these slant boards that don’t, you know, they’re six-inch wide on an angle, you’re supposed to lean on them. They were just put in, as I said, all over New York, so it was in the news. And I think that’s pretty hostile. It’s saying that you can’t be older, and it says you certainly can’t have certain kinds of disability or restrictions in terms of your movement. It means nobody ever gets tired. It means I don’t really want you here. I mean, any kind of architecture that signals you’re not welcome or signals, “Please don’t stay,” narrow walkways, dark lighting… There are just all kinds of ways of…dogs and guards will do it.

And some of the things that invite one group of people, in fact make it unwelcome for others. For example, in many of the POPS—these are privately owned public spaces that we have all over New York, where there are private guards, a private guard, or a lot of police, or dogs—young kids of color, teenagers of color…let me be respectful, or maybe teenagers is not even respectful…young adults, don’t feel comfortable. Why? Because police tend to watch them and follow them and always think that they’re going to be in trouble and on and on and on and it’s very uncomfortable or they might get questioned. And yet that those same police make tourists feel more comfortable. So, tourism and making public spaces for tourists as opposed to local residents is a really big conflict all over the world now.

Ivry: You’ve made the point that, as a society, we have to take intentional, deliberate steps to develop a culture that supports public space. But how do we do that? How do we take those steps, and how do we determine what those steps even are?

Low: I mean, again, I don’t have a complete answer for you. But in Why Public Space Matters, the last chapter is a methodology to turn yourself into a mini anthropologist and go study your own local public space. I think that to keep our public spaces, each and every one of us has to be responsible for the public spaces in our communities and that are around us and watch how they’re doing and look for their health and learn how to read them just like I do. Be aware as a community that these are these very, very special places that do give you so much, and that to protect them, that we need to study them, be aware of them, watch when they become not socially just or even more or dangerous or in any of the kinds of things. I think, just like the simple answer about fear and insecurity, the sad thing—it’s not a sad thing, there isn’t a technological solution. That’s what we, Mark Maguire and I, say in Trapped on security capitalism.

The way to be safe and the way to keep our public space open is to use it, to, as I started in the very beginning, one of the other ways to think about public space is: we’re the public. We’re in it. It’s ours. We need to make it ours, and we need to be actively making it ours. I also think that we need to be citizens who are aware that very little of the money in our cities is going towards public space and maintenance because the private sector is willing to take it over, but that there are risks and problems. That the spaces that they’re producing are not exactly the same as ones that are really open to everyone.  And it is a Faustian trade because we could very well end up with spaces like Hudson Yards. It is really designed for… It was the last, what, 25-acre space of public space left in Manhattan. And it’s really an upper middle-class space for a certain number of professionals who live there or work there. It’s not really open in the sense of when you go there, it says you really are not welcome here, unless you’re a certain person, have a certain amount of money It kind of has this moralized geography of who you need to be.

So, when we hear that a new space is being produced, I mean, again, I think we have to speak up. And to some degree, we have. I must say on the positive side, the Department of Transportation, in all fairness, DOT has done a lot to create new plazas, closed streets. We learned during COVID, the open streets really are used by mothers and children and people sitting outside their houses. They use them for festivals, they use them for holidays and all kinds of things. People live in New York, in a place like New York, but also in other places, in small environments where families can’t get together and you can’t meet others, and those open streets have made a difference. And they’ve also created all these new kind of corner plazas. Milan has created fifty new, sort of, I don’t know how to explain, you know, sort of transportation, taking the edge of sidewalks and streets and making places out of them, particularly near schools, so mothers can hang out together.

So, there are people doing things. There is pushback, but we all need to be involved in and responsible and knowledgeable that it matters.

Ivry: Setha, thank you so much for joining us.

Low: Well, it was wonderful to be here. It’s always wonderful to talk to you, Sara. You’re a great talk to you about this. Thank you so much.

Setha Low is on the faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her newest book is Beach Politics: Racial, Social, and Environmental Injustice. It’s just out from NYU Press. This podcast is part of a series from JSTOR Daily on public space, and we’ve got other fabulous episodes in this series. We’ve got one on urban landscaping, on public lands, on digital space, and more. They’re all available on our website, which is daily.jstor.org. We also have reading lists on public space, and, more generally, we’ve got reading lists on so many other topics like the Bloomsbury Group, citizen journalism, and Transatlantic Studies. So, check out JSTOR Daily, dig in.

This podcast is produced by Julie Subrin and me, I’m Sara Ivry, with help from JSTOR Daily’s JR Johnson-Roehr and Jonathan Aprea. JSTOR Daily is a project of JSTOR and the not-for-profit organization ITHAKA. Thanks so much for joining us.

Editor’s Note: When this conversation was recorded, Sara Ivry served as Features Editor at JSTOR Daily. She has since moved on from the publication. We’re grateful for her thoughtful work and the care she brought to this series.