This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2009, Number 29.

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2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Not to be reproduced without the permission of
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REVIEWED BY DANA CUFF

In Search of New Public Domain

Analysis and Strategy
by Maartin Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp
Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001

OPEN
New Designs for Public Space
by Raymond W. Gastil and Zo Ryan
New York: Van Alen Institute, 2004

At various points in history, the public

sphere rears its head provocatively,
potently, unabashedly. Augustus
Caesar shaped Romes public space
as a principal means of displaying
power and unifying the citizenry.
Napolon accomplished the former if
not the latter with Haussmanns boulevards in Paris. The great Modernist
projects of Chandigarh and Braslia
created utopian space that was to
symbolize heroic political futures. And
when Ant Farm inflated its Clean Air
Pod at UC Berkeley in 1970, it was
part of the radical tradition of claiming
public space for debate. For centuries,
if not millennia, public space has been
tied to politics, as the realm mediating
between citizens and the state, or at
least between individual citizens and
the collective. Even when Jrgen
Habermas extols the public virtue of a
street caf, the modest space is
understood as a breeding ground for
political debate.1
Victor Gruen found the
answer to that crisis in urban revitalization projects, like the countrys first
outdoor pedestrian mall in Fresno,

California, where he closed a downtown street to auto traffic in 1964.

Coincidentally, my very first architectural job twenty years later was to rerevitalize that mall. It had been abandoned, its boarded-up shops covered
with graffiti, and the city decided to
relocate its mental health facilities into
an old department storenobody in
their right mind had been down there
for years, the reasoning went.
Such bizarre design logics
cycle through the history of urban public space, provoking skepticism about
the value of new books on the topic.
What new can be said about the public
sphere? Koolhaas has said more than
enough on shopping. Weve abandoned Habermas in principle, yet his
principles keep seeping into our conversations. We agree that the boundaries between private and public are
murkier than ever, yet we cannot seem
to leave the two separate terms
behind. We also acknowledge that the
public is really multiple publics, and
that the terms public sphere, space,
square, and domain each hold different implications. But these kind of

Book Review
1

H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E

acknowledgments tend to stifle discourse altogether.

In this context, the two books
reviewed here are valuable because
they contribute new material to work
with as we shape our post-metroburban
notions about the public sphere. One
extends and updates a Habermasian
perspective while the other gives us
recent design projects to reflect on. In
very different ways, each has something
new to say and contributes to our understanding of contemporary urban space
as a result. OPEN: new designs for public space is the exhibition catalogue from
a show mounted by the Van Alen
Institute in 2003 that has traveled
around the United States, including
Washingtons National Building Museum
in 2005, the Chicago Architecture
Foundation in 2006, and Clevelands
MOCA in 2007. The focus on open
space designs from the past decade
sparks thoughtful conversations and
short essays by journalists, architects,
and scholars. These are interspersed
throughout the book, which is dominated
by a series of refreshing two-page
spreads (one text, one image) about
projects from all over the world Africa,
Asia, the EU, South America, and the
United States. The catalogue format
establishes a glossary of spaces with a
global perspective on urban trends in
plazas, streets, memorials, and technologically enhanced spaces. OPENs utility as a pictorial reference on new public
space design is only slightly marred by
the absence of an index or world map to
show the location of each entry. In addition, because the original exhibition took
place in 2003, a number of works presented as projects have since been built
(e.g., Barcelonas waterfront park by
FOA, the ICA in Boston by Diller +
Scofidio), or abandoned (Hadids
Science Hub in Singapore, Alsops
Fourth Grace development for
Liverpool), which is not to say that the
projects arent worth studying, but readers naturally begin to wonder, What are
we looking at? Are these for real?
Behind the OPEN catalogue
lurks a question about what is meant by
new designs for public space. If the
statement by editors Raymond Gastil
and Zo Ryan seems formulaic, that the
designs featured are changing the way
we live, work, and play in cities, their
underlying point of view is well-worth
documenting: In spite of political, economic, and lifestyle forces that under-

H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E

CUFF

mine public space, works from around

the world demonstrate that opportunities
for vital urban life are being designed
and built. The essays in the catalogue,
like the projects, are a valuable, curated
collection of ideas rather than an argument about the public sphere.
In OPEN, new implies recent
rather than unprecedented, which
reflects our historical situation, when the
directions for urban change are less
clear than they were to Gruen in the
1960s. In the most optimistic light, these
projects and perspectives chart a trend
that runs counter to the end-of-civic-life
urbanists whose world has been gated
and malled. But OPEN also stands
against the spectacularized version of
architectural urbanism ushered in with
Bilbao. The projects between the covers
of OPEN demonstrate the variety of
ways designers are countering simple
versions of those two dominant ideologies in the public arena.
If OPEN is a global tour, In
Search of New Public Domain is all
about the argument. The authors,
Maartin Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp,
build a case, in this short text, that failures of the public domain stem not from
the standard excuses but from a lack of
friction. This double-Dutch view from
two urban planners (though Reijndorp
was trained as an architect), finds grist
for the public mill in the chaos of everyday life. Its potential for a political civic
life is strictly neither Habermasian nor
utopian, though it is a bit romantic in a
gritty sort of way. They argue that the
public domain is characterized by cultural exchange in which friction and confrontation are real possibilities. At a later
point they offer the provocative definition
of the public domain: An experience at
a location where the code of behavior
is followed by groups with which we are
not familiar. In some ways, this speaks
to a current discourse in architecture
about experience design, extending it
with an infusion of social experience that
can enrich the play of media and effects.
They hold to a worldview in which difference reigns over homogenization, where
social codes vary substantially and in
turn energize cities. Be gone,
McDonalds, Starbucks, and Disney!
Make room for the local oyster farmers
protest and the pickup game of vacant
lot soccer.
Nowhere is the perspective of
each text as obvious as from the photos:
OPEN is full of unpopulated aerial,

abstract views so that the space itself is

revealed; In Search of New Public
Domain contains eye-level views into the
swarm of humanity in airports, at the
beach, in the mall. You cant tell exactly
where they are, but you get the feeling
youd like to join them.
The photographs reveal the
weakness of In Search of, at least
according to its self-stated intention to
inform the design of new public space.
We can blame the occasionally awkward
translation (e.g., the public domain must
respond creatively to current trends of
parochialization, functionalization, and
aestheticization), but in the end, this
text offers no easy remedies or even
diagnoses that architects can act upon.
In this sense, their hope of inspiring new
forms of design is as opaque in the
images as the texthardly a single work
of architecture or landscape is portrayed. When the authors suggest that
the public domain depends on different
groups of people rubbing elbows, it is an
immense leap to say that the exchange
and commingling of those different
worlds and their liminal spaces will
become the design task.
It is worth taking time to read
between the lines. Different worlds, to
Hajer and Reijndorp, means homeless
and affluent, prostitutes and office workers, transit passengers and street people. There is a plea for democratic
space here, but it is not a simple Cant
we all just get along? point of view.
Instead, they narrow their attentions to a
few ideas for the city: stronger liminal
spacesin-betweens and transitions
particularly between public and private
spacesthe reintegration of the car, and
the inclusion of the homeless. The indistinct rhetorical line between urban sociology and urban materiality paints a
murky picture, but if you squint at it, outlines of an important urban position
become clear. The problem is not shopping, or privatization, or crime, but the
boring, monotonous spaces that have
emerged to deal with them. Since urban
renewal swept America and Europe in
the postwar era, and private interests
came to dominate where the state had
formerly operated, public spaces developed with a priority on singular functions
and easy control. The authors talk
through this problem and create an
alternative way to think about the public
domain. If architects, planners, and policymakers absorb this way of thinking,
they will have a loose but provocative

SPRING/SUMMER 2009

2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher

BOOK REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW

H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E

give us projects and logics that help us

assess where we are as well as where
we can navigate forward, past the surveillance society, the shopping society,
and the experience economy, into the
next public domain.
Notes
1. Jrgen Habermas, The Heart of Our Cities:
The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure (New
York, Simon & Schuster, 1964).

2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher

set of objectives to guide them.

Together, these two volumes
form a useful and provocative dyad.
While OPEN leaves, well . . . opens the
underlying principles that guide the
design of its disperse examples, In
Search of offers those principles, yet we
remain . . . yes, in search of design
guidance. The two texts converge in at
least one geographic location:
Barcelona. Now at the 150th birthday of
Cerds plan that extended the city
beyond its ancient walls, Barcelona is
one of the only cities where design has
made real improvements decade after
decade. Much of this civic quality is due
to the rules Cerd projected to create
urbanism (a term he coined) from architecture.
Although Cerd says in his
later text, The General Theory of
Urbanization, that the five bases for
urbanism are technical, administrative,
legal, economic, and political, it is really
the formalthose chamfered corners on
every blockthat he is remembered for.
Rather than laying out rules, Hajer,
Reijndorp, Gastil, and Ryan offer contemporary views on urbanism. It is worth
kindling the embers of our discourse on
public space, because recent developments afford opportunities as well as
perils. The increase in the perceived
threat of terrorism has had a tangible
impact, such that surveillance cameras
and locked gates are acceptable even
within the public sphere. The reconstruction of American infrastructure as an
economic recovery strategy is less like
the WPA-era projects and more like
those of the Army Corps of Engineers.
There has been no discussion of public
sphere repercussions. The shift from
public space to consumer-oriented
space has gone hand in hand with a
shift from a designed environment to a
designed experience. In OPEN we literally see a much wider range of public
spaces cropping up all over the world;
from In Search of, we gather a compelling new argument against control,
whether it stems from new urbanism or
state watchdogs.
Victor Gruen thought cities
were not planned enough, and Cerd
could be used as evidence that he was
right. But that would misinterpret Cerd
because in Barcelona the motivation is
not a plan or model, as Choay pointed
out, but a series of projects and sets of
logics that create its remarkable public
sphere. The two books reviewed here

CUFF

SPRING/SUMMER 2009