Hello everyone,
thank you for your many rich contributions. Overall, you manage to come up with fairly accurate definitions of what a public space is.
You frequently mention the typical ideal of the category, i.e. the public square or street, which are common spaces open to public wandering. They belong to the public domain, are managed by a public body and people can move around freely. They are spaces where people meet, cross paths, where all strata of society can co-exist. Be careful not to idealize the image you have of it: they are also spaces of friction and tension. Like society, they are profoundly unequal. For this reason, they are spaces where you can act to change society. Public space is a space to be invented, to be designed together!
Beware, the fact of circulating freely is not a sufficient definition criterion: you circulate quite freely in your apartment and yet it is not a public place. On the contrary, the current period of containment shows that free circulation in the public space is relative and depends on circumstances: in times of war, under curfew, in dictatorship or during sanitary containment measures, access to the public space is very limited. This informs us that public space is an administered, controlled, supervised space: we do not do what we want in it!
The artists who work there are aware of this: they negotiate their presence by applying rules of use (request for authorisation, link with a cultural organiser who takes care of it) or they transgress these rules like certain graffiti artists for example. Depending on the country, access to the public space can be dangerous for artists: testimonies will illustrate certain situations in the MOOC.
Some of you cite more specific places such as supermarkets, train stations or public transport. They can be considered as public spaces and many artists play with these situations to extend their field of intervention and sometimes push the definition to its extremes. Some artists have, for example, brought the public to areas that are not usually accessible: the storerooms of a supermarket butcher’s shop, a fire station, the sewers of a city… I leave it up to you to evaluate our definitions in the face of these cases. It is no doubt still a question of circumstances and temporality.
Few of you mention social networks or digital media, yet in these times of containment they are ubiquitous substitute for urban spaces. This public sphere of exchange and social relations is to be brought closer to the initial definition of public space by its inventor, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, namely a media (such as the press) and socio-political space. Do not forget this dimension which is very obvious these days.
Have a good continuation!
