“I use the word public in this essay carefully, to refer to places, buildings, and spaces […] that belong in a collective sense to either residents or to other kinds of stakeholders in the city. This usage means the inclusion of architectural or urban elements that are shared visually, even if they are not public in the sense of providing bodily entry. Façades as well as public squares, or platz are thus potentially public; likewise the details of streetscapes, such as the specific details of a given building, the names of streets, or the language or text used to name a place are also, subtly, “public.”
But space becomes public in another important way. In such places as the street and the platz, protesters, for example, insist by their presence that the space they are temporarily occupying is indeed public.
[…] the publicness of space is not a given; rather, it is something to be continually rehearsed and negotiated, exercised, and sometimes lost. The occupation of space, whether by authority, advertising, tourists, or citizens, inflects the degree to which it may be said to be public. Thus, I see the publicness of space not in a binary mode […] but rather as one characteristic of space whose intensity is strengthened or lessened by a variety of other factors.”
“A city is a multifaceted entity, whose historical, economic, social, and cultural dimensions that can hardly be summed up in a map or an image. But a city is nevertheless a sort of map its own past, its future desires, and most of all, its internal contradictions and struggles. A city is a place of what Ernst Bloch calls “contemporaneous non-contemporaneity,” where bits of the past lurch into our present, and vice versa. As theorist Rosi Braidotti writes, a city is “one huge map that requires special decoding and interpreting skills; ]in the hands of the artists?] the city also becomes text, a signifying artifact.""
”… art has a particular capacity to act upon the urban realm, to engage this charged dynamic by which inhabitants must continually assert their agency, spatially, within cities.”