Image Courtesy of Minnesota Press

《公共空间的创造》认为城市是协商的产物
The Invention of Public Space Shows the City as a Product of Negotiation

由专筑网邢子，小R编译

在之前的《建筑师报》中，作者Karen Kubey，一位专门研究住房和健康的城市学家，质疑公共空间的产生是“创造的还是协商的？”文章以Mariana Mogilevich的著作《公共空间的创造》为基础，探讨公共空间是否是城市协商的产物。

目前围绕纽约公共空间的辩论，比如流行病时期街道的未来，或者华盛顿广场的强制宵禁，并假定这些公共空间应该为每个人服务。在这种情境中，公共空间被认为是固有的民主，是我们展示城市多样性的地方。但Mariana Mogilevich的新书颠覆了这种观点，《公共空间的创造》挑战了这样一种观念，即城市的开放或自由空间相当于一种“不折不扣的普遍利益”，其公民基础可以追溯到古代雅典的Agora，它修正并大大浓缩了名义上的空间创造历史轨迹，将其追溯到20世纪60年代和70年代，即约翰-林赛市长管理时期。

In this week's reprint from the Architect's Newspaper, author Karen Kubey, an urbanist specializing in housing and health questions if the invention of Public Space is "Invented Or Agreed Upon?" Basing her ideas on a book by Mariana Mogilevich, The Invention of Public Space, the article asks if public spaces are a product of negotiation in the city.
Current debates around public spaces in New York—the future of pandemic-born streeteries, say, or police-enforced curfews in Washington Square Park—assume that these spaces should be for everyone. Within this discourse, public space is seen as inherently democratic and the place where we celebrate the city’s diversity, among other things. But Mariana Mogilevich’s new book upends this wisdom. The Invention of Public Space challenges the notion that the city’s open or free spaces amount to an “unalloyed, universal good” whose civic underpinnings can be traced to the ancient Athenian agora. It emends and dramatically condenses the historical trajectory of the titular spatial invention, dating it to the 1960s and 1970s, during the John Lindsay mayoral administration.


Image Courtesy of John Vliet Lindsay Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University

Mogilevich坚持这一点，她写道：“20世纪60年代初的纽约市并没有‘公共空间’这个概念。”无论是在这里还是在其他城市，“没有人这样称呼它”。只有通过包容性的空间制造和公众参与的尝试，现在通常被称呼为构成“公共空间”的元素，如公园、广场、空地、人行道、水岸、街道等。在城市危机的背景下，这些尝试有巨大的意义，大大小小的设计方案都可以打开一扇通往乌托邦的大门。Mogilevich写道：“每个空间，不是作为城市的一部分，也不是作为与城市分离的空间，而是作为城市的隐喻。”

通过仔细介绍至今仍在塑造建筑和规划领域的空间和政治实验，Mogilevich展示了城市生活过去和现在的关键所在。《公共空间的创造》希望读者不要把城市看作是静态的物体，而是看作与人们之间不断谈判的产物。事实上，这本书的最大优势在于它对城市管理人员、居民、设计师和倡导者进行了详细的描绘，他们对城市应该是什么以及如何使用它（以及由谁使用）有着自己的假设和想法。自始至终，Mogilevich以精确、引人入胜的写作方式将复杂的概念和历史具体化，让读者有机会置身于这些不同行为者的视角中。

Mogilevich没有分析公共性的影子——即谁拥有这些空间，而是将设计背后的过程作为重点，描绘这些“物理的生活空间”。她介绍了战后不久出现的肥沃城市设计潮流，展示了这些参考点如何引导林赛政府内部的规划师和城市主义者发展“开放空间的实验”。该书深入探讨了这些实验，每一章都专门讨论了不同的空间类型，从住宅广场和袖珍公园到步行街和滨水景观。通过一系列戏剧性的事件，考察了三条线索，即心理学、参与性和城市规模，展示了理想是如何与城市的现实相结合，并产生具体的结果和意识形态。


作为公共政策的城市设计

阅读Mogilevich的研究，建筑师们很可能被设计师在林赛政府中的权力和影响力所吸引。1965年，林赛作为自由派共和党人当选，1969年作为独立人士再次当选，他明白空间就是政治，政治就是空间。他正在适应这个时代，在大规模移民和郊区化的背景下，1960年至1970年期间，有100万黑人和波多黎各居民搬到了纽约，而类似数量的非西班牙裔白人则搬出了纽约，城市的经济不平等加剧，同时，要求种族公正的呼声高涨。城市危机是在罗伯特-摩西（Robert Moses）在其几十年的统治期间实施的自上而下的城市转型和更新计划之后发生的。

林赛用一个独特的观点反击现状，将城市设计与公共政策等同起来。在一份关于城市住房危机的白皮书中，他承诺“使这个城市，包括它的住房、公园、社区设施为它的人民服务”。Mogilevich将这种方法描述为“乐趣、自由和多样性的典范，让设计师和规划师参与到协调一致的市政实验中，以创造出适合存在的空间。”林赛首次在城市规划部内设立了城市设计小组，作为“设计的实验室”。该小组由15名建筑师组成，领导设计和规划研究，进行设计审查，并协调私人开发。

这是一个富有创造力的官僚时代，托马斯-霍文在30多岁的时候，凭着一份白皮书，从在大都会艺术博物馆中世纪展厅工作的艺术史学家到城市公园专员，这在现在看来是不可思议的。那份关于在被忽视的地区和被边缘化的社区建造游乐场的草图，成为了一个以“学习和自我实现，而不是标准化和一致性”为基础的意识形态计划。在霍文的领导下，在城市中央公园举办了参与性活动，如化妆舞会和舞蹈比赛，并由理查德-达特纳等建筑师设计了冒险游乐场。

当霍文忙于改造城市的游戏景观时，政府中的其他人在早期的人行道咖啡馆法规和行人化试验方面取得了进展。林赛任命了一个人行道咖啡馆研究委员会，该委员会建议允许寒冷天气下“将人们带回街道，从而减少犯罪的可能性”，城市设计小组甚至制定了一项关于第二大道户外饮食的设计标准研究。Gay Talese当时讽刺地评论说，纽约人终于可以像在国外那样过着有咖啡馆的生活了，只要他们“不对公交车的尾气过敏，而且......并不贫穷”。2020年，街边小店重新出现在第二大道上，尽管它们的未来并不确定。

另外，1970年4月22日的第一个地球日庆祝活动使整个城市的临时街道关闭，旨在减少空气污染和促进公共交通，类似于Bill de Blasio在COVID-19封锁期间推出的开放街道计划，并且和现在的同类计划一样，充满了活力和政治上的矛盾。制造空间的几乎消失，特别是在曼哈顿，也可以与林赛时代的设计和政策决定联系起来。住房中的共享空间一直都有争议，从超级公共广场到“可防御空间”这种最小化的区域。


公众参与

如果说Mogilevich的书倾向描绘具有远见卓识的官僚，那么它也注意到了公众参与创造和维护开放空间的不断发展模式。这些段落是整本书中最激动人心的部分，也是最落寞的部分，它揭示了宏伟的野心和良好的意图是如何被动摇的，特别是在缺乏足够的规划和维护资源的情况下。该市的袖珍公园项目就是这种结局的典型例子。Mogilevich写道，袖珍公园因其面积小而得名，试图将空地从“碍眼的地方变成便利设施”。由于撤资、白人的逃离和房东的忽视，像贝德福德-斯图维森特和南布朗克斯这样的贫困社区的空地是“政治剥夺权利的明显标志”。当时的公共空间设计已经将用户体验置于美学之上，例如，在Jacob Riis广场，保护纽约市住房管理局原始草坪的围栏被拆掉了，取而代之的是可居住的、积极规划的设施和景观，公众对设计的参与是合乎逻辑的下一步。

第一个袖珍公园于1966年在Bed-Stuy开放，在两个私人基金会的资助下，市政府与布鲁克林中部协调委员会和普拉特社区发展中心合作，该公园受到了建筑媒体的热烈欢迎，并将其称为“邻里冒险”。这个定义并非无缘无故，社区成员参加了设计会议，当地儿童帮助完成小型建筑任务，并担任游乐设备的设计“顾问”，附近的失业人员被雇用来建造公园。该公园由普拉特学院教授M.保罗-弗里德伯格（M. Paul Friedberg）设计，还有普拉特艺术学院学生的壁画，当地人希望像这样的公园能够成为社区主导发展的催化剂。

但新的公园很快就失修了，因为城市希望低收入居民能处理设施的维护。Mogilevich引用了Pratt中心创始人和社区规划师Ronald Shiffman在1969年对三年的袖珍公园实验的评价：“任何城市或社区发展公司打算通过开展美化计划来争取时间或创造一个可见的、但一次性的缓解措施，最终会被理所应当地辜负。”

Mogilevich insists on the point. “New York City in the early 1960s did not have ‘public space’ as such,” she writes. “No one referred to it that way,” here or in any other city. It was only through experiments in inclusive space-making and public participation that the constellation of spaces that are now commonly understood as making up “public space”—parks, plazas, vacant lots, sidewalks, waterfronts, streets—came to be identified by that name. These efforts took on outsize meaning against a backdrop of urban crisis, where design proposals, big and small, could open a door to utopia. “Each space,” Mogilevich writes, “was conceived not as a part of the city or as a space apart from the city but as a metaphor for the city as a whole.”
Through careful presentation of spatial and political experiments that continue to shape the fields of architecture and planning to this day, Mogilevich shows what was and is at stake in urban life. The Invention of Public Space invites the reader to see the city not as a static object, but as the product of ongoing negotiations among people. Indeed, the book’s great strength is the compelling portraits it renders of city officials, residents, designers, and advocates, all with their own assumptions and ideas about what a city should be and how it might be used (and by whom). Throughout, Mogilevich’s precise, engaging writing delivers complex concepts and histories in a tangible way, giving the reader the chance to inhabit the perspectives of this diverse set of actors.
Rather than analyzing shades of publicness—who owns these spaces, really?—Mogilevich foregrounds the processes behind the designs and depicts these places as “physical, lived space.” Introducing the fertile urban design currents that came out of the immediate postwar period, she shows how these reference points guided planners and urbanists inside the Lindsay administration to develop “experiments in open space.” The book drills down into these experiments, with each chapter devoted to a different spatial type, ranging from residential plazas and vest-pocket parks to pedestrian streets and waterfront landscapes. Examining three threads—psychology, participation, and urban scale—through a series of dramatic episodes, Mogilevich shows how ambitious ideals met urban realities to produce results both concrete and ideological.

Urban Design as Public Policy
Reading Mogilevich’s study, architects will likely salivate over how much power and influence designers had in the Lindsay administration. Elected in 1965 as a liberal Republican and reelected in 1969 as an independent, Lindsay understood that space is political and politics is spatial. He was adapting to the times: Amid mass migration and suburbanization—one million Black and Puerto Rican residents moved to New York between 1960 and 1970, while a similar number of non-Hispanic whites moved out—the city saw an increase in economic inequality and calls for racial justice. The urban crisis followed top-down urban transformations and renewal schemes implemented by Robert Moses during his decades-long rule.
Lindsay countered the status quo with a unique formula equating urban design with public policy. In a white paper on the city’s housing crisis, he promised “to make this city—its housing, its parks, its community facilities—for its people.” Mogilevich describes the approach as a “model of fun, freedom, and diversity, enlisting designers and planners in concerted municipal experimentation to create the spaces that would prove it was so.” In a first, Lindsay established the Urban Design Group within the Department of City Planning as a “design experiment laboratory.” Staffed by 15 architects, the group led design and planning studies, conducted design reviews, and coordinated private development.
This was a time for creative bureaucrats such as Thomas Hoving. While in his mid-30s, Hoving made the now-unthinkable career jump from art historian working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval wing to city parks commissioner on the strength of a single white paper. That sketch, for the construction of playgrounds in overlooked areas and marginalized communities, would blossom into an ideological program grounded in “learning and self-actualization rather than standardization and conformity,” Mogilevich writes. Under Hoving, the city hosted Central Park “happenings”—participatory events like costume parties and dance contests—and built adventure playgrounds by architects like Richard Dattner.
As Hoving was busy remaking the city’s playscapes, others in the administration made headway on early sidewalk cafe regulations and experiments in pedestrianization. Lindsay appointed a Sidewalk Cafe Study Committee, which suggested allowing cold-weather enclosures to “bring people back to the streets, thereby reducing the likelihood of crime,” and the Urban Design Group even developed a study of design standards for outdoor eating on Second Avenue. Gay Talese satirically commented at the time that New Yorkers could finally live the cafe life as they would abroad, as long as they were “not allergic to bus fumes and … not poor.” In 2020, streeteries reappeared on Second Avenue, though their future is uncertain.
In another foreshadowing, the first Earth Day celebration, on April 22, 1970, triggered temporary street closings across the city. Designed to reduce air pollution and promote public transport, these closings resembled the Open Streets program Bill de Blasio introduced during the COVID-19 lockdown and were as energizing and politically fraught as their counterparts are now. The near disappearance of manufacturing space, particularly in Manhattan, can also be linked to design and policy decisions of the Lindsay era. Shared spaces in housing developments were contested then as they are now, ranging from super-public plazas to areas minimized in the name of “defensible space.”

Public Participation
If Mogilevich’s book turns on singular visionary bureaucrats, it also pays mind to evolving modes of public participation in the creation and maintenance of open spaces. These passages are among the most exciting and tragic in the entire volume, revealing how grand ambitions and good intentions can easily falter—especially when sufficient planning and resources for maintenance are lacking. The city’s “vest-pocket” parks program is a paradigmatic example of this denouement. Named for their small size, vest-pocket parks attempted to turn vacant lots from “eyesores into amenities,” Mogilevich writes. The result of disinvestment, white flight, and landlord neglect, empty lots in poorer neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and the South Bronx were “visible signs of political disenfranchisement.” Already, public space designs of the time moved to privilege user experience over aesthetics; for instance, at Jacob Riis Plaza, fences protecting pristine New York City Housing Authority lawns were torn down and inhabitable, actively programmed play- and landscapes installed in their place. Public participation in design was the logical next step.
The first vest-pocket park opened in Bed-Stuy in 1966. A collaboration between the city with the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council and the Pratt Center for Community Development, funded by two private foundations, the park was greeted warmly by the architectural press, which labeled it a “neighborhood venture.” The characterization was not unearned. Community members participated in design meetings; local children helped with small construction tasks and served as play equipment design “consultants”; and unemployed men from the neighborhood were hired to build the park. Designed by Pratt Institute professor M. Paul Friedberg, the park also featured murals by Pratt art students. Local activists hoped parks like this one would serve as catalysts for further community-led development.
But the new parks quickly fell into disrepair, as the city expected low-income residents to handle facility maintenance. Mogilevich quotes Pratt Center founder and community planner Ronald Shiffman’s damning 1969 evaluation of three years of vest-pocket park experiments: “If it is the intention of any municipality, or community development corporation, to buy time or create a highly visible, but one-shot palliative by undertaking a beautification program, they are in for a rude and well-deserved awakening.”


Image Courtesy of Minnesota Press

从“失败”中学习

《公共空间的创造》中介绍的许多空间最终都被认为是失败的，甚至其设计者也这样认为。在尼克松削减联邦对城市的资助和1975年纽约市的金融危机之后，它们被忽视，被涂鸦，有些甚至被拆除。少数被认为是成功的项目，如South Street Seaport和Battery Park City，过去和现在都是“为有限的、通常是白人和中上阶层的公众提供的空间”，Mogilevich尖锐地观察到这些，她一次又一次地质疑这些新兴的公共空间到底是为谁设计的。尽管林赛政府的工作有明显的乌托邦色彩，但旧的偏见仍然存在。

这篇评论的部分内容写在COVID人行道咖啡馆的围墙内和一个由商业改进区维护的彭博时代步行广场上——这些新形式的公共空间因其商业化、在整个城市的不公平分布和有限的使用权而被批判。Mogilevich承认这些担忧的合理性，并谴责从民主空间制造实验到今天对“创新”、数据收集的关注，以及“对可移动座椅的近乎神秘的信心”。但她也访问那些拒绝向公共空间妥协的人：“一个非商业的、不按地理分布的、普世的城市空间是否曾经存在，又或者它只是短暂的出现过？”

Mogilevich的描绘有着奇妙的细微差别，她对前景充满希望。每个公共空间都在某种程度上可能会受到损害，没有一个空间像我们希望的那样具有包容性。但这并不是一个放弃的理由，她同意建筑师和理论家Craig L. Wilkins的观点，他写道：“空间就是生命”。Mogilevich称当代城市空间的“公共化”斗争是“革命性的”，并赞扬最近的公共空间设计欢迎不同的性别身份，回应移民的关切，并同时支持人类和其他物种共存。建筑师们希望加入到这场变革中来，他们必须接受城市空间的变革不是“留下物质遗产，而是留下意识形态遗产”。这本书放弃了天真的想法，激发了灵感，让读者精神振奋，从而为重新追求空间正义做好准备。

这篇文章最初发表于《建筑师报》。

Learning from “Failures”
Many of the spaces profiled in The Invention of Public Space were ultimately perceived as failures, even by their designers. Following Nixon’s cuts in federal funding for cities and the 1975 New York City financial crisis, they were fenced off, neglected, graffitied, and sometimes demolished. What few were deemed successful, such as South Street Seaport and Battery Park City, were and continue to be “spaces for a circumscribed, generally white and middle- to upper-class public,” Mogilevich pointedly observes. Time and again, she questions for whom these emergent public spaces were designed and for whom they were not. Despite the utopian streak evident in the work of the Lindsay administration, old prejudices persisted.
Portions of this review were written in a COVID sidewalk cafe enclosure and a Bloomberg-era pedestrian plaza maintained by a business improvement district—examples of newer forms of New York public space that are rightly criticized for their commercialization, inequitable distribution across the city, and limited access. Mogilevich acknowledges the validity of these concerns and decries the move from ambitious experiments in democratic space-making to today’s focus on “innovation,” data collection, and an “almost mystical belief in the agency of movable chairs.” But she also invites those who might reject any compromised public space to ask, “Did a noncommercial, geographically distributed, ecumenical urban space ever exist, or had it just briefly appeared possible?”
Mogilevich’s portraits are wonderfully nuanced. Her outlook is ultimately hopeful. Every public space is compromised in some way, and none are as inclusive as we would hope. But that is not a reason to give up. She might agree with architect and theorist Craig L. Wilkins, who writes, “Space is life.” Mogilevich calls contemporary fights for the “commoning” of urban space potentially “revolutionary” and celebrates recent public space designs that welcome diverse gender identities, respond to the concerns of recent immigrants, and support human and nonhuman species. Architects looking to join in the fray must accept that transformations in urban space will not “leave a physical legacy so much as an ideological one.” This timely book squashes naïveté and inspires, leaving the reader energized and better prepared to pursue spatial justice anew.
This article was originally published in The Architect's Newspaper.