Walking through New York City today, one is constantly walking through a myriad of "public" spaces. However not all of these spaces are "public" and the question that begs to be asked is what does public necessarily mean. There are streets, there are plazas, and there are parks. Although these spaces all fall within the public domain, it becomes quite apparent that not all of these spaces are equally public, and there is a degree of "publicness" to all of them. This level of "publicness" is often a temporal element that changes over time and also changes depending on the perspective from which you are approaching it. This is made clear if we look at the history of parks in NYC and how the degree of "publicness" changed over time.
Two perspectives that we can begin to look at parks in NYC from are Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rosenzweigs perspective in their passage "The Park and the People: Central Park and its Publics:1850-1910" and the perspective of Sharon Zukin in the passage from "Whose Culture? Whose City?" Both of these passages provide a different analysis of what is public and a different understanding of how we can view park spaces. Blackmar and Rosenzweig from the beginning present a few definitions of public and what this elusive term actually means. The first is the notion of public from the perspective of ownership. "In his description of himself as a 'public servant' responsible for maintaining 'public property,' 'public' referred to municipal ownership and control of property."[1] This meant that the public in this case was a matter of who was in charge of the space, who made all the rules, who enforced order and who dictated how everything was going to look. Blackmar and Rosenzweig create 3 lenses for looking at a space from the perspective of ownership: public property, private property, and "common property." The next definition of "public" that they present is a "public" that is defined by the people, a social defintion of public. "Yet Clausen also invoked a more inclusive 'great' public, when he spoke of preserving the public property for 'the use and enjoyment of all the people.' In this sense, 'public' referred to the organization of parks as relatively nonexclusive territories, which assumed their character not through political powers of ownership or administration but rather through patterns of social use."[2] This form of "public" is one where the actions of the people determine how public a space really is. Because a park could be called a "public space" but if it is never used, and only used by certain groups then it isn't really a "public space" but rather only one in name. Further simplifying the two definitions of "public" that Rosenzweig and Blackmar present we can see that there is a "political public" -- one involving issues of ownership, administration and a "social public" -- one that is created by the patterns of use by the people.
Sharon Zukin on the other hand begins to talk about a different dimension of "public". The public that she begins to outline is a cultural public, a visual public, and finally a controlled public. "[C]ulture is also a powerful means of controlling cities. As a source of images and memories, it symbolizes 'who belongs' in specific places. As a set of architectural themes, it plays a leading role in urban redevelopment strategies based on historic preservation or local 'heritage.'...The growth of cultural consumption and the industries that cater to it fuels the city's symbolic economy, its visible ability to produce both symbols and space."[3] This definition of a cultural public contains within it similar definitions to that of the "social public" that Blackmar and Rosenzweig talked about however it includes in its definitions not only the ways in which people use parks and how that begins to inform the culture of a particular space, but also the entire visual rhetoric that a space suggests and how specific visual interactions with a space begin to function as a form of social exclusion, reinforming and redefining the "publicness" of so called "public spaces.
One important thing to note is that the definitions of "public" as defined in the previous passages are referring to two very different time periods. Rosenzweig and Blackmar were analyzing the period of time from the late 19th century to early 20th, while Zukin is analyzing public spaces in the late 20th century. The "cultural public" as Zukin defines it was not the same in the late 19th century. The 20th century saw many changes that redefined life. It was a century that included the Great Depression, World War, and advertising. The Great depression created a big change in the ways in which people viewed the Government, and faith in public institutions was at a low. The answer to this was the rise of conspicuous consumption, streamlining, planned obsolescence and advertising. This began to create a paradigm shift in what people put their faith in as they began to be subject to more and more commodification of the visual dimensions of the city and the city at large began to become a commercial hotzone. The changes that were created gave rise to the "cultural/controlled public" that Zukin was talking about.
With all of that said, we can now begin to examine the amorphous nature of the definition of "public" when applied to parks. Blackmar and Rosenzweig analyze Central Park and show how over time park use changes and the definition of "public" changes along with it. "Between 1850 and 1910, New Yorkers continually negotiated Central Park's political management as public property and its cultural value as a public space."[4] Blackmar and Rosenzweig here present the two ways in which "public" is defined. The words property and space here can be substituted with management and use and both of these had big transformations between 1850 and 1910. Blackmar and Rosenzweig outline a series of transformations that were happening simultaneously on the political and social platform. The management of Central park moved between political parties and their ideologies, and ultimately moved into the hands of the public as they began to take ownership of their park and change legislation both through pressuring for change on a political level, and through the rules which they chose to obey. This can be seen in the riot that broke out over a private company trying to rent chairs for seating.[5] The people were completely against this, and rather than just not obeying these rules, they actually destroyed property in order to voice their opinion that they would not have this in their park. This transformation is what Blackmar and Rosenzweig call a change from "public property" to "common ground."
The other change in "public" as defined by Blackmar and Rosenzweig was a change in the social characteristics of Central Park. Initially the park was used primarily by the elite. This was because the park was distant from the working class section of the city and the transportation infrastructure wasn't developed enough to allow for easy access to the park. The park was a place for people to ride their carriages and became a bit of a "flaneur" like park, where people went to see and be seen. Riding through the park in a carriage was a status thing, that differentiated classes. It was a place to socialize and play status games. However the park began to change as more and more immigrants began to make an appearance. This was partly due to labor reforms that created shorter days, better wages and transportation improvements. Also when Sundays were declared days off for everyone the demographics of the park began to change throughout the week. The elite no longer showed up to the park on sundays because it was now crowded with other people. However changes in neighborhood demographics around the park began to change the park character throughout the week as well. Slowly but surely, Central park began to change from the park of the rich to the park of the people. This change occured because of the people who began to think of the park as theirs, and ultimately they began to take control of the park. It slowly became a democratic park.
Zukin however talks about the park in a different sense. The "common" park that Blackmar and Rosenzweig talked about has slowly disappeared. It is now a "private" park. "Central Park, Bryant Park, and the Hudson River Park show how public spaces are becoming progressively less public: they are, in certain ways more exclusive than at any time in the past 100 years."[6] This is because the parks are now largely financed by private organizations. In the case of Central Park this is the Central Park Conservancy, which raises half the funds for the maintenance of Central Park, and thus plays a big part in the decisions that are made in regards to it. Zukin talks about Business Improvement Districts(BIDs) and how they begin to take control of the public spaces that are around us. BIDs are a new condition in NYC that allow business and property owners to tax themselves in order to provide money for the maintenance of the public spaces around them. This tax then generates the majority of the money that funds parks and public spaces in the area, giving BIDs almost exclusive rights to the management of the parks and public spaces under their jurisdiction. Zukin refurs to this as the "militarization of public space." Many of the changes that are created are changes of security: gates, private guards, cameras. These ultimately as Zukin puts it create an "implicit code of inclusion and exclusion" as certain peoples are no longer welcome in the space, and ultimately don't feel comfortable in a space. "The underlying assumption is that of a paying public, a public that values public space as an object of visual consumption."[7] and as Zukin points out this is usually a very particular kind of public too because "the cultural strategies that have been chosen ... carry with them the implication of controlling diversity while recreating a consumable vision of civility."[8] This is because as Zukin puts it, these private investors are more often than not from a particular class in society, and ultimately want to reinforce their ideals, and the tragedy of it is that "handing such spaces over to corporate executives and private investors means giving them carte blanche to remake public culture. It marks the erosion of public space in terms of its two basic principles: public stewardship and open access."[9] Because the "public" does not raise enough money to pay for the park, we do after all live in a capitalist society.
Zukin and Blackmar and Rozensweig present us with very different understandings of what are parks are, and ultimately what "public" means. Zukin ofcourse paints a less pretty picture about the state of our public spaces, however what it seems is that it is ultimately still the "social" public that is the decision maker in these spaces. Because just like the riot that broke out in Central Park in 1901, that empowered the people of the park to say what rules they will follow, what they wont and ultimately what "public" means to them, the privatized public space is only as private as Central Park was "politically public," the people can redefine "public" through use, the only problem now is that we have advertising and visual commodification to contend with.
Bibliography
1. Blackmar, Elizabeth. Rosenzweig, Roy. “The Park and its People: Central Park and its Publics: 1850 – 1910”
2. Zukin, Sharon. “Whose Culture? Whose City?”
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