HACKING PUBLIC SPACE

People use public space for intimate purposes, establishing relationships and associations. Human interactions and participation are bases for everyday life. Public domain areas are for the free use of individuals despite the territorial claims of some influential users. Open space, parks and streets need to be designed to encourage people to interact. A network of good transitional spaces is needed to establish solid relationships between the private and the public realms.

Old meeting points related to the geography or history of cities have been replaced by more commercial ones.There always have been places within the city which provide adequate space for interaction and intimacy; but most are now unusable through neglect. Actual designs are abandoning such concepts of privacy and some users are being forced to take or reinvent spaces for the purpose.

Colonia Bausili and Cases Barates, a joint housing estate in the Zona Franca of Barcelona dating from around the 20’s, form an example of housing microworlds created by industrialisation. The model housing estate of the period would include a bar, a shop, different services, venues and relational spaces vital to neighbourhood life such as a public square, a playground etc which were extensions of the personal space.

Most of this old housing is now disappearing from Barcelona’s districts, not without resistance from citizen groups which see in this disappearance a social displacement for the purpose of creating the compartmented city to the benefit of special interests such as commerce, lucrative research and the professional classes and to the detriment of existing residents whose needs are ignored. Instead of being recycled as public space or a public venue, industrial land is fast disappearing and its heritage lost.*1

Urban developments based on land clearance sites make little or no attempt to include spontaneous public “usability” among the architectural criteria. No shaded seats, except outside commercial premises reserved only for paying customers, individual seats, no seats at all; no green verges, inadequate trees, no mountains…and uncomfortably tilted benches (apparently conceived as a measure to avoid homeless people resting overnight) – The modern city is no more welcoming or convivial a social centre than the interior of a fast food restaurant whose furnishings are conceived to encourage transitory eating.

Colonia Bausili/Cases Barates          Barcelona Plaça del Fossar de les Moreres barcelona

In times like these some thoughts come to mind: the rapid spread of global surveillance, the obsession with security, oppression, social compliance with the fact of being monitored. How we become statistics, consumers, how we are guided towards consumerism from birth to death, what happens to our personal information, and where it is going.
There’s nowhere to hide. But in this panopticon city we are all watchers as well as prisoners, and identities are lost, dissolved in a multiplicity of observation points. So, reduced to effective solitude, watched and watching, we hide in the hive.

The City Hive, the shopping mall of all desires, rejects the classical conception of the “active citizen”, a free user of meaningful public space, entitled to act in solidarity with other free users.
Instead, consumer society encourages and cultivates individualism, reducing this former “active citizen” to one more interest group competing among the city´s other interest groups, e.g. city development, the tourist industry…

These “new citizens” of the hive, born individualists, will have little interest in preserving quaint gathering places or to build sociability into new urban planning; they may even seek to turn all human outdoor interaction into a variety of social pollution, an anomaly against livability and an illegal practice.

In spite of recent associations with computer crime, the term “hacker” originally meant a technically skilled, inquisitive individual who dismantles everyday electronic devices to gain a better understanding of their workings. By extension anyone who takes an interest in the secret workings of any closed system has come to be known as a “hacker”. In the context of city exploration “urban hackers” map the city’s prohibited sections; forgotten tunnels, abandoned buildings, derelict
factories, etc.

City planners close to politicians but far from citizens and their needs may also consider as urban hackers, those who retain a conception of the city’s open spaces as being entirely public.

These hackers of the new hive anonymously create social locations or reclaim old ones, rebelling against an urban landscape that tilts the balance of empowerment from the private citizen to private enterprise. Space hacked and appropriated becomes an extension of the private and intimate, a playground…a place for sharing, transcending the individual, challenging monitoring and recovering the celebration of the collective.

Living room at Sabadell suburb    Living room at Terrassa suburb

Private messages in the streets

This city hive, with its mercantile heart and new exurban districts build with a uniformity of construction, still retains areas that, in reality are areas where the most creative urban hacking takes place, developing and maintaining a social quality of life in spite of their marginal position, inadequate housing and lack of support or public structures.

These expressions of determined social coherence include such activities as neighbourhood gatherings, the creation of allotments, user-planned construction and the appropriation or customising of public space for relational purposes.

In the time of chats, emails, and sms the street is still an open book to share messages; and so old and young alike may also share in the subversion of hacking the hive.

Skate-boarders in the Macba square        Barcelona Second home at Monbau Mirador Barcelona

These hackers make their statements without reference to the law and policies which attempt to hide them or label them as a problem. Barcelona’s Macba’s square has been appropriated by the skate-boarding culture which is seen as an example of “uncivic” behaviour; it could also be argued that the skate-boarders’ use of the unwelcoming civic furniture of ramps and high stone benches as an obstacle course recreates the lost playground where youth networks were established.

In the second example illustrated above a family creates a sunday dining room “al fresco” at one of the official viewing points of the city with their backs to the main road. The view ahead is ideal while they studiously ignore the evidence of urban transit behind the self placed screens, subverting the use of a transit space. *2

Considering the existing urban fabric and its current condition we all need to reclaim meeting points to provoke a response that grows, opening up and leaving a positive trace of a human presence , returning more personal landmarks to the city.

*1 More information at www.laescocesa.org and http://salvemcanricart.org

*2 Examples and illustrations included in my research for the project Occasional Cities
www.ciutatsocasionals.net and in other personal works which can be seen at
www.interraincognita.org and www.myfirstkiss.net

Anna Recasens (c)2007

Who   does Glasgow Belong to now?

Every school-child in the city learned the old music-hall song, “I belong to Glasgow”. The pertinent question for citizens at the beginning of this new millennium must be, “but who does Glasgow belong to?”

And the answer, in common with many cities in the era of globalisation, must be, “to those citizens who matter: quiet consumers, shameless profiteers and privatisers, high stakes movers of capital, property developers; to money.” How else to interpret the immense changes which have come over (or should that be overcome?) Glasgow in the last forty or so years? A plan to drive a motorway through Glasgow Green, historic gathering place of free speech and protest, was successfully repelled in the late 1980s; since then, the people’s city has been eaten away in small bites. The world-famous shipyards on the Clyde, generator of wealth and jobs after the collapse of other industries; privatised, sold off, closed. Paddy’s Market, unofficially tolerated fencing-post in the alley at the back of the Sheriff Courts, where doubtful merchandise met impoverished buyers; chased away, after a hundred years. The Barras, popular market place, where once you could buy (according to another popular song) “tickets to the moon/ a return for hauf-a-croun/ and five bob guarantees a first class seat”; closing down, the site in the hands of developers, who propose to construct a standard of housing far beyond the purses of the market’s former shoppers. No more tickets to the moon; no more barkers at their stalls, turning commerce into comedy; another hundred years of Glasgow street history eaten up.

There’s more than one way to kill a city’s spirit; but few are as effective as to give it a dose of market chemotherapy, once the centres of solidarity have been excised like tumours.

Take the banks of the Clyde, for example. Once, its access to the Atlantic coast, the river a narrowing corridor of a great estuary, brought wealth to Glasgow; ports and warehouses, unloading and storing goods from the then Colonies, enriched a few, brought work for many; trickle-down economics worked as well then as it does now. The Finnieston crane, a monumental construct that once lifted locomotives for Empire-wide export, now stands as a grave-marker over an entire industrial epoch; rather, as a fashion accessory over a whole new development of private communities for the city’s new motivators. The Clyde Walkway, once a pleasant walking path parallel to the banks of the river, has been broken by new housing; notices warn those citizens with long memories that this is now private property; this slice of Glasgow does not belong to you.

Or take another example; there are sadly many such, and they are only increasing. On the border of the Glasgow Green park, in the district of Shawlands, a crucial change in the definition of District Council-owned park-land, from “green-site” (ie, grass land, therefore an untouchable section within the boundaries of the park) to “brown-site” (bare earth, and so available for exploitation), allowed the city government to consider selling a good sized portion of formerly public lands for private development. Meanwhile, opposite the gates of the newly designated “brown-site”, housing that once belonged to the Council, and that was transferred into the ownership of tenants as part of the 1980s Conservative government’s scheme to forbid local councils from renting accommodation, building new housing stock, or maintaining old commitments to existing properties, was demolished. The houses, of the old sandstone tenement variety characteristic of Glasgow, were for the most part dilapidated, as new owners found themselves liable for maintenance costs previously the responsibility of the Council as landlords of the property; but several of the houses were inhabited until the eve of demolition. Determined renovation might have saved the old sandstone structures, as had been the case with many similar examples in the city’s prestigious West End, the highly priced district surrounding the University; whether this had been considered is unclear; and, to tell the truth, the battle to save the re-designated portion of the park was just commencing when I left the city to take up residence near Barcelona, and so I have no reports on whether this Council initiative succeeded or failed.

But this redefinition, the change of colour from green to brown, strikes to the root of the neo-liberal conception of public space within the city. Either the city government is the trustee of land, or indeed of all public amenities, on behalf of the citizens it claims to represent; or it is a corporate structure, claiming right of ownership of public assets as property of the Council, and the concomitant right to profit by them, as title-holder to those properties it disposes of by sale. If the Council is our trustee, then where is the consultation? Where is our right to say how, or if, those public spaces or amenities should be sold, or to what level they should be maintained? And if, as the usual Friedmanian sophistry dictates, the city government is selling public property in order to generate capital for other Council services and projects, then what, after this monstrous global urban fire-sale, will there be left to spend it on, apart from the salaries of councillors and consultants?

The old music hall song goes, “I belong to Glasgow/ Dear old Glasgow Town/ There’s nothing the matter with Glasgow/ for it’s going round and round/ I’m only a common old working chap/ As anyone here can see/ But when I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday/Glasgow belongs to me!”

The issue of who Glasgow belongs to, the common old working chap, or the new international class of suit, is long settled. Both can have their couple of drinks on a Saturday; and both may waken on Sunday morning with a hangover; but only one of them will fall back on their pillow, with the secure feeling that Glasgow does, in fact, belong to him.

A text from Alex Benzie for Walking the city, a project included in the exhibition Ciutats Ocasionals at the CCCB in Barcelona.