What are the consequences when a city experiences a sudden and severe retraction of the public sphere? What characterizes the ‘void’ that results between a shrunken public sphere and a newly emergent private sphere?Examples of such ‘voids’ that have surfaced in many post-soviet cities include spaces on an urban scale (ground-floor spaces, courtyards, sidewalks, plazas, parks) as well as spaces on an domestic scale (residential building stairwells, hallways, balconies). In the absence of public funding and enforcement, private and institutional entities have begun to encroach into these voids; the character and content of huge territories in the city (both physical and psychological territories) have become vulnerable for appropriation. Where such appropriations have occurred, some have been necessary (commercial armatures adding to street life), and some have been detrimental (innumerable private garages and shacks sprouting up inside courtyards). But where such appropriations have not yet occurred, those territories remain unclaimed and therefore unmaintained.
Right now, the ‘Inner Ring’ of Kharkov is just such a territory: it remains mostly uncontested, and as a result, is unmaintained. Yet, despite the disrepair and disarray, it retains a strong heterogeneous character: it can be understood and occupied in multiple ways by multiple types of people, providing a place for those parts, people, and programs which are excluded from the more normative spaces of the city. The danger, then, is that when the Inner Ring becomes a contested space (when the ‘void’ is inevitably claimed), this heterogeneity is lost, subsumed into the spectacle of commodity.
David Harvey’s notion of the spectacle, which he illustrated with the example of Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards, is relevant here: when a public space becomes a commodity for private consumption, it precludes the possibility for a diverse, pluralistic city; instead, it offers an ‘image’ or spectacle, a totalizing version (a caricature?) of itself to be understood in only one way, for one kind of citizen (the bourgeoisie), and pushes out all others (the poor, the alienated, the non-native).
So: Who should maintain what? As designers, who should we be enabling, empowering? The public, private, or institutional sector? Are there other options? And in determining this, how in fact does Kharkov maintain its heterogeneity? Is there an economic, cultural, or political cost associated with this maintenance?
Austin has asked some great questions at the end of his post. Specifically, "Who should maintain what?"
ReplyDeleteIn January New York received the most snow fall it had ever previously received. The removal of this fluffy stuff was a dramatic exercise in civic action, the department of sanitation covered the roads, crosswalks, fire hydrants... residents and store owners shoveled the sidewalks in front of there stores, people who owned cars on the street shoveled them out, moved them, trucks then plowed that away. A dance of policy and contracts or people naturally taking care of the public realm?
When the snow falls in Danbury, Connecticut the mayor says it costs the city about $25,000 per inch.
So this is business. Never-the-less one great example of a state-society relationship played out in the street.
In Kharkiv such accidents are always maintained by the state service net. Sometimes not very enthusiastic, but constant reaction. I think it is a dance of contracts, but it's not bad when there are such contracts that make someone to take care of the city.
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