There was obviously something in the air when decided to do a special issue of Blueprint about the limits of public space. London’s summer heatwave, the activities of the Manifesto Club, and the opening of The High Line in New York have all contributed to rash of attempts to work out what public space is for, and how to make it work.
This seems to have been playing on the mind of London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, for a little while. The scheme to place pianos around the city and provoke public singalongs seemed like a jolly idea. But if a return to the ‘good old days’ of Londoners gathering around the old Joanna (as imagined by some) was the plan, it hasn’t really materialized. It’ll be interesting to see if Antony Gormley’s One & Other Fourth Plinth – described in the Guardian as a ‘public-access talent show’ – will be more successful in capturing the popular imagination.
Having also incurred the fury of the Guide Dogs for the Blind by supporting the Dixon Jones-designed ‘shared surface’ scheme for Exhibition Road in London, Johnson has now made an open call for ideas on how to revitalize London’s public spaces. Blueprint has made its own suggestion.
New York, by contrast, has been basking in the glory of a hugely popular public space project: at the beginning of June, The High Line, by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, opened to near-universal praise. Nicolai Ouroussoff described it as “one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York in years.” There was just one voice of dissent but that was quickly stomped my Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG, who described the critique on Twitter as “possibly the stupidest piece of urban criticism I’ve read in recent memory”. Less trumpeted was the, perhaps temporary, creation of a ‘pedestrian mall’ in Times Square: essentially a cordoned-off area with a few haphazardly arranged seats for spot of lunchtime relaxation. Some consider it a slipshod arrangement unworthy of a great city; but it is interesting to note that New York’s two most prominent efforts to transform public space have been about creating areas of calm and contemplation in a fearsomely busy city. London, on the other hand, seems desperate to inject life into increasingly deadened urban spaces.