* How Public?
Rebar explores San Francisco's privately-owned public open spaces
John Bela, Blaine Merker, Matt Passmore
Abstract
San Francisco's privately-owned public open spaces ("POPOS") have multiplied in the last twenty years, and as major new development is poised to begin downtown, they promise to become even more common. Taking the form of courtyards, plazas, rooftop gardens, and corporate atriums, fourteen POPOS have been created since 1985. San Francisco's Downtown Plan enabled developers to build high density commercial development in return for providing spaces that were to be "open to the public" during certain hours and provide amenities such as restrooms, shade, and protection from the sun and wind.
However, what appears to be win-win for developers, citizens, and open space advocates masks a deeper question: just how "public" are these spaces? All are under heavy surveillance; some indicate this with signage, but many do not. Unlike traditional public spaces, where surveillance efforts routinely spark a lively debate regarding the security concerns of the state, constitutional rights, and civil liberty interests, surveillance in these sites goes without question. In San Francisco's POPOS, the debate appears to be wholly lacking. To what extent, then, should a public space under the unblinking eye of private ownership be called "public" at all?
To explore these questions, REBAR initiated the COMMONspace project. Between May and November 2006, REBAR set out to map, document and probe the explicit and unspoken rules of San Francisco's POPOS. First, REBAR gathered vital data on the fourteen sites and created a web-based forum for publishing field reports from anyone visiting the sites. Next, in partnership with performance arts group Snap Out of It, REBAR aims to activate the fourteen POPOS with a series of "paraformances": performance actions inspired by the field reports and designed to probe the spaces' implicit social codes. Paraformances begin as playful, "plausibly deniable" actions by single individuals and culminate in full scale, "flash mob"-style occupations that engage the participation of their accidental audiences. Using San Francisco's lively, traditional public spaces--such as parks and streets--as a benchmark for a healthy public realm, COMMONspace will use its interventions in these spaces to:
- Raise public awareness of the existence of POPOS and explore their role as a part of San Francisco's intellectual and artistic commons
- Identify what, if any, barriers the law erects to surveillance and sousveillance in POPOS
- Determine whether pervasively watched public spaces fulfill their role as public spaces, and what effect surveillance has on speech, conflict and social relations
- Explore what activities are possible within POPOS, and how different these are from activities possible within traditional public spaces
- Push our own internal boundaries and the social codes that govern our actions, in this unique socio-spatial laboratory.
REBAR will present the results of its summer investigation into POPOS at
UnBlinking using photography and video, and offer some insights on the possible
future of these spaces as a part of the artistic and public realm.
Biography
Rebar is a collaborative group of artists, designers, and activists based in San Francisco. Our work ranges broadly in scale, scope and context, and therefore belies discrete categorization. It is, at minimum, situated in the domains of environmental installation, urbanism, activism, and absurdity. Rebar's work is fundamentally motivated by the desire to explore the arbitrariness of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the doxic environment: the uncontested acceptance of the daily life-world and the adherence to a set of social relations we take to be self evident. Rebar's projects are intended to engage social, ecological and cultural processes as they unfold materially in space and time. One way to approach Rebar's work is to compare it to the methods of sampling and remixing used by DJ's. Much like a DJ samples recorded sounds, Rebar's work appropriates elements of the physical/cultural world and remixes them into novel contexts. By "remixing the landscape" in this way, Rebar exposes new meanings and alters assumptions about our shared environment. Rebar considers itself to be an open forum for outrageous ideas. We invite critique and promote collaboration. To create a typical Rebar project, an ad hoc group of conspirators will coalesce around a concept to manifest a concrete reality. Membership and affiliation with Rebar is fluid, and evolves as projects are developed and deployed. While Rebar's work can be used or interpreted as playful, ridiculous, or absurd, it is also highly functional. Rebar remixes the ordinary, repurposes the ubiquitous, and rebuilds with invisible structural material . . . much like rebar itself.
* Once securely embedded in the invisible social codes that govern a space, any deviation is an opportunity to ride the emergence threshold. (Photograph REBAR)