By Sarah Ulicny
Huge whispering dishes and benches that create music? While these things sound like something out of Alice’s Wonderland, they are actually in our own.
Market Street in San Francisco has turned its public space into a “Living Innovation Zone.” Much like society in general, the bench that creates music and the pair of ten feet tall dishes that transmit whispers across 50 feet only work when people engage with each other. Last week at Joynture, The New School’s Parsons DESIS Lab and LMHQ presented “Public Space: New Ideas for Civic Life,” a discussion on why these innovations (and other additions to public spaces) are vital to society.
The event brought together an exciting roster of urban planning professionals including: Mathew Lister of Ghel Architects; Mary Rowe, director of Urban Resilience and Livability at The Municipal Art Society of New York (MASNYC); Emily Weidenhof, director of the New York City Department of Transportation’s NYC Plaza Program; Sarah Lidgus, a fellow for the Design Trust for Public Space; Bryan Boyer of UNION/Makeshift Society; and Daniel Latorre (The Wise City).
The discussion was thought-provoking and enlightening. One audience member noted that the panel contained “a lot of very stimulating people.” Stimulating people lead to stimulated people. After the discussion, the audience and the speakers could be found sharing ideas in small groups by the projection screen, in their seats, and of course, by the free food and drinks! Joynture’s Hamilton Room proved to be the perfect public space.
Throughout the evening, the speakers stressed how effective public spaces improve society. Rowe referenced a makeshift coffee shop that offered free coffee to New Orleans residents in the wake of Katrina, providing a place for displaced people to share their stories and plan their next moves. Boyer talked about Librariness, an initiative which aims to bring the library’s educational benefits to the public through programs like Librarian-at-Large and floating book collections, which move throughout New York City by truck.
Ultimately the speakers represented, as another audience member said, “different sides of the same idea.” This idea being that with innovative participatory design our public spaces can encourage civic engagement. To make this happen we must build our public spaces with care and creativity. As Latorre asserted toward the end of the event, “We shape our spaces and thereafter our spaces shape us.”
The speakers agreed that the key to shaping our public spaces for civic engagement relies on asking the right questions and demands us to be, as Alice would say, “curiouser and curiouser.”
Sarah Ulicny is a freelance writer in New York City.