Politics of Public Space

The politics of public space concerns how shared environments are produced, accessed, and contested. Public space is never neutral; it encodes exclusions through surveillance, policing, privatization, or commodification. Movements from the agora to Occupy Wall Street reveal public space as arena of democracy and dissent. For landscape and urbanism, this politics challenges design to confront who is included, who is excluded, and under what conditions. Public space is thus both a material site and a battleground of rights, visibility, and power. Landscape architecture is politics.

Liam Young is together with Kate Davies running the Unknown Fields project. They travel around the world and explore landscapes behind objects we used on a daily basis: materials for our phones, fabrics for clothes, lithium for batteries … We caught Liam in Ljubljana, where he was narrating Unknown Fields film live.  

During all the media coverage—particularly in the United States—of Hurricanes Harvey (Category 4, 17 August-1 September), Irma (Category 5, 30 August-12 September), Jose (Category 4, 5-22 September) and Maria (Category 5, 16-30 September), the flooding and subsequent trail of destruction in Houston and southeast Texas, South Florida and the Caribbean, there was ceaseless talk of […]

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