More appropriate than considering these works with respect to how they address the “common good” is how they address the “commons,” the space and resources we share, harkening to the originary political conception of the “common wealth,” or public wealth, and how it should be administered. The commons have been under assault for centuries, but intensely so since the dawn of industrialism with the extreme privatization and pillaging of land and natural resources combined with the sad mismanagement by our entrusted public entities of our public spaces, parks, infrastructure, schools, and other shared assets. The word “commons” suggests medieval laws involving free-grazing animals and the right to forage in forests, but we can’t forget that it remains central to our everyday lives, from the water running through our taps to the streets that get us where we need to go. With the commons so threatened, so in disrepair, is it any wonder that “commoners” feel compelled to step in? Spontaneous interventions embody innumerable ways of rethinking our collective well-being, both physical and emotional.
Equity
In America, equity has long had a predicate of property. But Spontaneous Interventions seeks to reassert the meaning of the word as not only about financial stakes and stocks but about fairness and justice. Our most engaged urban activists seek to provide a lost sense of generosity in parts of the city that have been left behind. For them, equity is the outcome of action, of solidarity, of a sense that the city must offer a foundation of fairness for all.
Our exhibition, selected to represent the country by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, focuses on projects realized in U.S. cities, which raised the question within the curatorial team of what distinguishes urban interventions in this country from those in the rest of the world. For this reason, we inventoried the problems to which our featured interventions are primarily responding, and arrived at 10 rough categories: (1) urban blight, crumbling infrastructure, and disinvestment in cities; (2) unsafe, banal, or wasted places created by autocentric planning; (3) vacancies, property abandonment, and damaged landscapes defined by shrinking cities (related to postindustrial job loss); (4) a different order of vacancies left by the post-speculation real estate bust; (5) lack of access to amenities (such as open space, parks, playgrounds, culture, recreation, fresh healthy food, etc.); (6) insufficient mobility options; (7) pollution; (8) disenfranchisement, exclusion, social alienation, and lack of information or knowledge about how to participate in civic affairs; (9) privatization or corporatization of public space; and (10) surplus or underutilized spaces caused by hasty, insensitive, or over-development.
These problems are evident in cities all over the world, and are the result of processes and phenomena that span decades, even centuries. To comprehend how we got here—what is it about today’s cities that make people want to intervene in them?—we created a timeline of important milestones in city-making and urban activism (which runs along the floor of our show at the U.S. Pavilion): Spontaneity might be a defining characteristic of these urban actions, but they must be understood against their long and complex historical, political, and cultural contexts. Admittedly imperfect, biased, and quirky, the timeline is meant above all to convey that cities are eternally works in progress, and that actions, large and small, top-down and bottom-up, formal and informal, have always had unforeseen consequences and counter-actions.
American cities are vastly different not only from their international counterparts but from each other. They share qualities, naturally—cars and parking everywhere, and more wasted space than one might see in tight historic cities in other parts of the world—but Dallas is different from New Orleans is different from Pittsburgh. Place-based and social policies have played a role in stratifying populations within cities, as Toni Griffin describes in her essay, in a manner that’s very specific to the U.S., though cities in the rest of the world also deal with the uneven distribution of amenities and hazards along the lines of race and class.
There’s an important cultural difference, too, that informs Americans’ expectations and use of public spaces: We’re not exactly a European café-sitting culture, or an Asian street-market one, or a Latin public-lounging one. But the explosion of coffee culture, farmers’ and flea markets, food vendors, street festivals, and more, seems to suggest that we are moving towards an increasingly globalized idea of what vibrant urban life is all about, embracing all the benefits it can bring—sociality, safety, economic activity, civility, and so on. As urban populations steadily grow and cities compete with each other to top “livability” lists to attract residents, investment, and tourists, they are naturally learning from each other and adopting best practices. Some spontaneous interventions appear to be efforts to “Europeanize” American cities: If it means more bike lanes, car-free pedestrian zones, and places for sitting and enjoying the city, this isn’t a bad thing, though urban sociologist Sharon Zukin has warned of the confusion of expanding public space with consumerism-driven development in the name of urbanity, or as she wryly puts it, “pacification by cappuccino.” To put this in a global context of another sort, we must acknowledge that what we call tactical urbanism is simply a way of life in parts of the developing world where people’s tenuous existences rely on self-help solutions.