Public Space Projects

I'm in my program because of Baltimore. Maybe if I'd lived in New York or L.A. I would've wanted to go back to school anyway, but a lot of my work at the Department of City Planning had to do with public space--big, underutilized parks, abandoned industrial waterfronts about to become new neighborhoods, vacant lots everywhere (14,000 total for the City). Plus, my favorite place in Baltimore was the Sunday Farmer's Market underneath the elevated highway that runs straight through downtown. 6 days a week, it's a massive parking lot that's cut off from everything around it, mostly empty at night, and that smells like piss. Sundays it's packed (there are not too many places in Baltimore you can say that about), it's diverse (ditto), and in summer they practically give the corn and canteloupes away.

I had an idea for a nonprofit called the Baltimore Public Space Project. If anyone wanted to know what it was about, you could just say "The Farmer's Market"--taking a dead space and transforming it into a safe, popular, active, unexpected place to be. The picture on the left is from a test project: a tree-decorating party to dress up dead street trees in front of my building.

There are a million other examples: a community coalition in southwest Baltimore is using grants, city funds, and a lot of sweat equity to clean up hundreds of vacant lots, plant grass and trees, and maintain the resulting miniparks. In downtown Brooklyn an urban designer and a choreographer studied people's movements across Fox Square--a busy, but bleak triangle of public space between a couple of major streets--and then created a one-week dance performance to transform the space. The artist Sophie Calle decorated a Manhattan payphone (with flowers, free cigarettes, pictures, etc.) and recorded people's reactions. And the kids at Interboro have made beautiful proposals to transform malls. (Tobias' grad school thesis, on the Fresh Pond Mall in Cambridge, is featured in the book Everyday Urbanism.)

So now Sarah and I have started Public Space Project at school to create temporary interventions in underutilized or neglected public spaces. Outflow #70 and John Peterson's installation all fall under the still vague umbrella that is our group (of 2 people). We haven't hit on a project we want to do yet, although Sarah knows a nonprofit in Chinatown that might be interested in working with us, and we'll meet with them later this week.

In the meantime, send me photos of deserted parking lots, desolate plazas, leftover spaces, etc. and I'll post them.