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Murals have been used by marginalized communities to demand social justice and to reinforce the collective identity. It serves as a tactic to resist invisibilization by authority, a strategy used to marginalize and control some communities. Murals' capacity to codify ideas into an image makes this practice a tool for the collective production of knowledge and education. In collaboration with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, I co-founded an art project to employ local youth to do a community mural based on Paulo Freire's notion of dialogue. I explored the use of public space, public art, and dialogue to facilitate a decolonizing pedagogical experience. My research questions are: How is public space transformed into an alternative pedagogical space through public art? How does a public art project preserve the collective memory in new generations and inform them about local social issues? How does a dialogue based project enable youth empowerment and critical thinking? The project took place in Humboldt Park in Chicago, a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. I worked with seven teenagers for six weeks. The first two weeks we engaged in conversations with community leaders and local socially engaged artists. The next four weeks the participants developed a concept, which included cultural symbols and images. The data was collected through journals, videos, photos and the artwork itself. The metamorphosis of the dialogue into public art is parallel to politicization in the public sphere. The intervention of public art in public space serves to articulate and expose community struggles, identity, and inequalities. Through codification, dialogue emerges as an ongoing process, constantly mutating before, during and after the mural painting. The project unveils identity gaps that the participants were not aware of. These gaps awaken a curiosity for their own culture and identity, as well as to the social issues in the local community. I noticed the group dynamic became a platform for the participants to create new social bonds and to meet community leaders. Through conversations, tacit community struggles became evident. The public space becomes the scene to disseminate arguments that will challenge the social imagination. The strength of mural painting in education lies in the capacity to produce knowledge organically, in contrast to many institutions where knowledge is prepackaged and alien to the realities of marginalized communities.

Public Space, Media Space asks how media saturation are transforming public space and our experience of it. From the role of graffiti and Youtube videos of street art in the Cairo revolution, to OOH (Out of Home) advertising, the book is diverse in its approach and global in its coverage

Teheran-ro in Seoul and Mediaspree area in Berlin are pristine examples for public spaces with a history of rapid change in the context of broader political and economic transitions. Dahae Lee shows that in such a transitional context, the public sector alone is incapable to provide and manage public space. Hence, it engages private sector entities in the form of privately owned public space/s (POPS). By analysing the planning instruments used for POPS in both cases, their uniqueness as well as strengths and weaknesses are revealed. Based on the results this study offers a number of policy recommendations for cities that encounter similar problems. License: CC-BY (applies to online archiving as well) Text to the license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ DOI: https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839462324

"Recent global appropriations of public spaces through urban activism, public uprising, and political protest have brought back democratic values, beliefs, and practices that have been historically associated with cities. Given the aggressive commodification of public resources, public space is critically important due to its capacity to enable forms of public discourse and social practice which are fundamental for the well-being of democratic societies. Public Space Reader brings together public space scholarship by a cross-disciplinary group of academics and specialists whose essays consider fundamental questions: What is public space and how does it manifest larger cultural, social, and political processes? How are public spaces designed, socially and materially produced, and managed? How does this impact the nature and character of public experience? What roles does it play in the struggles for the just city, and the Right to The City? What critical participatory approaches can be employed to create inclusive public spaces that respond to the diverse needs, desires, and aspirations of individuals and communities alike? What are the critical global and comparative perspectives on public space that can enable further scholarly and professional work? And, what are the futures of public space in the face of global pandemics, such as COVID-19? The readers of this volume will be rewarded with an impressive array of perspectives that are bound to expand critical perspectives on public space"--

A review essay on books by (1) Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces/Private Lives: Democracy beyond 9/11 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); (2) Margaret Kohn, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 2003); (3) Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: Guilford, 2003); & (4) Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002).

This book presents possible alternatives and interpretations to the well established notion in the mostly western discourse on public space. The discourse on public space as understood in the democratic-rationalist tradition, when applied to the Singaporean public space, would offer much criticism but would not be adequate in identifying alternative processes that allow for transformative potentials in public space. Thus said, the objectives of this book are: 1. To develop a conceptual frame of reference to construct the discourse on Singapore public space 2. To form a preliminary model of Singapore public space through analyzing case studies 3. To understand the modes, methods of production and representation of these public spaces within the rapidly changing urban context 4. To situate these constructions of public space and its possible trajectories within the larger discourse on public space, and to examine the viability of such a construction and interpretive model of public space