WHAT IS PUBLIC?
PUBLIC /ˈpʌblɪk/ adjective
1. of or concerning the people as a whole.
2. done, perceived, or existing in open view.
3. (noun) ordinary people in general; the community.
PUBLIC, stylised as bꓵBΓIC
A project set to establish a dialogue on the public sphere and threats to it,
through the culture and practice of parkour.
Parkour emerged from Parisian suburbs in the late 1980’s as a subversion of a technique of military discipline developed by Georges Herbert, La Method Naturale, and the disciplinary and marginalising structures of public space epitomised by the Banlieues.
The democratic potential of space has been systematically eroded by privatisation and commercialisation; freedom and spontaneity replaced by surveillance and control. Questions about who or what public space is for, about what it means to live in common, have been effaced by the dictates of profit-making.Parkour bears an affinity to these questions - it challenges the use of space, opens up new paths of moving and living, and is routinely obstructed by draconian land use laws and the belligerent police that enforce them. Parkour is therefore one, partial way of re-appropriating public space; but there are others. What would it mean to fully re-appropriate the public realm; to generate a kind of PUBLIC designed along the principles of freedom and spontaneity?
In short, what would a bꓵBΓIC FUTURE look like?
RESOURCES
Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl
The New Enclosures by Brett Christophers
Designing Disorder by Pablo Sendra and Richard Sennett
The Life and Death of American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Seeing Like a State by James C Scott
The Language of Cities by Deyan Sudjic
Red Metropolis by Owen Hatherly