BIOMIMETICS AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Hylozoic Ground, Philip Beesley, Rob Gorbet, Rachel Armstrong

A major natural disaster occurs, on average, 10 times a year, with minor disasters striking as frequently as once per week. These include floods, tidal waves, tornadoes, ice storms, fires, landslides, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Major global cities, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Mumbai, to mention only few of them, have suffered from numerous disasters and an enormous number of people have died.

Scientists are able to predict the time needed from the starting point of a disastrous event until it reaches the affected areas, but still they are not able to predict when a disaster will happen. For example for the hurricane Sandy the meteorologists could measure the speed of the wind and thus could predict the amount of time needed for the hurricane to reach the northeast areas of United States. In consequence, people living in the coastal areas built barriers in order to protect their properties. However, there still were a large number of constructions that had been destroyed.

Nowadays, architects try to take into consideration these unpredictable events in their design, especially when conceptualizing and designing public spaces in coastal areas. For example, they have started designing different programs in different height levels so the lower could be sacrifice in case of flood emergency and function as barriers or large tanks for flooding water.

There are architects and researchers on environmental disasters who investigate multiples ways that a construction could react during a disaster. These projects are paradigms from biomimetic architecture. For example the researcher Rachel Armstrong in the University of Greenwich is doing a research in protocell architecture. She believes that the problem is that buildings during a disaster react as machines so they don’t have the flexibility of a physical organism. Moreover, she considers that the traditional architecture has separated nature from human activities. In her research ‘’Architecture That Repairs Itself’’ she is dealing with the problem of sickness of the constructions in Venice. She has developed protocells that could create an artificial shell-like structure. Architecture nowadays developed the biomimetic principles one step further by creating living architecture. Other examples of this is the self-healing concrete, in which researchers plug bacteria or the Silk pavilion from MIT media lab, in which they used 6,500 live silkworms to form the pavilion.

As Rachel Armstrong argued, our future cities will be designed more like gardens than machines. This is an idea similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s argument about organic architecture: “may go by the way of the machine to teach his own people not foolishly to rebuild but to build the new beyond the old; to build a nation that is itself more like one great organic life all together; to so now how to go forward into organic life universal…” Wright contemplates that architecture should live with nature as a whole. Could we perhaps visualize Wright’s dream in the near future? Would ever large cities be constructed of living organisms? Are they going to sense and respond in the disasters? For sure the cities of the future will be based on time not on space.  For sure, major cities will be constructed so as to react on disasters, not just receive them catastrophically.

BUILDING A REVOLUTION

Our trip to Russia was an amazing reminder that historically architects still believed that they could use architecture to change society. Part of why they failed was the extent to which they enforced an imposing ideology on the residents. Communal housing tried to fight capitalism with the architecture of the rooms. The size of the rooms was meant to discourage people from bourgeois consumerism. The worker's clubs were intended to spur political discussion. It was an architecture that was intended to create a certain dialogue that could potentially lead to a revolution. Our study of Russian social experiments such as the socialist city Sotsgorod take these social changes to the urban scale. They were trying to develop cities that were completely based on the needs of the worker in effort to celebrate their efforts. The whole city was dependent on their job and specific industry. It was intended to create a live-work dynamic that was ideal for the workers.

It's interesting because it reminds me of something Lucas pointed out in our summer semester. He said that the reason public housing stands out so much in New York is because of the homogeneity. It is heterogeneity that allows blending. It is this reason that I think is part of the reason why projects like this failed. They were too uni-focused. It is also something that I notice in society today. Our jobs have become more and more specialized, and we have lost any semblance of being self-sufficient. I believe it is this self-sufficiency that was was cities and towns were initially built upon. They are built on that exchange between different specializations, and with the advent of the internet, that is what has driven globalization. It is this need for industrial and vocational diversity that was missing from the social experiments of Sotsgorod. 

YES! GENERIC! SO WHAT?

Hong Kong, photography: Michael Wolf

It's undeniable the contemporary trend of cities to copy others' features/elements. Contemporary?

Since trade between different societies existed, globalization had started. Despite the idea of sharing has been with humanity for ages, for many times these cultural relationships were not developed in a peaceful way, like during European colonialism. Over that period, cultural sharing — or imposition — happened in many different levels, including in terms of space. Architecture in the Americas, for example, is, generally speaking, European architecture.

Then, is it bad architecture? Weren't the Americans (from all the Americas) able to adapt, recreate, add, subtract the European styles to meet their own needs? There are many examples that prove that they were, but even when the ones which are just style copies have their qualities and importance in the history of architecture.

So, if the generic is not a contemporary issue, why it's so obvious when you look at — almost — any major city today? I would say it is because of the last decades' rapid urbanization. World's urban population went from 0.7 billion in 1950 to 3.4 billion in 2009 (United Nations, 2010). How spaces could possibly be full of character and local identity when they were just built? Probably most of what humanity ever built was built in the last six decades. It's too much construction for such a short period of time.

Many questions can be raised from this theme, but, based on history, it's not a big deal to be generic. And, if there is, than it's just a matter of time and these spaces might generate their own identities.

BIOPOLITICS IN PUBLIC SPACE

Destruction of Uyghur Settlements in Xinjiang by Chinese government

Yes, it is true that imperialist and nationalist states have one element in common: they both seek to make the public space benign, regulated, clean and healthy, incapable of producing either disease or order. They present a new definition of the public that has usually been at odds with other historical forms of community. We could find many examples that clearly support this argument: the British imposition of public space in India or, just to mention a most recent case, the demolition of the traditional neighborhoods in Kashgar in 2012, and attempt of China to erode the ethnic Uyghur Muslim culture. And hygienic public space is somehow the excuse to assimilate other ethnic minorities but above all a way to assure the healthy workforce required for an efficient capitalism. An efficient capitalism requires disciplined and regulated public spaces.”Biopolitics” indeed. In this way, we could read the informal settlements and the untransformed open spaces as a refusal of citizens to an ideal bourgeois order. Should we then refuse to design public spaces?

In my opinion, the modern conception of public space should not be applied indiscriminately to all countries, it should not be globalized. There are lessons to learn from the South-American favelas, the Indian bazaars and many other types of informal configurations of public space. However, there is a risk of romanticizing these scenarios. When it comes to questions of life and death, of young children dying on the pavements of the streets, a dilemma appears. Should such subaltern citizens have the freedom to die in their ignorance or should we intervene with our knowledge? Not intervening in these open spaces would be simply irresponsible towards our concerns for prolonging life. So for me the question is not if we intervene, but how. Modernity always replaces tradition at some loss and design plays here a key role to make this process more or less painful.

So let`s design public spaces without limiting its appropation. We should design them to precisely challenge the idea of an imposed model of a global disciplined, surveyed and over-regulated public space; to propose new bottom-up urban scenarios. Public spaces able to allow difference, contestation and even disorder, but that guarantees at the same time the right of a prolonged life.

THE COINCIDENCE

Columbus circle in the late 19th century. (courtesy MCNY)

Influenced by the Theory of Chaos and given the changes that occur due to coincidence, I am contemplating if luck or purposeful interventions or perhaps both have shaped the structure of a city. How has architecture reflected on natural disasters or on major social and economic changes? How has architecture responded to climate change or to war and population fluctuations?

After the Civil war (1870 - 1920), the number of Americans living in cities grew from 10 to 54 million. ‘’Cities in the late 19^th century were large, crowded and impersonal places devoted to making money’’. They were not formed and designed to accept the dramatic increase of the population resulting in inefficient constructions and very low quality of life. However, the invention of the elevator and other crucial technological improvements allowed the construction of massive skyscrapers that could accommodate thousands of people. The New City has then inspired many architects to form their own manifestos. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: So our big cities, vampires, must die.

In my mind two questions arise; How the New York would have been formed if the Civil War had never happened? How New York was going to seem if people hadn’t immigrated there or if the immigrant destination was another city?

TYPOLOGICAL REMIX (OR WHY BJARKE IS BIGGER THAN REM)

BIG - W57, New York

From the readings on the suburbs to the Arctic Monkeys’ album, the idea of cataloguing and defining the idea of what is a city has taken its place. For the concept that a city is a walled portion of land, to a virtual construct, to a limitless expanse of free-movement, the concept of suburbia (or any synonym) needs to be defined. 

But I think there are always two conditions in any urban situation: the formal and the relational. The former has to do with the shape of things: how is the city laid out? How the architectural spaces are formed in respect to the land use, access to sun, light and nature? How the infrastructure and its input/output of resources inform the inhabitants? These are questions that concern the limits of the architecture. Questions that (might) be influenced by the product of architects and planners.

The second condition, the relational, is a more tricky one. It exists in respect to the network formed within people. We can call it the idea of community, perhaps. The bonds between people, their personal/social connection to each other and to the whole. The program, events or situations that happen within the boundaries of the architectural space.

And in this disjunction that lies the key to understand the suburban effect. We see a positive longing for the intrinsic qualities of suburbia (access to space, detached houses as a symbol of power, freedom of choice, cleanness and the invisibility of the outside-circle). From Wright to the de-urbanists to recent garden cities in UK, the ideal of sprawl still occupies the imaginary of the middle-class. These are formal conditions elevated as a desire continuum - while the negative aspects (long distances, detachment, dependency on the individual, isolation and sameness) tend to be ignored. 

Building on this relevance, I suggest we tackle the problem the way architects can afford. Why not considering the formal condition as the desired solution and work on the idea of remixing typologies? Why not suburbanize our metropolises? 

Typological understanding of what is interesting in the suburban form can be the key to re-create new urban types that could be apprehended by the urban population, create new formal conditions and, in turn, influence how people live inside the cities. 

Instead of complying with the generic city of today, we can built new forms of living that in turn, can become new relationships to how we experience our city.

THE PUBLIC CYBERSPACE

Can you remember the days, when the whole family gets together, seated around the fireplace, talking to each other, about what happened at school or where to go for the weekend? This ideal has long gone. Fireplace, as the original center of the living space, was taken over by television. We don't talk anymore, instead, we spent days and nights sitting in front of the gleaming screen, no longer using our minds.

Everything is changing. TV time since then has been replaced by the internet entertainment, delivered via iPads and laptops. If we want to talk about any scale of space, such as domestic space, collective space, public space, we can not ignore the invisible cyberspace. Cyberspace rapidly occupied our life both in time and space.
If you had a choice to live in the Palace of Versailles that has no modern system of air conditioning, electricity supply or even running water, or a 3*3*3 cube with no view and no decor, but fitted out with internet access, and satellite TV, which one would you choose? The answer for me depends on the contemporary definition of Architecture. Is it more related to art or is it about functional problem solving? Does form follows function or vice versa?

I prefer the 3*3*3 cube. According to the Moore's Law, the speed of Revolution in technology is much faster than one in Architecture. My understanding of Revolution in Architecture is that it always follows the Revolution in building technologies. Can you imagine modernist architecture without concrete? Without glass BAUHAUS would not exist. Architecture can hardly be the origin of a revolution, it is not as fundamental. Today, the leading technologies are internet, computer science, programming. As always, architecture follows the trend, with parametric design, smart furniture, etc. We first meet the needs of the clients, then we find the solution, and in this process architecture methods are not always efficient. The basic elements of architecture have been redefined by high-tech products: our clients are no longer after better spaces, but rather after stronger WiFi signals.

INFRASTRUCTURE, COLONIALISM, AND MILITARY URBANISM

"HOLC is often cited as the originator of mortgage redlining, although, this claim has also been disputed. The racist attitudes and language found in the appraisal sheets and Residential Security Maps created by the HOLC likely gave federal support to existing bias racial antipathy in society at large (Crossney and Bartlet 2005; Crossney and Bartlet 2006)."

On a late afternoon on the 9^th of May 2014 at the Buell Colloquium: The Figure of Democracy: Houses, Housing, and the Polis, Reinhold Martin introduced the keynote speaker, Ira Katznelson, by giving a framework of the recent happenings and concerns in housing in New York City.

I quote him roughly from my notes : “…the Lefebvrian right to the city – simply translates to the right of housing, […] New York city Mayor Bill de Blasio’s New Affordable Housing Policy […] represents an important departure from the status quo, […] so much so, in fact, that the New York Times Editorial Board while applauding the Mayor’s ambition, felt the need to fret a bit over whether all those new units or all those new people who cannot otherwise afford to inhabit our polis might put pressure on the subways and other infrastructures  - shared infrastructures like the Agora formed the backbone of anything like a democratic city – that is a city found on the principle of equality. This preemptive objection shows how far we still have to go. […] There wasn’t really a problem to extending Manhattan’s number 7 subway line to serve the luxurious New Hudson Yards – imagining in pain for new infrastructures to service the city’s dispossessed remains somehow a bit more troublesome.[…] A truly democratic polis cannot be built on such inequality.”

The following day, talks ensued on the question of housing in the U.S. Perhaps the most riveting talks were that of Christina Cogdell author of Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s, who explained how under the slogan of the U.S. Housing Authority “Slums breed crime” poverty-stricken families were gathered and taken to centers to be sterilized instead of being given housing. The following speaker, Ofelia Cueves’s talk was titled: Housing, Race and Imprisonment: Unprojected Futures in American Democracy showed how more recent Domestic Racial Class Policies have deprived non-white Americans from the security of ‘home’ through debt and the denial of mortgage credit.

A few months later, I stumbled upon a book review of Stephen Graham’s Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso Books, 2010). The book review by Jakob Steiner published on August 2013 and titled City Limits: Military Urbanism from Baghdad to Brooklyn explains: “the new military urbanism has permeated how the state imagines urban space: a site of warfare where borders must be constantly shored up against migrants, indigents and criminals.” He further explains what Graham considers as sites of military urbanism “this urbanism expels parts of the homeland as legitimately a ground of war, whether that takes the form of police brutality, segregation or the drug war. […] other examples include fast-lanes on motorway toll plazas where the rich and privileged can pass through controls quickly or the U.S. practice of checking passengers already at the foreign airport departure.”

Graham’s concept is heavily based on Michel Foucault “Boomerang Effect” from his book Society Must be Defended. Foucault explains how methods used during colonialism to control the local masses and crowds in the cities with infrastructure that connected some parts and disconnected others were brought back to the homeland. He writes: "It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself."

The planning and construction of infrastructure is funded by the state and it might not always be easy for architects with a strong sense of social responsibility to have any influence in altering projects that might be disconnecting and further alienating certain communities (with the exception of a few like Robert Moses whose agenda is questionable) – However, could architecture act as an urban acupuncture, taking on the role of a small scale infrastructure that connects? Could architects conceive infrastructures that not only connect areas but also act as Agoras, described by Martin as “the backbone of anything like a democratic city”? If so what are some projects that take on this role? And if no precedents are available then where do we start? 

STONE AGE SETTLEMENT

Serpentine Pavilion 2014

Since 2000 each year in the Royal Park of Kensington Gardens in central London well know architects are designing pavilions: Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Oscar Niemeyer, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Koolhaas with Cecil Balmond and Arup, Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, Olafur Eliasson, Cecil Balmond, and Kjetil Thorsen, Gehry, SANAA, Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron and Sou Fujimoto.

This year pavilion has been designed by the least well know Chilean architect Smiljan Radic and critics wrote that probably is the best pavilion that has been designed until now. It is a cylindrical, semi-transparent shell made from fiberglass and stands up in large stones. The pavilion seems like an ancient monument from Stone Age that has been discovered in the middle of the park. Ellis Woodman wrote: ’Seeming to belong at once to a world of science fiction and to a primordial past’. In some parts the fiberglass shell is cut out and therefore it seems like some parts have been destroyed throughout the years.

This pavilion combines future and past, new and old, in an approach that could be called emotional or even romantic. It makes me develop my thought around the archetype of construction, the reason behind designing and building, the rationale behind the shells. Two questions rise in the labyrinth of concepts: is architecture developed linearly all these years? Should we delve into the past and start designing all over again from the beginning?

PUBLIC SPACE, POLITICAL DISCOURSE, AND IDENTITY

Banksy, Street Art from www.streetartutopia.com

After a ten hour flight from New York to Moscow, we somehow thought taking the subway from the airport to the closest station to our hostel on Red October Island is a good idea. The walk from the station to the hostel on Google Maps seemed easy, we were to cross two major public spaces, the square of Christ the Savior Church and the Patriarshy Bridge. However, in reality, the walk with the luggage was a struggle with the countless staircases. The square of the church was elevated from street level but was smoothly connected to the Patriarshy Bridge. Nonetheless, once we got to the end of the bridge the only way down was yet another set of long staircases. Both spaces had no intention of being easily accessible. Moreover, once in the space, both the plaza and the 15 meter wide pedestrian bridge were empty open spaces which apart from the monumental presence of the pastiche church, lacked any identity.

A few days later in London, I left the hostel early in the morning to have my favorite blueberry breakfast bowl at CRUSH, an organic health food store in Brunswick Centre. While walking, I decided to take a shortcut from the Northern side of the center instead of going through my usual route through the main entrance to the central concourse. However, the detour drove me to walk a longer distance. What seemed to be an open central square was in fact barricaded with only three controlled entrances. The public space is “blockaded”, like the public spaces in Moscow, with a change in levels and objects that break accessibility. Sennet in The Fall of the Public Maneloquently expresses the state of the Brunswick Centre writing “Everything has been done again to isolate the public area [of Brunswick Centre] from accidental street incursion, or from simple strolling, just as the sitting of two apartment blocks.” Similarly, the Lever House in New York, despite the fact that it stands on the same level as the street, is isolated by the glass walls that surround it lacking any diversity in people and activity.

The Patriarshy Bridge in Moscow, the Brunswick Centre in London, and the Lever House in New York, as Sennet puts it, are spaces “ to move through and not be in […] public space becomes a function of motion, it loses any independent experiential meaning of its own.” In The Human Condition published in 1958, Hanna Arendt lamented the loss of the Public Realm, which according to her was pacified by mass culture and the household economy. Public realm according to Arendt is synonymous with political discourse. It is a continuous space of contestation. According to Arendt’s definition of Public Space, none of the spaces previously mentioned are public.

On the streets of Shiyyah, a town in the Southern suburbs of Beirut, as one walks from Maroun Street crossing the Old Saida road to Hassan Kanj Street posters of Imam Ali gradually replace the Lebanese Forces Cross graffitied on the walls. According to Rosalyn Deutsche in The Question of “Public Space”, “public space is not a pre-given entity created for users – it is a space that emerges from practices by users.” It is the presence of a set of institutions where people engage in debate, a space where “the identity of society is both constituted and questioned.” In Shiyyah, the Muslims on the West and the Christians on the East, use religious, confessional, and political signage in public spaces to territorialize and enforce the community’s identity, alienating ‘strangers’ who do not relate to them. This is also true for parts of East London where anti-immigration ads have recently filled the billboards which have in turn prompted graffiti artists to respond to the hate ads, thus sparking a nation-wide debate and concern over the identity of London as a diverse city for “all”. The simple act of placing an ad that voices concern over “border control” generated a political discourse reviving the public realm. Here we also recognize Claude Lefort’s concept that public space is the “legitimacy of contest about what is legitimate and what is illegitimate” It is “the social space where, in absence of foundation, the meaning and unity of society is negotiated, constituted, and out at risk.”

However, despite the fact that they generate discourse, both the graffiti and the billboard ads are not formal public art produced by artists striving to connect and engage with the community at large. They are expressions of angry outbursts of dispute over who can rightfully occupy the space. One of the more formal artists whose sculptures have commemorated past struggles in American History is Maya Lin whose three major monuments mark three key periods of public upheaval and severe contestation in U.S. history; the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement.

The three moments that rearranged the foundations of the whole country through uprisings and violence are represented as “Shrines of Conciliation” described by Abramson to have “formal clarity, visual reflectiveness, and inviting tactility”. Lin uses the timeline not only as a teaching device but as a way to historicize the ordinary person’s life, to narrate an “inspirational social history that emphasizes the efficacy of populist politics in American Democracy”. It narrates unity and therefore a common morality. What it does not do is question and challenge authority. Abramson articulates this phenomenon “The raw facts the names the numbers – are bureaucratically produced and impersonally presented and thus possess an autonomy, inaccessibility, and power that prevents the beholder from asking where they come from and who they benefit. […] the information dominates the powerless beholder.”

Ironically, in Art and Censorship, Richard Serra explains the process in which a public art is legally accepted into the public realm, which may explain why it rarely questions authority but instead affirms it. In 1989, Serra’s Tilted Arc on the Federal Plaza in New York was removed; the site specific art piece was therefore destroyed. The Berne Copyright Convention, which grants moral rights to authors was unable to help the artist in re-claiming his rights since the treaty, ratified by the congress excluded the key moral rights clause. This exclusion had been made due to heavy lobbying from powerful magazine, newspaper, and book publishers. The defendant therefore has the right to “curtail free speech based on dislike of the content”. The Yates Amendment passed by the Senate further gives the government rights to judge the content of art, opening the doors to moral crusades under the rhetoric of “quality of life”.

Similarly, Mapplethorpe’s exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery was cancelled for not meeting the standards of “decency”. In Serra’s words “the penalty for this violation is the exclusion of his speech from public viewing and the withdrawal of public funds to make the world available to the public”. Here the term “Quality of Life”, instead of connoting equality, implies the “existence of an abstract universal city-dweller […] encompasses all people in a single whole and in this way neutralizes their differences and erases concrete inequalities”.

The democracy of public spaces was further questioned in 1990 after the restoration of the Jackson Square Park, the keys to the gate were handed to an alliance of residents who locked the park during night time making sure that the homeless feel unwelcome to this “public park”. Interestingly, the controversy of the rights of the homeless in public spaces was addressed in Krzysztof Wodicsko’s The Homeless Projection (1986-1987) at the Soldiers and Sailors Civil War Memorial in Boston, two years before the destruction of Serra’s art on the Federal Plaza in New York. Similar to Wodiczko’s controversial art is Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970) which was quickly cancelled due to his art’s questioning of the shady works of a real estate company which ironically still remained in business afterwards. Barbra Kruger’s photomontages (1980s) also question and critique society’s norms and priorities. More recent works include Lebanese born British artist Mona Hatoum’s Hanging Gardens (2008) “‘hanging garden’ consists of 770 jute sacks, stacked to head level. All together, they form a 10 meter long wall, which looks much like the sandbag barricades used as defense from enemy gunfire during battle and other war zones such as checkpoints and border crossings. Despite the associations we have with the image of these barricades, the sacks are filled with seeds that sprout, greening the wall and expressing more of an image of growth and prosperity. The piece deals with the friction between notions of home, security, warmth and their opposites.”

The most recent controversial art is Paul McCarthy’s Tree, the 24 meter (80 feet) sculpture standing on Place Vendome was part of the International Contemporary Fair in Paris before being sabotaged and brought down two days ago on the 18th of October (2014). McCarthy described his sculpture as an “abstract work” inspired by a Christmas tree rooted in a joke about a sex toy. The Mayor of Paris condemned the attacks claiming “Paris will not succumb to the threats of those who, by attacking an artist or a work, are attacking artistic freedom. Art has its place in our streets and nobody will be able to chase it away.” In Art and Political Consciousness Rosenberg writes “Art is affected by the quality of political order, but the influence does not flow the other way.” However, in the case of Paul McCarthy, the dismantling of the “public” in reaction to the art has influenced French Politics to take a stance in favor of the art. The sculpture generated the public realm by creating a discourse between the art form, the general public, and the state. The art generated a concept called triangulation, which is a dialogue that arises between the art form, the artist, and the people. Here the art object is not the main masterpiece to be admired but about the dynamism that it creates in its surroundings, becoming a chain of reactions thus generating the public realm.

This process of triangulation has also been used by a team of Lebanese designers called Dispatch Beirut, who striving to spread hope have begun using LEGO as “building blocks” to patch up the bullet holes and cracks in buildings in Beirut. Every weekend, they choose a random site and as they place the LEGOs the residents of the neighborhood join in, interestingly, even after the artists leave, the LEGO pieces always change, and grow. People have the urge to personalize the pieces placed together. By doing so the object or art piece allows people otherwise insignificant to the larger political and public realm to emerge and declare their right to the city.
Finally, Rosalyn Deutsche writes in The Question of “Public Space”: “The term “public space” is one component of a rhetoric of democracy that in some of its most widespread forms, is used to justify less than democratic policies: the creation of exclusionary urban spaces, state coercion and censorship, surveillance, economic privatization the repression of differences and attacks on the rights of the most expendable members of society.” Unfortunately, these phenomena are true and ever growing with the expansion of global cities. However, small installations by local artists addressing root problems of the immediate society through interactive art that is a chain of reactions, redefines the space through empowering certain urban actors who otherwise may be insignificant or even invisible. Even the act of “vandalism”, whether it is the graffiti that covers border control ads or dismantling an art piece overnight, is a form of discourse that further drives people to question key issues and redefine their identity as a community and as a city.