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.