Speaker
Description
The need for justice is particularly acute in public space: a critical site in which democracy is expressed and differences negotiated and affirmed (Harvey, 1992; Low, 2013; Mitchell, 2003). The design, distribution, and accessibility of public space shape the experience of the city—offering avenues to address socio-spatial segregation, fostering diverse cultural expression, and serving as a forum for the practice of democracy. Public space thus offers a means for thinking about a more just city.
In addition to the distributive, procedural, interactional, and recognitional dimensions of justice (Low, 2020; Giamarino et al. 2022), an ethic of care is an additional lens through which to evaluate justice in public space, but this concept remains theoretically underdeveloped and has received relatively less attention than the other dimensions of justice in both empirical and theoretical explorations (Low, 2020). Intergenerational public space presents further possibilities to interconnect concepts of care and justice in the planning and design of urban public environments, yet this concept too remains underdeveloped in the literature (Nelischer and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2022).
Despite the aforementioned dearth of scholarship, there appear to be both theoretical and practical potentials in connecting an ethic of care to intergenerational public space. A care lens has the potential to uncover new possibilities for public space by engaging with the perspectives of diverse publics to inform interventions that meet youth and older adults’ physical needs in material public environments and also support their social and emotional well-being through interaction, understanding, and caring relationships in shared public spaces. These potential outcomes align with the normative goals of both intergenerationality and public space justice.
This study responds to this potential by exploring how planners, designers, and researchers of public space can incorporate an ethic of care into efforts to support intergenerational public spaces in disinvested neighborhoods. Specifically, we ask: 1) what tools can researchers and practitioners adopt to promote justice and care in intergenerational public space planning and design processes? 2) what strategies can planners and designers adopt to create material public spaces that promote intergenerational use, engagement, and caring relations? 3) how can planners and designers support ongoing practices of care amongst intergenerational users of urban public spaces in disinvested neighborhoods?
In this study, we develop a framework for just public space design that centers the practices and potential of care throughout a project’s scope, context, process, practice, and evaluation. Drawing on a study of a new pocket park in Los Angeles, we operationalize this quinquepartite framework to demonstrate how incorporating care can support participatory processes, material infrastructures, and programming interventions that advance justice in intergenerational public spaces, particularly in disinvested communities. We argue that an ethic of care exhibits strong compatibility with the principles of intergenerationality, and ought to be made more central in efforts to plan, design, and program just public spaces.
References
Giamarino, C., Goh, K., Loukaitou-Sideris, A., and Mukhija, V. (2022). “Just Urban Design Scholarship? Examining Urban Design Theories through a Justice Lens.” In Goh, K., Loukaitou-Sideris, A., and Mukhija, V. (eds.) Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harvey, D. (1992). Social Justice, Postmodernism and the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16 (4), 588–601.
Low, S. (2013). “Public Space and Diversity: Distributive, Procedural and Interactional Justice for Parks.” In G. Young & D. Stevenson (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning and Culture (pp. 295–309). Routledge.
Low, S. (2020). “Social Justice as a Framework for Evaluating Public Space.” In V. Mehta & D. Palazzo (Eds.), Companion to Public Space, Routledge, 59-69.
Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. Guilford.
Nelischer, C., & Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (2022). “Intergenerational Public Space Design and Policy: A Review of the Literature. Journal of Planning Literature, 38(1), 19–32.
| Keywords | public space justice; ethic of care; intergenerational public space |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
