Yule Heibel's Library tagged artists →  View Popular, Search in Google

- look to 4culture.org in Seattle; they've found ways to do this

- while I agree with the critique of the "malling" of public spaces (privatizing what were public spaces), I'm very very tired of the suggestion, hinted at in the highlighted phrase, that public behavior should be exempt from scrutiny or controls of any kind. If you think about it, the move to privatization could be seen as a *failure* of public will to regulate behavior in public spaces (examples: social disorder, public drunkenness & urination, hooliganism, vagrancy, aggressive panhandling, and so on). Too often (esp'y if you're living in a place that has a British flavor - either UK or Canada, eg.), there's a tendency to not be judgmental about social disorder, to be forever tolerant, to not complain, and so on. But people still react (are reactionary), so eventually they allow privatization as a way of "sterilizing" what they don't like about the public space. It's almost certainly dishonest - it would be better to have frank (even "judgmental") discussions about our urban public spaces instead. But that's where we chicken out, because no one wants to be seen as some kind of "oppressor" of "freedom." whether of individual righs (even if they're infringing on others' rights) or expression, and no one wants to be identified as intolerant of the "hard to house" or poor.

- from my own p.o.v., this is the most valid critique of privatized formerly public spaces. But it applies to overplanning in general, too.