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The Presence of Absence: Where are the people in public space?

• What is the role of new technology?

• Are we being isolated by the iPod culture?

• Is it possible to plan in spontaneity?

• If an art object is chosen for a place, who does it represent?

Diarmaid Lawlor, associate director of Urban Initiatives, says that places should be ‘centres of collective meaning'.

Some of the key issues raised included:





• The profession has overdone planning for all – we have lost the ability to say no, do little, allow people to make places work. Should urban designers say no to briefs they don’t think will work?


• Artists get selected too often for the way their work looks rather than the way they think – this can lead to clashes of ideology and aspirations. Too often the creative input of artists is not taken seriously by others – there is a ‘throw away mentality’ - how do we rectify this?


• The debate surrounding objects being placed in our cities and towns is obscuring the need for thoughtful places, which encourage real interaction. How can the two professions unite to encourage more creative clients?

Then the city should focus on trees, which once defined Toronto, and drinking fountains, which used to be ubiquitous. After that, let's look at clocks.

In these ways, we could enhance our relationship with the city at relatively low cost. Even if Toronto doesn't change, the experience would.

Astani's proposal is only the latest controversial effort to
bring massive advertising and colorful light shows to the neighborhood
anchored by Staples Center and L.A. Live, the hotel and entertainment
complex that includes the recently opened Nokia Theatre.

Civic boosters promised two years ago that L.A. Live would transform
Figueroa's entertainment district into Times Square West -- a
California counterpart to the bright lights and in-your-face
advertising seen at Broadway and 42nd Street in Manhattan.

In November, the City
Council approved Fig Central, a hotel and condominium complex
across from Staples Center that will have at least one 330-foot-long
band of animated advertising. And at least seven more electronic
signs are planned for the rest of L.A. Live, according to city
officials.

The courtyard outside Nokia Theatre has 12 LED signs -- enormous
screens that intersperse concert footage with advertisements
for mobile phones and Coca-Cola. The theater is adorned with
more screens and billboards, a fact that disappoints some neighbors.

he argues that his LED displays should
not be considered billboards.

To make the images less blinding, the signs would have a brightness
of only 1,200 candelas at night -- roughly one-sixth the intensity
of the signs found at L.A. Live, Astani said. And because the
movements of his LED sign would be slower than the images on
a television screen, Astani contends, his 14-story sign would
be graceful, not gaudy.

"We don't want to create a monster," Astani said. "If
this is bright or intrusive, we cannot sell the condominiums.
It will have to be so unique and unobtrusive that people will
be proud to live behind it."

Matt Stuart photographs the unscripted drama of the London streets. Entirely
spontaneous, his pictures are made possible by a combination of instinct,
cunning and happy coincidence, revealing the beauty and significance of the
everyday - what the rest of us see but don't notice, moments that vanish
faster than the blink of an eye.

For his efforts, Stuart has picked up a little collection of pink
stop-and-search slips, souvenirs of practising a century-old art form in a
city increasingly paranoid and authoritarian.

Street photography on the net

www.in-public.com

A showcase of contemporary street photographers, including work by Matt
Stuart, plus a “masters” section, featuring the brilliant and influential
Joel Meyerowitz.

www.seconds2real.com

An international street photography collective, with a newsletter, and links
to interviews by and films of masters of the art.

www.public-life.org

A German-based collective, including galleries, news and book reviews.

www.billcharles.com/merm/jeffmermelstein_1.htm

Work by Jeff Mermelstein, chronicler of New York.

www.magnumphotos.com

The world's most famous photographic agency includes work by some of the
pioneers and masters of street photography, including Henri Cartier-Bresson
and Elliott Erwitt.

Second, this device points to some media characteristics that are important to distinguish. This pair of glasses in its current state overlays physical reality with an added layer of information. Just like ‘passive’ navigation devices such as TomTom, it is augmenting space with an extra level of added information. It is not creating a truly hybrid space in the sense of - following Adriana De Souza e Silva’s writings - enabling social interaction in both physical and digital spaces at the same time, which are mutually influencing each other.

Yet what if new uses are created with such a device? What if video-calls (e.g. via Skype) are possible through these pair of glasses, calls that take place both in digital space and influence the physical space and vice versa? Or if you watch Youtube video’s on this thing and immediately comment on them via your cell phone? Then this device would enable the creation of hybrid spaces. So augmented space or hybrid space it is not inherent in the technologies but always defined by the social processes in which technologies are used.

The likely winner, however, is Toronto landscape architecture firm, Janet Rosenberg Associates. It envisions a square by the water, hard-surfaced and dotted with armchairs. The highlight would be an environmental artwork by California-based Ned Kahn.

The three-part piece would have a shallow pond, a "roof" and a giant 20- by 13-metre "screen" made of clear "pixels" that blow in the wind.

The idea is to embrace the weather, to make it a part of the square, to illustrate it somehow and actually make it visible.

The double row of trees that extends along the lake's edge would break up here to allow for maximum access to the water.

Though the three finalists are all quite different, in their own way each takes conventional notions of public space and carefully turns it upside down. This is exactly what Toronto's waterfront needs.

It's reassuring, too, that the square will sit on land that could easily have been ignored and left untouched. Yet it is precisely this sort of detail that will bring the waterfront to life and attract an audience beyond the immediate.

Perhaps the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. – now Waterfront Toronto – should create an idea bank, an inventory of schemes that can be brought out when opportunities arise. In this case, all three finalists have done projects on the waterfront; it might be that this familiarity allowed them to produce such excellent schemes.

"I'm very excited," says Chris Glaisek, Toronto Waterfront vice-president of planning. "This space didn't exist, but now I think it's going to be one of the best public places on the water's edge. It'll be a space people love to come to."

Further north, the city's love affair with the condo tower reached new heights; a tower at Yonge and Bloor will stand 80 storeys tall and a second, at Yonge and Gerrard, 75 storeys.

Though neither tower could be described as architecturally exciting, both are presentable. At the same time, however, most development happened in the vacuum that passes for planning in Toronto.

Before the storm, the St. Charles streetcar was at least an image of the social ideal. Uptown lawyers in seersucker sat by weary-looking housekeepers going to the downtown hotels. Noisy schoolchildren jostled for space with tourists from France, Rome and Australia wondering about the solemn fellow on the column at Lee Circle. (That would be Robert E. Lee.) Prim suburbanites visiting from Nashville and Atlanta, and encountering public transportation for the first time, smiled nervously past muttering bums. No other city in the South entertained such a mix.

In the worn wooden interior, bathed in the smell of sulfur and the soothing racket of clanging machinery, the fractures in the stratified city melted, slightly. And what would be deficiencies in other places — improbable premodern slowness, the occasional surly conductor, unexplained lengthy halts between stops — were virtues. The conductor sang out, ingeniously mispronounced, the names of the Greek muses that double as street names here: MEL-Po-MEEN! (Melpomene) TER-Chicoree!(Terpsichore) You were getting somewhere, slowly. Complicated reading could be accomplished.

Excellent, as a rider named Cherry Gardon put it the other day, “if you’re not in a rush to get to work” — a widely held ethic.

“The streetcar is not just something convenient,” said Manuel García-Castellón, riding it recently to his job as a professor of romance languages at the University of New Orleans.

He struggled to explain why something so irrational could also be so indispensable. “Sometimes, I think I’m in the salotto of my house,” he said, using the Italian word for parlor.

In July and August, the streetcar effects a miracle: benign contact with the superheated New Orleans air. All the windows come down, the sweet, thick air rushes in, and you are in a truce with the beast of the South Louisiana summer.