Visual Public Relations by Sarah Roberts-Bowman & Simon Collister

Author:Sarah Roberts-Bowman & Simon Collister [Sarah Roberts-Bowman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

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The communicative function of public spaces

Noureddine Miladi

The study of urban spaces has attracted increasing attention over past decades partly due to the symbolic role attached to them and their use by social movements. City squares and other prominent urban spaces are becoming sites of resistance in an attempt from the public to reassert their political power (Rovisco and Ong, 2016). Unlike cities themselves, which can be viewed as spaces of transition, city squares and public spaces at large remain places of interaction and communication. Through their monuments, statues, street art and images they signify memorable glories which evoke responses with, debates about and interactions by the public.

In this chapter, I examine the communicative functions attributed to public spaces. I look at the role town and city squares, public gardens, museums and art galleries play in developing social relations, establishing connections and building friendships. Drawing on the French philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, whose work on the critique of everyday life, the right to the city and the production of social space provides a challenging insight into the symbolic and significant role of the social production of space. I analyse the symbolic meanings of public spaces and the extent to which the communicative functions of such spaces are being recreated.

Lefebvre’s development of the theory of space in his Le Droit a la Ville (Right to the City) (1968) provides a conceptual underpinning for the symbolic power of public spaces and their social and political significance. Furthermore, I argue here that the significance of this phenomenon emerges in large part from its incorporation of town/city squares and street walls as part of spatial strategies to build tactics of resistance. These strategies further emanate from Lefebvre’s understanding that “any space implies, contains and disseminates social relationships… a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products)” (1968: 82–83).

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