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On
the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture,
by Setha M. Low.
The construction of public spaces
involves politics as much, or even more than, design. This
assertion is central to Setha Low's 25-year ethnographic/historical
study of two plazas in San José, Costa Rica: Parque
Central and Plaza de la Cultura, the former dating back
over 200 years and the latter constructed in the 1970s and
80s. The choice of these two plazas highlights their obvious
differences in design, demographics, and use, while also
allowing the reader to see the similarities in terms of
their political construction and renovations over time.
The ordering of Low's book is an
interesting one, jumping around in time and in focus, though
ultimately giving the reader a broad overview by the end.
She starts immediately with "notes from the field,"
her observations on a number of visits in the 1980s and
90s; this start helps give the book a personal tone that
readers wary of academic texts will appreciate. Histories
of Latin American, European, and indigenous plazas follow,
situating the two Costa Rican plazas within these traditions
while disproving a simple attribution of these spaces to
one tradition or the other.
After Low establishes the complex
intertwining of histories that led to spaces like the Parque
Central, she delves into the ethnographical portion of the
book. She starts by grounding her work in theories of space,
explaining how they inform her approach and giving the reader
numerous sources for further information. Her research includes
mapping of the two spaces' populations (by gender and age),
uses, and movements; in this chapter the differences between
the two spaces becomes apparent. What follows is a description
of the different means of public protest and their impact
on the space itself, and here the similarities become clear,
as the local government responds in each case in a manner
that serves their interests rather than the public's, or
at least no more than a particular subset of the public
(middle class, tourists).
The book concludes with conversations
and literature on the two spaces, adding more elements to
the mix that Low then brings together in her conclusion:
that public spaces must be protected, preserved, and fought
for. While this conclusion may be fairly obvious to some
people, it accomplishes a few things: it situates her site-specific
study within a broader context, as the politicization and
privatization of public space is happening just about everywhere;
it reinforces the importance of these spaces in our daily
lives; and it frames the proceeding information in a way
that hopefully make the reader more critical of contemporary
practices not only abroad but close to home.
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