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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

The imagination paradox: Participation or performance of visioning the city

Katarzyna Balug1
Harvard Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Models of urban planning after authoritarian modernism raise the question of democratic control over the city
Imagination and the possibility of imagining as a collective act. The paper examines systemic hindrances to free-thinking, and
Modernism thus free-acting, embedded in urban communities. Through the case study of recent work by the art collective
Urban planning Department of Play, it illustrates the rationale for engaging public imagination specifically via play as world-
Aesthetics
building; and it posits the potential implications and limits of such activity as an intervention into city planning
Participation
Art
processes. Interested in liminal spaces between territory, language and social affiliation, the collective advances
Public space an agenda of productive dissent in public space through play and performance. Department of Play begins from
the position that we can only plan that which we imagine, and thus exists as an effort to free the public ima-
gination from modes of thinking dictated by the capitalist context.

1. Introduction The result is that there are a number of contradictions that under-
mine the efficacy of public participation, an effort to engage urban
“What we’re involved in is applying imagination. Maybe some dwellers in democratic local planning in practice since the 1960s. For
people don’t have imagination and borrow other peoples’. Other one, planners who emphasize participation at a community scale
people have imagination but can’t apply it. The new is not only the grapple with the problem of representation and inclusion. Often there is
product of the past.” selective representation of who constitutes a given community, espe-
Peter Cook (Archigram), 2002 cially in dense and diverse urban environments. On the one hand,
emphasis on ‘community’ as a unit of participation may not necessarily
In the 1967 book The Right to the City, Henri Lefebvre proposed a
match the more fragmented collective identities that share a geographic
political program of urban reform necessary to counteract the dominant
area (Polletta and Jasper, 2001). On the other, as public amenities
urbanization processes of the 20th century. In order to test new models
become increasingly privately developed, there is implicit bias in which
for planning, he underscored the need to imagine boldly with those who
residents ought to count as ‘community,’ as will be demonstrated via a
inhabit the city, and an ephemeral praxis of ways of living (Lefebvre,
case study in the essay. Secondly, planners struggle to capture the un-
2003 [1970]). Lefebvre’s perspective was echoed by scholars and
wieldy ‘data’ supplied by participatory efforts. To facilitate data ana-
practitioners alike in the era that lasted from the end of World War II
lysis may require oversimplification of input options, such as asking
through the 1960s: bold, optimistic, and unafraid to embrace utopia in
limited choice questions. A related problem is fatigue or participant
collectively imagining the city as a blend of art with theory and urban
burnout over months-long planning processes; the participating public
spatial practice (Jameson, 2008 [1982]).
is typically volunteering their time (Fainstein, 2008).
In the first decades of the 21st century, the stakes of global capital in
These factors emerged during the shift from visionary spatial
urbanism appear so powerful and naturalized as to be insurmountable.
planning that implicated the social environment without engaging
Unlike the technocratic, totalizing modernist visions of the city that
public voice, to one in which the role of visioning, or imagining, the city
prioritized a social prescription alongside physical form, ideas for both
has been handed from the planners to the public via participatory ef-
social and spatial change today are relegated to piecemeal efforts that
forts. Paradoxically, the critical optimism that fueled the earlier plan-
do not interfere with the requirements of capital. This disposition,
ners’ imagination is not fostered by either the contemporary urban
summarized by political theorist Richard Foglesong as the capitalist-
reality or the emphasis on process over outcome of participatory
democracy contradiction, suggests a reactionary scope of planning over
planning.
the last decades, in which planning steps in where the market does not
This optimism can nevertheless be found in another domain. Artistic
reach (Foglesong, 2008).

E-mail address: kbalug@g.harvard.edu.

1
Department of Play, 165 Tremont St. #3, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.08.014
Received 31 August 2016; Received in revised form 9 August 2017; Accepted 24 August 2017
0016-7185/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Balug, K., Geoforum (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.08.014
K. Balug
collectives have been critically engaged with the psychic and physical
urban environment resulting from rapid industrialization since the 19th
century, beginning with poet Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur in
Haussmannian Paris. The influence of the early 20th century Italian
Futurist movement reverberates through the writing of the French
group Situationist International (SI) in the 1950s (Gough, 1996).
Through the dérive, a way of traversing urban space that creates dis-
orientation, SI reimagined how the script of a map dictates one’s ex-
perience of the city (Mcdonough, 1994). In the US, artist Allan Ka-
prow’s 1960s happenings constructed similarly unexpected situations
by going ‘off script’ from normal social behavior (Kaprow, 1993). The
works of artists concerned with urban space and society evolved
through subsequent decades, and over time also began to grapple with
issues of community, inclusion, and democratic process.2 Today, an
increasing number of local governments in the US are turning to artistic
practices to engage residents in city issues through programs like artist
residencies. What might planners expect from a formal engagement
with artists, and what implications does artists’ work hold for planning?
How can art maintain its unique methodologies and sphere of concern
when working alongside planning agendas?
In this paper, I argue that artists’ efforts could ultimately inspire a
visionary imagination that is as bold and total as that of modernism yet
is the result of a democratic process of public engagement. However,
along the way planning must resist attempts to incorporate art into its
existing structures, and instead remain open to a public engagement
process that results not only in urban plans but in a stronger sense of
urban society. The notion of society and mutual recognition as such, is,
I argue, the missing link in successful participation. To support this
proposition, I present the case of Department of Play (DoP), a Boston-
based art collaborative that I lead together with anthropologist Maria
Vidart-Delgado. DoP creates context-specific performative events to
practice a collective imaginary and bold visioning in public life.
To begin, I briefly situate the rise in civic participation after the fall
from grace of modernist planning in the US alongside the growth of
neoliberalism. I then underscore differences in the engagement pro-
cesses of participatory planning and public art to date, and argue for the
significance of the “social imaginary,” as defined by philosopher
Cornelius Castoriadis, and the role that performance plays in this
imaginary. In the second section of the paper, the case study of DoP
serves to emphasize the importance of public space in fomenting ima-
gination, and to demonstrate how creative actions transform everyday
sites into opportunities for democratic practice. I share several projects
that DoP has completed, and how they both free public imaginaries of
the city and elucidate hindrances to civic engagement, and identify
issues that have emerged from the practice. The outcomes of the col-
lective underscore the core argument of the paper that, through tem-
porary exploration of alternative possibilities, public art offers valuable
blueprints for a public construction of society through collective imagi-
nation that could couple pluralistic, horizontal civic engagement with
visionary urban planning outcomes.
2. Participatory planning emerges from the ashes of
‘Authoritarian High Modernism’
The discipline of planning emerged in the 19th century as a re-
sponse to the growing urban chaos and inhospitable living conditions of
the industrial era. Its ideology of technology-fueled rationalism, the
growing power of the state, and the limited capacity of an emerging
civil society helped facilitate the utopian aspirations of technocratic
visionaries whose ambition extended to organizing the entirety of
human society (Scott, 2008). In the early decades of the 20th century,
planning’s focus was on a great, calculable future, for which sacrifices
by individual subjects were considered worth making (Scott, 2008). As
2
For further discussion of this evolution, see Kwon, 2002; Lippard, 1997; Bishop, 2012.
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a growing civil society and post-World War II reconstruction brought
modernist practices into question, Paul Davidoff’s seminal 1965 essay
“Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” took on the long-held assump-
tion that city planners determine what is in the public interest through
scientific expertise. Instead, he argued, there is no objectivity or neu-
trality in planning, and values like the public interest must be decided
with citizens through a process of debate. He called for plural plans to
be developed by multiple governmental and non-governmental agen-
cies, which could be publicly deliberated and inform legislative action.
This assumed citizens who would be heard but must be able to for-
mulate ideas and respond in the technical language of professional
planners. His framework emphasized the planner as advocate and
educator of the public so that it could fulfill this role (Davidoff, 1965).
Related, though less demanding on the public was Jane Jacobs’s view
that communities were the most expert voices about a given area
(Jacobs, 1961). These ideas gave rise to advocacy planning, a contested
method of gathering public input through, for critics, endless and in-
efficient debate (Fainstein, 2008). Others, like Leonie Sandercock fa-
vored the attitude of advocacy in planning, but held that Davidoff did
not go far enough. In Towards Cosmopolis, her critique of Davidoff
claimed that his planner retained a position of power, as ‘representative
of the poor’. Instead, she suggested that the planner’s role was to elicit
an epistemology of multiplicities, downplaying their role as expert and
playing up multiculturalism in her self-proclaimed ‘utopian’ Cosmopolis
(Sandercock, 1998), akin to Jacobs’s calls for diversity.
In planning practice, though, different populations are often ad-
dressed separately from one another. Instead of a planner fomenting
dialogue and negotiation among diverse neighbors who share the out-
comes of a geographically-oriented plan, the planner engages re-
cognized groups individually and later ‘resolves’ any conflicting opi-
nions that arise in the final proposed plan. Thus, participatory plans
that claim to represent ‘community’ interest in fact generalize what
multiple, differing viewpoints have brought to the table in segregated
community meetings (not to mention that only recognized groups are
invited to participate). The diverse actors that live in a given environ-
ment are subsequently grouped together as ‘the community’ and told
they were represented in the planning process. Sandercock implies that
a planner’s job is to listen and engage with culturally diverse popula-
tions, yet how planners – and the so-called communities – reconcile
differing viewpoints into the design of pluralistic spaces remains a black
box.
Nevertheless, the attempt to improve resident input is a significant
shift from earlier planning practice, which privileged planners’ ex-
pertise over local desire. How does participation fit into the larger
context of planning’s role in today’s cities? If, as widely acknowledged
by critics like David Harvey, the city is a construct optimized to re-
produce capitalist society (Harvey, 1985), it is fundamentally im-
plicated in the uneven development logics of global capital. City gov-
ernance structures dependent on attracting global market actors must
compete with other cities. Urban agglomerations exist to absorb and
create surplus product, argues Harvey, and capital must continue to
seek out new fields of growth, cyclically resorting to crisis (Harvey,
2008). Even when presented with good intentions, such as Sandercock’s
planner, local officials are ill-equipped to offer their less privileged
residents pathways to structure the larger urban condition in their
favor, much less contest it. Urban plans have become more reactionary:
broader efforts driven by real estate interests organize the participatory
efforts at a neighborhood scale that cannot intervene in the overall pro-
development rationale. It has become difficult to imagine how the claim
to remake ourselves by remaking the city (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970])
would not ultimately further capital’s aims.
Thus, public participation has evolved in concert with another
factor – the rapid growth of private development and related decrease
in power of public planning in the city. The de-emphasis of the mod-
ernist role of vision occurred in tandem with reconceptualizing plan-
ning to be more participatory in the decades after the 1960s. Rather
K. Balug
than consider the city as a whole – a prescription for design and modern
life alike – neighborhood-level planning is ameliorative, at the scale of
making small improvements to everyday experience. The emphasis on
local knowledge over professional expertise assumed an ethical dis-
position that favored process over outcome and institutional structures
over physical design. As a result, master plans moved from emphasizing
urban design to policy and services in the 1970s (Hall, 2002). This has
had some implication on the availability of public urban space, which
in turns affects residents’ ability to identify as a member of ‘the public,’
which will be explored later.
As the core of US cities saw increased revitalization beginning in the
1970s, planning agencies became facilitators of growth (Molotch,
1976). Public participation processes were more often than not limited
to discussing the exactions the city was able to wrangle from devel-
opment budgets. To facilitate the slow process of participatory plan-
ning, community organizations stepped in, expected to represent their
community as a uniform body politic to the city (Levine, 2016). The
local groups, caught between maintaining political favor and resident
representation, became ever less likely to facilitate dissenting public
voices and more likely to seek residents’ support for politically- and
development-friendly agendas (Molotch, 1976). Over the last decades,
participation in planning has become a standard affair, evolving into a
practice that has helped foster a sense of community efficacy in those
who attend public meetings, yet offers limited agency. Present at these
meetings is an undercurrent of expressed hierarchy, with the planning
“experts” doing much of the presenting, and the public being allowed
voice in limited, predetermined circumstances.3 Importantly, the
number of participants remains a fraction of the overall population, the
majority of whom either has no knowledge of these meetings, lacks
interest, or experiences other barriers to entry (these could be language,
transportation, childcare, hours) (Kitchen and Whitney, 2004) – yet the
outcomes are framed as representative of public opinion overall.4 Both
Lefebvre and Harvey emphasized the importance of space in main-
taining State power (Lefebvre, 1991; Harvey, 2006). With meeting
space organized by community groups whose power is dependent on
political support, residents can at best mitigate local development, with
little capacity to affect how global trends of growth play out locally.
Thus, instead of public demands emerging from the community meeting
to be received by city officials, the meeting regularly becomes a place
from which to maneuver public support for city plans.
Of course there are exceptions to the efficacy of community groups.
In Boston, a remarkable example is the Dudley Street Neighborhood
Initiative, which in the 1980s was the first non-state actor to gain the
power of eminent domain and today operates a land trust to protect its
area from rising real estate values. However, even this group actively
engages only 12.5%, or 3000 of 24,000 of the population over which it
has strong political influence (Moore Southwark, 2014), begging the
question of political representation of the majority of residents.
This highlights the lack of a neutral ground in which unfettered
participation can take place, a heterotopia (Foucault, 1986 [1967]) or
third space (Soja, 1996) where there is no correct outcome in the on-
going critique of the present conditions, something that will be ex-
amined later in the essay. As postmodernism and neoliberal develop-
ment changed the landscape of planning and architecture, the system of
3
For example, in community meetings organized by the Boston Redevelopment
Authority about redevelopment of Andrew Square, BRA representatives closely monitored
and guided participant conversation by serving as ‘facilitators’ at each table during a
period of discussion. They allowed little room for the discussion to wander away from the
options presented as viable, and for new ideas to be expressed. The author attended
several such meetings in the summer and fall of 2016.
4
A recent Boston planning process for the city’s first master plan since 1965 proudly
claims to have included 12,000 public voices in its drafting (Imagine Boston 2030 blog,
2016), or 1.9% of the population of almost 646,000. The majority of these voices were
solicited via in-person and online surveys that included a limited pool of answer options.
Public workshops and open discussion involved only about 1600 attendees (Imagine
Boston 2030 draft plan, 2016).
3
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physical space in the city became less publicly disputable in favor of
highly local improvements discussed in community meetings as de-
scribed above. As a result, the city is split between its physical devel-
opment – driven by financial markets and global real estate investment,
and over which local government has limited influence – and its social
project – employment, affordable housing, services, education and the
like. These are seen as primarily relevant to low-income and otherwise
needy populations, while real estate concerns the wealthy – deepening
the divide between development agendas and planning, which attempts
to fill the gap for those left out of the real estate market. As the market
further encroaches on public services, even improvements to basics like
public transit are more beneficial for some residents than others,
through, for example, their embrace of new personal technologies such
as access to information via smart phone apps, rather than through
public infrastructure. As a result, the poor are structurally if not phy-
sically eked out of the city, because needed services are rising in costs,
degrading in quality, or downright missing. Previously, the physical
encompassed the social; now the social is an externality to be exacted
from development.
To summarize for now, we can see that a paradox has occurred with
regard to imagination: by taking on an agenda of participation formally,
planning efforts have co-opted those tending to participate into a pro-
cess where true visioning is neither possible nor desired. The limited
range of possible outcomes in this practice raises questions about its
claims at democracy on one hand, as was shown above, while inspiring
creative responses on the other, as will be examined now.
3. Public art and the imagination
As has been shown, there are several hindrances to visionary public
participation. First, planning’s fragmented nature under capital affects
its political scope. Secondly, the lack of translation between complex
public inputs and actionable outcomes leads to emphasis on feel-good
process rather than facilitating results that may defy planners’ ex-
pectations. Finally, a lack of neutral space, or organization-led space
conflated with public space, lead to inevitable exclusions of who par-
ticipates and how public voices are communicated to planners.
Especially in lower income neighborhoods, places to gather that are
independent of politically-minded community organizations are in
short supply. In placemaking efforts, what public spaces do exist are
perceived as spaces for “the community.” They are frequently policed
by local organizations who either own the land or have control over it
in exchange for maintenance, and who prioritize weaving plural voices
into a tapestry of monolithic sentiments rather than confrontation and
debate.
In this section of the paper, I examine how art practice relates to
these hindrances. First, I situate the evolution of public art practice
alongside planning in recent decades. Second, through the lens of
performance studies, I demonstrate how art correlates with the social
imaginary as defined by 20th century philosopher Cornelius
Castoriadis. Third, I explore the difference between planning and art
that occurs in everyday outdoor spaces that have no pre-existing pri-
mary audience, and underscore art’s lack of a direct agenda. There is no
need to simplify, but room to pause and critique the current reality to
first open up a sense of collective imaginary – an underdeveloped sense
in contemporary society.
3.1. Artists as service providers
In the 1960s, architects critical of modernism at the urban scale
took their cue from Situationist International in their search for an
expanded subjective experience of the city afforded by design (Engel,
2015). Unlike contemporaneous planners, their imaginary retained
much of the modernist attitudes. Theirs were not process- or consensus-
oriented proposals, but instead blueprints for a more free, porous,
mobile, and technologically-enabled but still monolithic society. Many
K. Balug
soon became subsumed under postmodernism, coopted by the move-
ment that defined what they were doing and institutionalized it – thus
depoliticizing their resistance (Scott, 2007; Jameson, 1991).
In artistic practice, there has been a shift since the 1970s in the
preoccupation of those involved in the public realm toward a de-em-
phasis on site in favor of social contexts and processes. Following the
trend of Sandercock’s planner, they have renounced artistic authorship
and expertise in favor of collaborative design with “a community,”
often preferring to establish themselves as the facilitator rather than
creator, and to de-emphasize the result or vision of a project while
prioritizing equitable community process. This work often involves an
effort to improve local urban conditions, generally for low-income
communities. The projects, however, tend to so seamlessly incorporate
into existing useful public services like after school or training programs
– or participatory planning efforts – that they cannot afford any dis-
tance to actually reimagine existing conditions (Bishop, 2012). For
critics, the ethical turn collapsed the ambiguity of art and possibility of
multiple readings into a feel-good, depoliticized exercise of consensus
and community building (Bishop, 2012). Projects are read primarily in
the way the community desires, and do not provide space for negotia-
tion, ambiguity, or deliberation. They operate within the same condi-
tions of possibility as participatory planning, limited by the agenda they
set themselves.
This type of work has been called new genre public art, socially-
engaged art, relational art, dialogic art and a number of other names
throughout the literature (public art will be used throughout the essay).
In the neoliberal era, artists working in this arena in the US have reg-
ularly been instrumentalized by capital interests. After many social
services were cut in the post-welfare era, so-called “socially engaged”
artists were encouraged to work with struggling communities. They
were an inexpensive alternative to fill the gap left by underfunded
service agencies, and their efforts, framed as harmonious, elevated the
social status and public perception of an area (Deutsche, 1996). Today,
they find themselves competing for foundation dollars with service
organizations, rather than receiving support from cultural institutions
or the art market. Creative placemaking, for example, has become a
strategy to utilize the arts as catalyst for economic development in an
updated take on participation (Markusen and Gadwa, 2010). In today’s
urban context, the public artist’s role appears limited to service provi-
sion and community consensus building.
Department of Play, as will be discussed in more detail later in the
article, is born of the apparatus of aesthetic experience in the public
realm to push against the expectation of community appeasement. We
operate as a ‘lost’ city department: independent of city hall, we em-
phasize that the street is the city; that the city is the totality of all its
physical fragments and social processes. We consider the notion of
“public” rather than “community”, and the former is not defined a
priori, but rather a constantly shifting body predicated on individual
members’ self-recognition as such. As an art collective, we open space
for critical dialogue through building imaginary worlds. Our ‘temporary
play zones’ blur boundaries between age, race, class, interest, and skill
level – bringing together actors that would not engage in community-
focused efforts. The play zones interrupt the everyday script of a public
space to reimagine some aspect of urban life; this practice of public
imagination highlights the contradictions of the real city.
3.2. The social imaginary
Though master planning and a strong centralized state facilitated
the rational planner’s will over society for the first half of the 20th
century, the more participatory approach of recent decades could open
an avenue for a transformation of planning to better function within a
neoliberal urban reality. To do so, however, requires resistance to in-
strumentalizing art, facilitated in part by awareness of its contribution
to the “social imaginary.” Castoriadis places the imaginary at the cri-
tical base underlying what makes society and institutions function. He
4
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makes a distinction between the imagination at the scale of the subject
and of the society; it is the latter that creates the condition of possibility
for symbolic meaning to exist, and mobilizes the actual organization of
society. Thus, the institutions that emerge in society are informed and
maintained by a complementary imaginary, which they in turn help
maintain through symbols that become second nature (Castoriadis,
1987). Following Castoriadis, imagination drives cognition and per-
ception, so that society can only create that which its members can
imagine. As will be shown below, public art expands the capacity to
imagine. But what is meant operatively by “society” in the con-
temporary world, and how does the concept relate to planning?
3.3. Public space and society
Before tackling this subject head on, we must underscore Lefebvre’s
notions of the process of production of space and the product of space
(Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]) to emphasize the relationship between the
physical public sphere and the unhindered debate and vision that in-
form the construction of society. A neutral space for exchange becomes
of particular importance in this scenario. Philosopher Michel Foucault’s
notion of heterotopia was characterized by its unpredictability and
otherness from the status quo (Foucault, 1986 [1967]). Though Fou-
cault did not commit heterotopia as a place of exchange of opinion, the
temporary suspension of the usual coupled with his claim of it as a site
of critique of the present lends itself to imagine space for negotiation of
alternatives. Central market spaces of the city were heterotopias as
early as ancient Greece (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970], Dehaene and De
Cauter, 2008). Historian Simon Schama described pre-Revolution En-
lightenment Paris as consciously fostering such spaces, where to be seen
was worth rubbing shoulders with the working class: “…in the avenues
and arcades of the Palais-Royal, where promenading (not to say soli-
citing), gazing, and inspecting were a major pastime, conditions and
classes were indiscriminately jumbled together…And it is evident that
contemporaries relished this social potpourri” (Schama, 1990).”
However, contemporary space is increasingly controlled by special
interests. Urban public space is complicated by private ownership and
public servants deployed for enforcement of privately-delineated rules.
For example Bryant Park, a historically tough area to control next to
New York’s public library, became privately administered in 1990.
After the park was redesigned to encourage a wealthier, better-behaved
public, park rules were posted and enforced by the New York police and
private security. Its closed gates at night prevented usage by homeless
New Yorkers, as did police that patrolled the area and removed those
deemed unsightly. While this has led the park to feel safer to many, it
suggests a delineation of who is and is not a member of the new
‘public,’5 leading the term to be conflated with ideas of a community of
shared affinities. This further becomes emblematic of sociologist Sharon
Zukin’s notion of ‘symbolic economy’ – a culture where public space is
closely linked with consumerism (Zukin, 2009) and encourages con-
sensus rather than negotiation among diverse actors (Deutsche, 1996).
If we follow Lefebvre’s notion that social space is continually produced
by society, the decreased access to spaces like Bryant Park implies that
society is narrowing its definition of – and space to deliberate about –
who is included and who is excluded.
3.4. Public art as aesthetic experience
Rather than focus on representative participation (a number of
people attend a meeting, choose between option A and B; planner
claims residents’ voices directed process), aesthetic experience can
create space for critical exchange, a pause of the everyday that leads to
seeing the familiar anew. Art historian Claire Bishop challenges the
5
A case in point: the right to pick through park trash – itself not normally an illegal
activity – became limited to members of a nearby church (Zukin, 1998).
K. Balug
ethico-moralistic approach to art informed by social science criteria,
which emphasize measures such as number of participants and acces-
sible process: “…compassionate identification with the other is typical
of the discourse around participatory art, in which an ethics of inter-
personal interaction comes to prevail over a politics of social justice.”
(Bishop, 2012). Instead, following philosopher Jacques Rancière, she
considers art as at once part of life and removed from it; an autonomous
space for a likewise autonomous political experience, which questions
how the world is organized: “The upshot is that art is perceived both as
too removed from the real world and yet as the only space from which it
is possible to experiment: art must paradoxically remain autonomous in
order to initiate or achieve a model for social change.” (Bishop, 2012).
Importantly, Rancière’s “emancipated spectator” underscores that, in
this process, there is no problem with distance between viewpoints or
knowledges. Dissensus is what makes dialogue interesting, and why
hierarchy can be done away with without eliminating authorship. The
artist offers a frame for aesthetic experience – an autonomous experience
of sensible perception whose undecidability implies political dissent
(Rancière in Bishop, 2012), and whose effect on the social imaginary
may create the conditions to alter urban institutions.
In other words, the distance from the everyday is precisely what
makes art fundamentally different from the usual services. Art, as en-
capsulated by Guy Debord’s concept of détournement, disorients the
familiar, destabilizing the status quo. It produces a moment of otherness
from which re-entering ‘reality’ becomes a choice. While related to
philosopher Theodor Adorno’s idea of architecture’s aesthetic au-
tonomy in modernism – a dialectic between resistance to and yet un-
avoidable embeddedness in society (Adorno, 1997 [1970]), art, unlike
architecture, affords temporality. Once seen from the distance of an
artwork, contradictions previously too familiar or too conditioned as
acceptable must be acknowledged, which is the first step to freeing the
imagination to develop alternatives. The result is the production of an
agonistic space, which “makes visible what the dominant consensus
tends to obscure and obliterate,” in which sustained debate rather than
agreement are valorized (Mouffe, 2007). Both society and space are
questioned – and produced – in this process.
In the critical space left by modernism, the social imaginary requires
a civil society that has the capacity to collectively imagine alternatives.
Conventional planning, for the reasons explored above, is stymied in its
ability to facilitate the emergence of truly visionary ideas from its ef-
forts of engaging collectivities, while decades of fragmentation have led
to a lagging identity of urban society as such. However, the recent in-
terest in collaborating with arts and artists creates a moment of im-
mense potential. Performance theorist Richard Schechner argues that
performance is a way to experiment with new relationships, to cross
borders that go beyond the physical to the personal, emotional or
ideological, to empathize while becoming someone else and main-
taining a sense of self simultaneously (Schechner, 2014). In particular,
the notion of social theater occurs in places and situations that are not
normally the sites of theater – such as public squares – but that lead to
healing, action, community or transforming of experience into art
(Thompson and Schechner 2004 in Schechner, 2014). A key example is
Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, which expanded Paolo
Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” into performance in Brazil, and is
now practiced globally (Schechner, 2014). In Boal’s work, residents
trained to be spect-actors perform issues facing the local population up
to the point of tension, where an obvious solution is lacking. At the
climax, audience members are invited to offer possible outcomes, which
the actors carry out improvisationally. Thus, rather than discuss hy-
pothetical, or pre-selected options, community members are able to see
their ideas come to life instantly, and discuss a wide range of alter-
natives – while feeling included in the solution-generating process
(Boal, 2008).
Fundamentally at odds with modernism, whose monolithic avant-
garde sought new norms for life in industrial society, the plural avant-
gardes that began with postmodernism and continue today resist any
5
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
notion of the normative or mainstream (Schechner, 2014). A case in
point is the Orange Alternative (OA), a performative resistance to
communism in early 1980s Poland that similarly resisted the totality
and activism of the Solidarity movement. Instead, OA carried out ac-
tions whose goal was to undermine the existing pillars of power, and to
create space for questioning rather than delineating the replacement
regime. Their mascot, a small, powerless dwarf, became a ubiquitous
symbol of resistance to the absurd reality of a government that rigor-
ously monitored citizen activity, yet could not provide for basic needs
like toilet paper and sanitary napkins. The happenings organized by the
OA attracted thousands of Poles wearing dwarf hats, and saw public
handouts of these necessities. Arrests of such ‘protesters’ only made
further mockery of the communist government, and the movement is
credited with helping Poles transition from fear to collective resistance
(Fydrych, 2014).
In a diverse nation like the United States, there is a more limited
sense of shared history, mythology, or tradition, all of which foster a
sense of society. However, the nation has a long, proud history of
fighting for democratic principles, a matter of pride for most of its in-
habitants. Can we consider public participation in planning a funda-
mental ritual of performing democracy? Greek scholars Dimitrios
Yatromanolakis and Panagiotis Roilos define ritual as “repositories of
collective memory” that provide both a sense of tradition and cultural
and historical continuity (2003). Key to the continuity of ritual are
flexibility, freedom, and divergence of opinion, which set it apart from
the public meeting as it stands today:
“regular social norms are suspended or subverted and carnivalesque
modes of expression may, in certain cases, come into play, thus in-
forming the ritual process with a dynamic heteroglossia interlinking
diverse domains of human experience and expression. This hetero-
glossia, in combination with the reflexivity involved in the role of
the participants not as mere spectators but as actors in an enacted
system of communicative codes, allows individuals room for flex-
ibility and creativity. The role of individual agency on such occa-
sions should be viewed in terms of a continuum defined at one end by
rigidity..and at the other by freedom and improvisation” (2003).
In this understanding of ritual, the spectator becomes a spect-actor
(Boal, 2008), and plays an active role in the procedure of ritual. Though
the ritual differs each time, that it occurs is expected – the habitual
reenactment of ritual as an act in and of itself plays a key role in it
becoming a form of communication, in which aesthetics play a crucial
role. Their notion of ritual aesthetics relies on dialogic exchange be-
tween daily life and ritual, in which power relations may be subverted
as agents reimagine and renegotiate their role in the suspended moment
(Yatromanolakis and Roilos, 2003).
4. Case study: Department of Play as ritual of performing
democracy
Department of Play (DoP) and its projects suggests possible ways to
consider the ritualization of participation toward identifying as a so-
ciety. Inspired by the experimental, critical practices of the 1960s that
imagined the future of the city through dynamic engagement at the
edges of architecture that regularly spilled into public space, we ima-
gine the future of the city through dynamic engagement at the edges of
public space, which increasingly spills into architecture. The earlier
utopian practices imagined new worlds through immersive experiences
in public art, experimental architecture, and science fiction, which were
fueled by the space race, globalization, and the phenomenon of the
modern city: all factors that informed the formation of and affected the
conditoins of urban society. We borrow from them, as well as from
practices such as Theater of the Oppressed and the younger collective
The Yes Men, which consider reality as a plastic entity and critically
bend the distance between truth and fiction.
Boston, the collective’s home base, is a highly formal, scripted, and
K. Balug
reserved place. The opaque, subjective, and slow government bureau-
cracy is exhausting for most individual artistic efforts. Thus the ma-
jority of the public art offerings that emerge fit into Zukin’s category of
symbolic economy, for example: ‘community’ picnics, art markets,
public sculptures commemorating historical figures, painted light boxes
or food truck festivals.
In this landscape, our first events were fleeting public play inter-
ruptions, in which we learned what it takes to create portals to another
kind of moment in public space. These portals stopped the everyday
flow of the city and invited people to play. For example, a crosswalk
shadow-puppet show transformed the headlights of cars waiting at a
street light into stage lighting. With a canvas stage moving across the
crosswalk during the pedestrian signal, we invited crossing pedestrians
to join in as puppet masters or actor figures themselves. In the process,
we learned that people were willing to join in regardless of age, gender
or social status as suggested by their appearance. For example, the
person who became most involved in holding the screen and inviting
others to join appeared to be a homeless woman, while young college
students and elderly patrons of the adjacent theater district willingly
accepted puppets from her and our team.
Our second play zone, Block Party, drew on science fiction, in which
an alternate universe typically veils a distanced, critical reflection on
ours. For Block Party, we set up over 100 custom-made foam blocks on
a public plaza, and invited people to become Martian designers. Their
task was to build prototypes for the first Martian cities; for us, it was an
experiment in recrafting habits of co-existence. Strangers of all ages
started from their own forms, then joined forces in deliberating to-
gether. Several times, spontaneous collaborations emerged that de-
ployed all the blocks in one structure. Adults helped unfamiliar toddlers
stack blocks, and teens worked with older hipsters to make archways. In
all, the prompt was alien enough and yet relatable enough to free the
imagination to consider what structures a new civilization would re-
quire, while the urgency of the ‘mission’ was pressing enough to forgo
the usual patterns of engagement.
After several similarly abstract trials, we arrived on a vacant lot at
the end of a residential block in an under-resourced part of Boston. The
area is home to African-American and Caribbean immigrant popula-
tions, and the lot in question is owned by a community development
corporation (CDC) whose mission is to strengthen the nearby commu-
nity. This group was particularly interested in working with DoP be-
cause of our connection to the Boston public art community, which had
lately received a lot of attention from creative placemaking funders.
The CDC was interested in better understanding what creative place-
making could do for their community. However, the date of the play
zone turned out to be a busy one in the broader area. Unlike initially
agreed, the CDC declined to help promote our event not to compete
with other simultaneous efforts. The partnership was limited to our use
of the lot.
The work that emerged on the lot was Boxtopia, the city of Boston in
2130. The real Boston had just launched its first master planning pro-
cess since 1965 aimed at 2030, 15 years in the future. Understanding
that 15 years in political time does not offer much possibility to fun-
damentally shift the city’s core issues (lack of affordable housing for
lower and middle classes, public school quality, lasting segregation and
latent racism, and so on), we responded with a focus on 2130, 115 years
in the future. Our mission was to underscore the need to deliberate
ambitious visions for this more distant future in order to set an ap-
propriate short-term agenda for the next 15 years. Boxtopia was the
place to begin crafting these visions with a population often either left
out of city discussions or reliant on the local CDC’s representation. The
sole material to be used would be cardboard boxes, which allowed for
inexpensive but large construction to occur quickly. As word spread
mouth to mouth among nearby residents on the day of the event,
dozens of people of various ages joined in creating structures. At a
certain point, a time-traveling “Minister of Play” emerged out of the
portal that Boxtopia had opened to 2130. He, a local actor in costume,
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Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
engaged people in conversation about their ideas for the future. The
question raised over and over was why the abutting residents could not
regularly access the lot – one of few open green areas in the dense urban
fabric – highlighted by the fact that we, outsiders, managed to gain
access. This raised questions of local leadership, access to space, and
political agency in light of a “community” non-profit that represents
residents without being held accountable to them. The CDC re-
presentative present on site avoided responding to this question posed
by residents, but admitted to us that it would be problematic to allow
access and habituate residents to the green space as they plan to de-
velop the lot into housing in the future.
The emergence of this question suggested to us that play and per-
formance can help interrupt the script of expected lines of thought and
reorganize the sense of collectivity. As philosopher Jacques Rancière
says, “This is what emancipation means: the blurring of the opposition
between those who look and those who act, between those who are
individuals and those who are members of a collective body” (Rancière,
2007). Boxtopia opened up the existence of the lot in the imagination of
individual residents, transforming it from an exclusion into a possible
shared resource. They could confront the lot owners, and directly pose
their desires to them.
4.1. Playing to expand the imagination of alternatives
In August 2015, Department of Play received an Artplace America
grant, a nationwide conglomerate of foundations and banks, which
aims to solidify the weaving of arts and culture into the political and
economic life of urban and rural environments. As a group that is
openly skeptical of creative placemaking practices as they pertain to
improving communities through an emphasis on consensus building,
we were encouraged to receive this support despite our looking askance
at priorities and strategies undertaken by many Artplace projects. Our
mission as set out in the grant was to develop a number of play zones
that imagine what a city master plan could look like if it were con-
ceptualized by residents, and did not necessarily take the form of a
planning document. These would focus on areas that have multiple
divisions and socially-enacted borders within and between them: we
were aiming to recreate Davidoff’s plural plans without resolution as a
public practice.
Based on the lessons learned from Boxtopia, we sought out locally-
embedded collaborators open to carrying forward issues that may
emerge from the play zone. The play zones would be in two Boston
areas that are just a mile, and yet worlds, apart: Fields Corner in
Dorchester, and Andrew Square on the border of the districts of South
Boston and Dorchester. Fields Corner, was also previously a white
working class district, but is now home to Vietnamese and Afro-
Caribbean immigrants, as well as African Americans and whites. While
people live in close proximity in the dense urban area, there is a vo-
luntary segregation between neighbors that masks a lurking mistrust.
There are service organizations that fulfill similar, often overlapping
functions for “their” populations, which compete for funding, resources,
and ‘turf’ – claims to residents and physical space. The latter, Andrew
Square is recognized as the former industrial heart of the city, popu-
lated by working class white immigrant groups. The area today is about
half white and half comprised of diverse residents that include African
Americans, and Asian and Latin American immigrants, yet the narrative
remains that this is an Irish area.
Our goal in Fields Corner was to create a play zone in collaboration
with local residents over a period of months, during which we would
practice sustained collective imagining about the city. The play zone
itself would be in a publicly accessible site, where our collaborators
would host passersby and welcome them into the imagining process. To
do this, our partners in Fields Corner were two youth centers that are
across the street from each other but that serve different populations,
exemplifying the above point. One was part of a Vietnamese CDC, while
the other was a city-run youth center that attracted primarily Afro-
K. Balug
Caribbean and African American teens. The two centers, many of whose
teens attend the same schools or live nearby, have not historically
collaborated. Over six months of workshops, the youth developed a
temporary play zone for Fields Corner. The first step, we quickly rea-
lized, was to create a sense of a team of individual voices out of the two
self-identified groups. Through months of exercises involving play,
theater, and model-making, the youth began to get used to each other,
to work together, and to take up various leadership positions. We in-
itially worked in the local public library, a neutral space to which
neither organization had a larger claim.
A significant moment came when the Vietnamese teens led a
lengthy exercise designed to make visceral issues of inequality. The
conversation sparked by the exercise demonstrated that all the youth,
regardless of skin color or ethnic background, were keen observers of
the racial disparity that especially targets young black men, and equally
desiring to do something about it. The following week, a young Cape
Verdean woman from the city-run center ran an alliance-building
workshop based on designing micro-worlds, and the team felt ready to
transition from the exercises into planning the play zone.
The title of the one-day play zone was “Portal of Tomorrow” and the
youth’s choice of theme was envisioning a city in which everyone feels
welcome and comfortable – comfortable enough to ask tough questions.
The entrance was through a portal akin to a carwash, to wash away
one’s expectations and habits as they entered. Inside, the youth created
several worlds in which visitors engaged in imagining the kind of city
and neighborhood they would like to inhabit. The portals included a
drink bar, in which a 14-year-old performer walked each visitor
through recognizing their positive and negative preconceptions of the
neighborhood and gave them a chance to rethink them. Another was a
400 square foot inflatable bubble filled with large foam blocks. Inside
the snow globe-like bubble, visitors built versions of ‘home’ and de-
liberated what home meant. A pond with paper boats and a wishing
tree offered space for personal reflection, while a DJ and food inspired
people to chat.
Throughout the day and in planning the event, we encountered
numerous questions from residents and business owners about who the
event was for. Was it “an event for immigrants or Americans?” the staff
at a Colombian restaurant wanted to know as we ordered empanadas;
others asked if it was for Vietnamese or black families; still others,
especially the elderly, did not trust an event that two different orga-
nizations had collaborated on and stayed on the sidelines, looking in.
These reactions were characteristic of the divisions found throughout
Fields Corner, similar to other neighborhoods. Events for and by in-
habitants of multiple identities are rare, unless they are cultural festi-
vals, in which each table or activity represents a unique culture without
mixing together. Our event, whose staff visually represented many of
the ethnic characteristics of area residents, was simply open to all and
was about the larger question of a shared future, bound by the physical
spaces of the political geography of Fields Corner. The owner of the
parking lot that hosted the event, an older white man, hung a large
American flag in front of his business during the event. When asked
about it, he said it was because “we are all America here today.”
Importantly this lot, visually central in the area and unhindered by any
fencing, was similarly to the Boxtopia lot not perceived as a local re-
source. The teen organizations were surprised at the ease of obtaining
access to it, and plan to use it in the future.
The outcome was crucial in culminating the process of developing
the play zone: it allowed the youth to see the results of their work and
to engage unsuspecting passersby in the experience they had produced.
Occupying a physical space in the heart of the neighborhood – the
parking lot lies at the intersection of the main street and the street
adjacent to the metro station – was instrumental to interrupting the
flow of the everyday, and allowing the teens to invite the public to
share a moment of rethinking their assumptions in the same vein that
the teens had done throughout the workshops. The public arena served
as a neutral ground to foment a new type of ritual: though on the
7
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
surface the event resembled familiar community events, its content, its
production team, and its scripts upturned expected norms.
In Andrew Square, we found an area that is undergoing rapid de-
velopment, whose reality differs from the tale told by the Boston
Redevelopment Authority (BRA, recently renamed the Boston Planning
and Development Agency to absolve itself from association with its
infamous urban renewal activities), which doubles as the city planning
agency. In area vernacular, the district is comprised of two major zones.
The first is split between housing occupied by primarily white residents
and large post-industrial lots that house various new businesses and
creative industries. This zone is seeing many new residents as older
condominium owners are either priced out or choose to rent or sell their
property. The other half of the district houses half of the population,
much of it in New England’s first public housing complex, opened in
1936. It is occupied by a highly diverse population that includes white,
black, Latin-, and Asian-Americans. Both areas have significant drug
and alcohol abuse and recovery populations. The edge of the district is
delineated by a large park that ends in the city’s most accessible urban
beach, while the interior of Andrew Square has no outdoor gathering
space other than a busy bus station. The six-way intersection that cuts
through the heart of the neighborhood was redone in the last several
years. At each corner are plazas with planters that offer some greenery.
However, they are buttressed by rounded metal-edged curbs, which
detract sitting and skateboarding. The remaining space is too small for
gathering, and offers no seating – it is purely a visual symbol of green
space.
The BRA is in the process of planning for growth in the area, eager
to transform available parcels into housing. In the development rush
occurring throughout Boston, the story told by the planners is that the
area has been under-utilized since its industrial era ended in the mid-
20th century. It ignores the complex residential history of the last
decades, an omission reinforced by the participatory planning meetings
that involve primarily residents from the white area. DoP saw no evi-
dence of outreach to engage the housing project inhabitants.
These conditions led our collective to address the challenge sug-
gested earlier: participation is limited to those who qualify as “com-
munity” members. In the case of Andrew Square, only a portion of re-
sidents were invited to the discussion. In response, we focused our
efforts on stories from across both parts of the neighborhood in order to
show the faces, lives and experiences of actual current residents who
will have to contend with the upcoming changes. Our plan was to create
a mobile storytelling lab housed in an inflatable cube on stilts. This
eight-foot cube would be taken to different public spaces around
Andrew Square, and would welcome residents and area workers to
share their personal story of life in Andrew Square.
Our desire was as much to gather stories as to interrupt familiar
places with a structure that defamiliarizes the space. However, as il-
lustrated above, the lack of gathering space made deploying the bubble
nearly impossible: we were ejected from a parking lot adjacent to one of
the intersection plazas by its owner; the bus terminal proved in-
accessible due to the bureaucracy involved in obtaining permission; a
third location was a private driveway that received little to no foot
traffic. Taking up space without formal affiliation proved political and
contestatory. Aesthetically, the inflatable cube performed a much
stronger visual presence than previous play zone instruments. Its heavy
wooden base and black plastic were imposing in a way that a clear
bubble or foam blocks had not been; it looked less inviting and more
mysterious.
To move the project forward, we continued story collection with
just a camera. The activity did not change, but its presentation did,
making collection less interruptive. This involved its own challenges as
potential participants hesitated to commit their story to video. Yet
through maintaining a regular presence in the area and building trust
about our intention, we managed to collect about 30 stories that to-
gether represent an intimate portrait of the many lives that inhabit the
area. Expanding our definition of a temporary play zone, we
K. Balug
transformed the stories into a multi-projection film. As we realized the
boundary that fractures this area, it became apparent that showing the
neighbors’ stories side by side was the first step – mutual recognition as
residents sharing the same geographic area was a prerequisite to col-
lective imagining. The bubble was thus transformed into a space that
blurs the private and public, the intimate and social. Its exterior became
a four-way projection screen that transformed its outdoor context into a
theater; its interior a space for dialogue for two. The film was screened
one summer evening on the inflatable at the beach – the one true public
arena in the area, which appears to be equally used by all residents.
Residents from Fields Corner were invited as well, as this is a beach
they likewise frequent, and the film included footage from the Fields
Corner play zone as well. The larger effort was to bring together two
neighborhoods that, in addition to being fragmented internally, rarely if
ever engage with one another.
The insight gained from working in both Fields Corner and Andrew
Square has been the realization that there is no unscripted everyday
public space in either community. Parks or beaches do exist, but these
are destinations rather than pass-through spaces where residents may
chance upon one another. The spaces that exist are primarily courtyards
that belong to particular developments, organizations or businesses that
share them with their clientele. Our play zones functioned to carve out
spaces for people to encounter one another outside the neat categories
that result from decades of neoliberal urban fragmentation. The aes-
thetics of the instruments deployed in the play zone symbolize this
departure. For example, the most successful components of the Fields
Corner play zone were the lemonade stand and the bubble, which were
the most visually striking. Many visitors missed the point of the other
moments because they were less aesthetically defined, even though the
intention and commitment behind them was deeply considered. The
Fields Corner parking lot became a site for different populations to use
because of its design and its creators – it was visibly for all. The
screening in Andrew Square placed the stories of residents who do not
recognize each other side by side. Both play zones suspended the usual
limits of social engagement by interrupting the script of a public space:
this cannot be overstated.
5. Toward visionary participation
Department of Play’s temporary play zones have led us to develop
aesthetic instruments that temporarily claim and rescript city space.
However, the space afforded by our instruments is as much physical as
it is social. The events’ aesthetics suggest a departure from the familiar,
the program inspires a critical reflection, while the visual presence of
collaborators or other participants creates a safe place from which to
risk leaving the usual script. At the moment, these are one-off experi-
ences, driven by a critique of participatory planning and a desire to
approach participation as an act of social imaginary. In order to par-
ticipate in public process requires one to recognize their belonging to a
society. These projects aim to create moments in which individual
members of the public can casually join in a collective activity, creating
a memory of shared endeavor. While one such memory is not enough to
create a lasting sense of society, the ritualization of such engagement
may over time produce more interest and faith in publicly negotiating
ideas. In the process, public space plays a key role – it must be both
available in some capacity, and is viable to be transformed by the so-
ciety emerging from it, to better foster its needs and desires. As scholars
of space have recognized since Lefebvre’s The Production of Space
(Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]), urban space is interdependent with the social
processes it both results from and engenders. When city spaces become
increasingly privately-owned or operated, both civic space and the
production of publics have less potential to develop. Community or-
ganizations claim to represent ‘the public,’ yet they are highly frag-
mented with regard to the people they represent, and not disposed to
fostering dissent. The lack of spaces for debate and civic protest in the
long term disempower residents, who are cut off from one another and
8
Geoforum xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
from a sense of ownership of parts of the city. In this moment, it is
crucial to imagine how public space can look and function in the 21st
century and subsequently, what kind of collective space and body can
emerge.
Planners, rather than convene organizationally-defined publics,
could more directly engage the self-recognized and shifting collectives
that arise from art practice. Emerging from the trajectory that saw them
transform from imposing modernist authorities to passive community
advocates, planners’ updated role as experts of systemic thinking would
allow them to negotiate the challenge of a new imaginary with realiz-
able propositions. While one may argue that this is the same as their
role today, the input material they received would be shaped not by the
limited options offered at today’s community meeting, but by an artistic
process of constructing a social imaginary. The outcome would likely be
more visionary, infusing the planning discussion with a creative, col-
laborative energy where participation is a regular part of performing
social life – and the imagination paradox is eradicated.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all those who contributed to this paper. Special
thanks to Neil Brenner for reading an early draft of the paper, and to
Diane Davis for the ongoing conversation about the topics discussed. I
deeply thank the residents of Andrew Square and Fields Corner in
Boston, and the organizations that Department of Play has collaborated
with in each of these. Thanks to Pattie McCormick, Carro Hua, Mike
Triant, and Zé Rodrigues-Osorio, and a huge thanks to Maria Vidart-
Delgado for her collaboration. Finally, thank you to ArtPlace America
for funding the projects described in these pages, Katherine Foo for
devising the panel Undisciplined Environments and then the special
issue, fellow panelists and authors Trevor Birkenholtz, Emanuel J.
Carter, James McCarthy, Nancy Peluso, Michael Rios, Dianne
Rocheleau, James Wescoat, Melissa Wright, and Jim Thatcher, and
editor Tom Perreault.
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding
agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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