on contemplative public space
Symposium on Public Space: Part IV
[We’re so pleased to share this guest essay for our ongoing Symposium on Public Space – see Part I, Part II, and Part III here – by longtime reader and supporter Geoffrey Kurtz. Geoff teaches political science and urban studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY) and is currently studying the circle of intellectuals who founded or were early contributors to Dissent magazine. His recent essays and book reviews have appeared in Current, Front Porch Republic, Perspectives on Political Science, and Public Seminar. In the coming weeks, subscribers will receive another guest essay and a Venetian edition of Tara’s “Points of Beauty” series —T. & Dh.]
Public spaces have different configurations, which reconfigure us—our perceptions, our relations, our states of mind—in corresponding ways. When I ride the subway, I am in a space which I cannot leave except at designated moments, where I have little control over my proximity to others, and which I expect to exit as soon as I’ve gotten to where I want to go. While there, I try to narrow the field of my senses, and tend to be short-tempered when my senses are engaged in a way I didn’t intend. But when I go to a park—say, a park like Washington Square, one variegated enough for a number of different activities to take place yet small enough that I notice most of what goes on—I am apt to drink things in without making a sharp distinction between what I came there for and what I found there.
In its Fall 1986 issue, the socialist magazine Dissent published a small symposium on urban public space. Among the contributions was Michael Walzer’s “Pleasures & Costs of Urbanity”, which remains an elegant and lucid guide to observing and reflecting on these sorts of differences among the spaces we share. In it, Walzer proposes that we “distinguish between two kinds of public space”:
The first is single-minded space, designed by planners or entrepreneurs who have only one thing in mind, and used by similarly single-minded citizens. Entering space of this sort we are characteristically in a hurry. The second is open-minded space, designed for a variety of uses, including unforeseen and unforeseeable uses, and used by citizens who do different things and are prepared to tolerate, even take an interest in, things they don’t do. When we enter this sort of space, we are characteristically prepared to loiter.
Although he comments on intentions and uses, Walzer is concerned mostly with “mindedness:” “It’s not only that space serves certain purposes known in advance by its users, but also that its design and character stimulate (or repress) certain qualities of attention, interest, forbearance, and receptivity.” A single-minded space, like a subway car, will erode my capacity for tolerantly noticing, let alone appreciating, what others around me are doing, but those capacities of character will tend to be cultivated by an open-minded space like Washington Square Park.
I want to complicate Walzer’s map of public space by adding a third type, one whose features cut across Walzer’s categories. Like open-minded space, it encourages lingering. Like single-minded space, it is amenable only to a few uses. Like both, it tends to foster in its users a particular state of mind. I suggest that we call it contemplative public space.
Contemplative public space is, as Walzer says of public space in general, “space we share with strangers.” But it buffers its users from the wider public. Unlike public spaces that encourage the relationship to sensory experience that we have come to call “consumption,” contemplative space offers a small number or a small range of elements that draw attention. A space is probably contemplative if, on entering, you find yourself neither in a rush to leave nor shifting your attention across a variety of sights and sounds.
The effect of contemplative space is to allow for, even to encourage, inner stillness. Elaborating Walzer’s taxonomy, we might think of it as quiet-minded space. The attention and interest it stimulates, and the forbearance and receptivity it requires its users to develop, have to do mostly with users’ inward experiences. If I feel hurried or harried while in a contemplative space, it is because the unsuitability of the space for varied activities or the unavailability of varied objects of attention has brought me to an acute, perhaps uncomfortable, awareness of the inner busyness, the appetite for distraction, that I have brought with me. An increased awareness of that appetite is itself an instructive experience.
The epitome of a contemplative public space, it seems to me, is a house of worship that is open to the public when services are not taking place. Consider a church with doors unlocked on weekdays. Pews face forward: it is not a space conducive to conversation. There is an altar, perhaps with stained glass or a painting or a crucifix behind it, perhaps with statues or icons flanking it, toward which you face as you sit: the shape of the space guides the focus of your gaze. There may be other people there, praying or simply sitting. But walls, and the fact that walking in requires you to go somewhere that isn’t on the way to anywhere, hold the city out.
My Brooklyn neighborhood has no churches that are routinely open during the week, but it contains other public spaces that seem to me to be contemplative. They might serve as helpful examples.
Along the southwest edge of Prospect Park, a footpath curves among trees. Along it, close to but somewhat shielded from crowded areas, four benches have been set, each a few bench-lengths from the next. It is a pleasant spot, but it would not be convenient for a picnic or a music performance or a game of catch, and there isn’t much of a view. There is little reason to sit there except to sit there.
A half-mile to the west stands a memorial to “the men of this district who served their country in the world war.” It consists of a rectangular marble monolith fronted with a bronze relief of a weeping Liberty and a plaque with the surnames of the remembered. The monolith has its back to a tall fence bordering a playground and its face toward a sidewalk alongside a one-way street. To the left and right of the monolith, at right angles to its face, up three steps from the sidewalk, sit granite benches. Families sometimes linger there briefly, eating cones from the ice-cream shop a half-block away; cars pass a few yards in front of the monument; children shout and scramble a few yards behind. Yet while you sit on one of the monument’s benches, despite being surrounded by spaces designed for movement you are in a space which itself is conducive to no purpose other than sitting, and which offers no focus for your attention other than the memorial itself.
Another four blocks to the west lies Green-Wood Cemetery, a contemplative public space of a different sort: criss-crossed by roads and footpaths, it is designed for movement. But both the rules of the cemetery and its shape—gravestones, steep hills, winding paths—preclude the picnicking and sports, the noise and bustle and variety, facilitated by the rules and shape of, say, Prospect Park. The cemetery is a space suited to sedate movement and a slow transfer of attention from one object to another, not dissimilar, object.
It might help to distinguish contemplative public spaces from spaces that may seem to be, but are not, like them. Large art museums, for example, are not contemplative. Designed to attract crowds and move them along, they contain many things to see—and, often, many people seeing them. If visitors to such museums experience moments of contemplativeness, those moments are accidental and likely to be fleeting; they happen despite the design of the space and are interruptions of its character.
Libraries may be quiet but are not quiet-minded. In a library, the texts and screens on offer allow me to choose the objects on which I focus my attention, and so while there I am likely to remain mentally busy. In a contemplative space, however, I am offered few objects for my attention, or objects of modest variety, and this lack of choice will tend to calm the bustle of my mind.
The pools at the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan are a failed contemplative space, or perhaps an insincere imitation of contemplative space. They are so open, so loosely bounded, that they tend to fill with crowds; the pools are so large, and are surrounded by so many other points of interest—trees marshalled in ranks, plaques covered with informative text, buildings which invite the public to enter—that a visitor’s attention is likely to become scattered. People tend to pass through quickly, on their way to someplace else, and this seems to be as much a consequence of the space itself as of the hunger for consumption that visitors, especially tourists, are apt to bring with them. A public space cannot at the same time facilitate a high volume of visitation and encourage each visitor to slow down. The priority chosen by the pools’ planners is evident (and may have been inevitable).
Walzer stipulates that we should not “equate open-minded/single-minded with good/bad.” Yet he is unmistakably protective of open-mindedness: “Open-minded space has in the past been a breeding ground for mutual respect, political solidarity, civil discourse, and it makes sense to suggest that without it all these will be put at risk.” Similarly, I would like to suggest that contemplative public space also contributes something valuable to our lives together.
Political theorists often think of public life—public speech, public action—as the root of what people have in common. (Public space, Walzer remarks, is first and foremost “space for politics.”) The significance of contemplative public space, it seems to me, is that it reminds us that what we have in common includes things that reach beyond public life. Experiences of contemplation, of inward quiet, are difficult to put into words: words and quiet don’t mix. Yet being able to speak at length about such experiences is not a prerequisite for deciding to trust them.
If we trust our experiences of contemplation, we may notice that these experiences are not, in the end, unique individual feelings. There is something common—indeed, universal—at work in them. The silence I meet when my mind is quieted is the same silence other quiet minds meet.
When my mind is busy, it is because I am caught up my own sensations, interests, tasks, and worries. When my mind is quiet—or, more honestly, to the extent that my mind is sometimes somewhat quieter—the displacement of my own affairs is not merely an absence. It functions instead as an unveiling, partial but palpable, of the reality of something independent of and more fundamental than anything particular to me.
Private space, of course, can be space for contemplation, too: “Go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.” But spaces that are both contemplative and public offer something peculiarly important: in them, I have occasion to notice that I and others have sought, and may be finding, the silence that we have in common.
Contemplative public space is a public good because the common silence into which it invites us is the point at which we are most evidently one another’s equals. It’s not that contemplative public space produces egalitarianism in the same predictable way that subway cars produce grouchiness. Contemplation, public or private, doesn’t produce anything. It allows; it invites; it waits. I don’t intend to argue that egalitarian politics necessarily arises from, or cannot arise without, contemplative public spaces. Yet I cannot imagine a more appropriate setting for democratic life—a setting in which people who value equality with one another are better able to know what they are up to—than one where the sorts of experiences that contemplative public space allows are part of daily life.
We might think of contemplative public space as space that invites us to wait together for a fuller recognition of how alike we are in the face of silence, and thus for a fuller appreciation of who we are together. As a polity, we need not share an understanding of what we will find—or Who will find us—when we step out of busyness into inner quiet. But if (the “if” matters) we aspire to be a political community constituted by our equality, then we owe it to one another to leave the door open.
 | A guest post by
|
Great essay! It reminds me of Immanuel Kant’s assertion that contemplation is integral to the experience of beauty. If one accepts that, then it makes sense that contemplative spaces feel more meaningful than single-minded ones. In fact, I would argue that any purpose-built space can be elevated to that contemplative plane through beauty—that that is the purpose of beauty in architecture and urban design. When ordinary buildings are made beautiful, the streets we all share become places where contemplation is possible.