Mending Privately Owned Public Spaces: Works on Taste and Spatial Practice

This book is motivated by a simple observation: Privately Owned Public Spaces, or POPS, are overlooked sites when it comes to exploring the subject of taste in architecture and urban design. The book unpacks the intricate world that unfolds from this thought, while arguing that taste is a missing key in current spatial practice discourse.Successful POPS are often presented as desirable additions to urban redevelopment projects in cities across the world. This perception often overshadows, and sometimes dismisses, some of the more damaging impacts that the establishment of POPS has on the social tissue of specific localities and social groups, and more generally on the socio-political dynamics of cities. Within the fields of architecture and urban design, high regard for specific urban regeneration projects with POPS at their heart tends to ignore their inherently divisive social impact. This, in turn, strengthens an often-legitimised belief that analysing, questioning and re-aligning such impact falls outside the realm of these professions. This book explores how successful POPS are sustained through, amongst other maintenance practices, carefully managed aesthetic codes, largely dependent on showcasing the aesthetic value of highly controlled programs of use. This specific practice turns POPS into revealing sites when it comes to exploring taste in the context of spatial practice. Why don’t we talk about taste in socially engaged practice today? Does a focus on aesthetics pose an ethical dilemma between superficiality and depth for practitioners in the face of persistent social inequity?

Adriana Cobo Corey is an architect and academic with a doctorate in spatial practice. Her research interests cut across performance, taste and class in architecture, urban design and education. She is a subject leader on ethical practice for BA Architecture at Central Saint Martin’s, University of the Arts London.