Aesthetic Inclusion: State-Sponsored Public Art and Urban Inequality in Park Design

Cal Garrett, Wake Forest University

In 2016, the public-private Roots and Routes initiative in Chicago unveiled a new recreational trail along the city’s lakefront that included a series of artist-designed “gathering spaces” intended to connect residents of adjacent neighborhoods to this new green space. The Caracol, for example, is a gathering space adjacent to Pilsen, a working-class Latine neighborhood with a strong immigrant community, that overseen by a local nonprofit partner. Notably, the Caracol features a spiraled “snail shell” seating feature that symbolizes immigrant experiences. Through public art projects like the Caracol, planners attempt to welcome and reflect communities, especially poor and working-class communities of color, in park spaces. Professional artists, commissioned by the state and local partners, engage communities through some kind of participatory or representational art project. Historically, however, public art has tended to reflect a dichotomy between the sanitized, propagandistic functions of public art sponsored by elites or the state and ‘street art’ that is an unsanctioned strategy for resistance or placemaking in neighborhoods. In this case, state-sponsored art projects like the Caracol appear to be working to emulate the critical affective work of unsanctioned, neighborhood art to imbue green space projects with a community-centered aesthetic. Why? Drawing on qualitative analysis of field observations, archival documents, and interviews with artists and planners, I suggest that public art offers several strategic advantages for programming or engagement because it allows communities that are otherwise marginalized and excluded from park and green space planning to be included and represented without altering administrative planning procedures and standards. Specifically, building on theories of urban austerity and racial geographies, I argue that planners have begun to mobilize art projects to address entrenched urban inequalities aesthetically, leveraging relatively small material investments in parks as a policy solution.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 218. Race and Space