Containing fiction and visual art in addition to more conventional essays, this book is a lively discussion of the role that public spaces play
or could play
in modern cities.
Research Book News, February 2010, 201002 The collection soon departs from its foundation in urbanism and takes a provokative, interdisciplinary turn, offering work by a rich assortment of voices, ... Read moreincluding a political theorist on subversive public spaces conducive to play and social deliberation as work, by a philosopher on how the city is public by definition, a novelist on characters struggling with a city's overlapping physical and social conventions, a new-media artist on the transformative effect of street festivals, and an art historian on the resurgence of outdoor art. Lisa Robertson's blending of poetry, urban geography, social history, and the arts in her excerpt, `Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture,' provides a fitting conclusion to a collection that will prove of interest to anyone concerned with what she calls the `spiritual domain'
as much the land stretching out from our persons, as our immediate surroundings that contain the mutable threshold between within and without (170). It is up to us to rap on the glass.
Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 17:4, Autumn 2010, 201102 To most familiar issues of public space and its fate, this collection brings insights that should be fatal to naive assumptions.
Jon Spayde
Public Art Review, Spring/Summer 2010, 201007 Show Less