THE PUBLIC REALM LAB
The Public Realm Lab is a research, design and scholarly environment dedicated to studying and prototyping spaces, practices, relations, institutions and infrastructures of the public world.
We work at intersections of urbanism, architecture, urban ecologies, urban policy, designing as social practice, and design research, investigating how public realms are conceived, co-produced, inhabited, cared for, and also transformed through collective action. We take as our premise that the public realm is neither a given, nor a neutral urban terrain; we believe that the public realm and public spaces ought to be understood as public goods. We thus explore the twin processes of the provision of public goods on the one hand, and their continuous appropriation and commoning on the other. Seen this way, the public realm and public spaces are environments embedded in the complexities, contradictions, and struggles over the allocation, distribution and appropriation of public goods and resources. What interests us are the ways in which the public realm can be configured to enable processes of commoning without exclusion, however not by resorting to consensus-building. We ask, what kind of roles architecture and designing could play in this context as material, social and political practices deeply committed to social, spatial and environmental justice.
We explore how the public realm can be (re)made through collective imagination and courage, cooperation, solidarity, co-designing, maintenance and care. We believe that when properly configured, the public realm ought to enable urban citizens and communities to co-produce new imaginaries, new solidarities, new practices of care, new bodies of knowledge, and novel ways of being and acting together.
Our research is both international and comparative, grounded in empirical urban sites, such as Corona Plaza and Rockaways, both in Queens –where social, political, economic, cultural and environmental forces uneasily converge– and extends to comparative global sites such as Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Venice, Brussels or Shenzhen.
PRL AT WORK
RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
We conduct design-based research in the public realm to understand the intertwined ecologies of territory, movement, visibility, economy, care, exposure, and encounter. We also analyze the morphological and infrastructural dimensions of urban transformation and produce critical frameworks that bridge theory and practice as well ways of knowing both in and out of the academia.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
We host public dialogues and curate encounters between scholars, activists, urban practitioners, urban citizens, policymakers and government officials, and students, and attempt to create an applied space of learning, experience and appearance.
LEARNING
We are committed to producing new urban knowledge by engaging our researchers, scholars and students with external partners through design-driven research and projects developed in collaboration with community-based organizations, the nonprofit sector and civil society organizations, as well as economic development organizations and government agencies. We run studios, workshops, and seminars on the public realm, urban ecologies, and designing as a civic practice, in the context of architecture and urbanism.
PUBLICATIONS, FILMS & MEDIA
We produce books and films that document and theorize the contemporary public realm and public space in complex geographies across the world. We are committed to exploring the role design of the material urbanity plays in establishing justice and equity as fundamental principles for the configuration of the public world.
DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING
We use designing as a method of inquiry in developing spatial and social prototypes which reimagine how the public realm ought to be conceptualized, co-produced and sustained. We collaborate with academic and cultural institutions around the world.
Funding for the PRL’s work has been provided by grants from Parsons School of Design, Provost’s Office at The New School University, and Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School.