Uncommon Uses of Public Space

By Todd Schoepflin

In my last blog, I discussed Laud Humphreys’ research about men having sex in park bathrooms. I think one reason his research is so interesting is because having sex in public bathrooms is an unusual use of public space. Let’s face it: seeing someone comb their hair or apply makeup in a public bathroom isn’t very compelling. For that matter, a lot of things that occur in public view aren’t interesting. Not surprisingly, abnormal uses of public space often catch people’s attention.

For example, this summer the local media where I live devoted a lot of attention to a story about a couple who had sex on a picnic table in a park in the afternoon. I’m sure none of us are naïve enough to think people don’t have sex in a park. But we don’t actually hear about it on a regular basis. I suppose if we did, it wouldn’t be news. In this case, there were definitely some intriguing angles in the story.

First of all, children reportedly saw the couple having sex. Second, the woman, who was married, was actually charged with adultery. The article points out that it was the first adultery charge in New York State since 2006 and only the twelfth in the state since 1972. It was the lead story in a six o’clock news broadcast. The newscaster reported that the woman said her husband is transgender and that they hadn’t had sex in a long time. Along with these dramatic elements, I think the story is so captivating because the couple violated basic norms about the use of public space. It’s uncommon for people to have sex in a park in the daylight hours.

Lately, I’ve become interested in a very different use of public space: graffiti. It’s graffiti on a particular set of playground equipment that has really captured my interest. The playground you see pictured looks like any other playground, a perfect place to play for children. I spend a lot of time at this playground with my two-year-old son. When you get close to the equipment you notice it’s covered with graffiti. Some of it is innocent, like “Jimmy + Renee,” kind of what you expect to see at a playground. Some of it is much more edgy than I would expect, like “Worship Satan; Sniff Glue.”

Every time we go there is something new written. Recently I saw that someone wrote “Fall in love, not in line,” an interesting philosophical statement promoting love and cautioning against conformity. The rest of the graffiti is too obscene to describe in detail. Let’s just say that whoever defaced the playground is familiar with male and female anatomy.

I’m not easily offended, but it’s disgusting to me to see raunchy graffiti all over playground equipment that is designed for children. As soon as someone removes the graffiti, there’s new work to replace it. Although I can’t be sure who’s responsible, I picture young teenagers doing this at the playground. There are several questions I’d like to ask if I happened to catch them in the act: Why do you do this? For fun? To amuse your friends? Boredom? As a means to express yourself? Have you thought of using Twitter instead?

Okay, I wouldn’t ask the last question, but if you think about it, Twitter and graffiti do have one thing in common: they are both means of expression. One reason I blog is so that I can express my thoughts and ideas. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs like this one are uses of virtual public space.

While taking a walk in my neighborhood, I was thinking about the places we usually see graffiti: boarded up buildings, subway trains, and overpasses. Looking out onto the street, I wondered what’s stopping someone from directly tagging the street. I’ve never seen graffiti on roads. Have you? Assuming that people want an audience for their graffiti, a road would be as good a place as any. I found one story about someone who is using paint to vandalize public space in Minneapolis. Known as the “paint bomber,” the person splashes paint on bus shelters and highways. According to the article, the Minneapolis police department has an employee dedicated full time to investigating graffiti.

By the way, if you want to read an in-depth analysis of graffiti, check out Graffiti Lives, a book written by sociologist Gregory J. Snyder. Focusing on graffiti artists in New York City, Snyder points out many reasons why people engage in graffiti, including a need for vandalistic thrills, an urge to communicate one’s worth, and the desire to become famous. One of the many things I learned while reading this book is that Nike, Puma, and Adidas have hired prominent graffiti artists to design limited-edition sneakers. In a sense, these corporations have profited from people who are characterized by police and politicians as menaces to society.

The artist Spencer Tunick offers another example of using public space in an uncommon way. He’s been able to get hundreds (sometimes thousands) of volunteers to congregate for photographs, even though you have to be naked for the event! As you can see on the website, he has organized events in Dublin, Mexico City, Barcelona, Montreal, New York, and dozens of other places. As explained on the website, the point of assembling nude masses of people is not to emphasize sexuality, but rather to challenge conventional views of nudity and privacy.

I’ll finish with one more example of using public space. Speaker’s Corner is a place in a London park where anyone can go to talk about anything. You can just show up and start talking. I learned about it while looking for things to do in anticipation of a trip to London a few years ago. During my trip I ended up going there, thinking I might actually start speaking about something, but as it turned out I just listened to a strange fellow ramble on incoherently for about twenty minutes. Nonetheless, the idea of a public forum taking place in a park is pretty cool. In theory, we could all take turns airing our opinions in the parks in our communities, but most of us never will, perhaps because it’s not something that other people do on a regular basis.

Sex in parks during daylight, obscene graffiti on playgrounds, photographing nude groups of people, and expressing one’s views to strangers at a park are only four examples of atypical uses of public space. Can you think of some other examples?

Comments

[Star]

What is also interesting to think about is the fact thaof those children in the park had never seen that couple having sex...someday those children would obviously be given the "sex talk"or possibly even finding out about sex from friends and/or by accident. However...no matter how they come to find it eventually experiment with either themselves or other people. Eventually thier seeming innocence about the world will come to meet them in the future. My question is why hold back in the first place why lie and fabricate what sex is into a frilly, happy, and nursury appropriate story that may acctually promote sex in the first place?
Graffiti on the other hand, by some is seen as vandalizim...but history proves that it is nothing new. Since prehistoric times the world has become a giant yearbook for all walks of life. This Graffiti does not disprupt the play or the activities of what the rest of the public have come there to do. But...one also must consider what the chemicals and substances used in graffiti in the present day has progressed to. Now, the threats to the enviornment has elevated and as humans we must understand that the chemicals in graffiti are an issue.
Yet...Graffiti itself is a statement of being.

Another atypical uses of public space is the concern of televison. An open box avaible with unlimited restriction of how the government can control the public. Parents who cannot handel rambunctious children will sit them down in front of a children's show and they will be drawn into it like a hypnotist and a trance teaching them ideas of who they should be and how they can be accepted into the rest of society.
Sex is the headlining act on TV's red-carpet. Sex is the soul reason for survival in the human realm. yet sex is also the most avoided subjuct in public.
What do we hav to be afraid of? Why is sex so intimidating to most? has the fear of survival scared so many as to cause scilence to its name in the middle of a conversation? And is fo...why is it that TV can show it but the viewers can never discuss it?

[MRWED]

Being nude or showing intimate movements in the park is real bad. There are minors everywhere that can be polluted with such unhealthful things. Such acts should be done in private.

[Rebecca]

I like your suggestion that graffiti artists should turn to networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to express themselves without damaging young children's local parks. However i think graffiti artists thrive on the ideas of deviance and anonymity. Unfortunately graffiti has been around for a long time, and I seriously doubt that it will go anywhere.

[Joel]

I enjoyed this blog because it reminded me about how I viewed the things I viewed on a daily basis when I was a child. On every playground I climbed, public pool I swam, mall I shopped, or restaurant I ate, there was always something my parents didn’t want me to see. Public places are filled with complete strangers, and the actions of one person can have an effect on all the people around them.
I remember having to leave the public pool early because of a couple in the Jacuzzi displaying inappropriate means of affection. My mother would never let me be exposed to these situations as a child, because she didn’t want me to think they were acceptable for me to do when I was older. These actions were engraved in my mind as inappropriate and now when I am at the pool, I make sure that my actions are appropriate for everyone who is present. What my mom was always worried about was the ordinary life that I viewed and internalized without her influence. For example, almost every day of my childhood, I would go to the park to play in the playgrounds and I would notice graffiti everywhere. Some displayed messages of affection, some evoked moral contemplations, but mostly the graffiti was outright grotesque and offensive. The risqué messages were the ones that usually caught my eye and had an irreversible effect on me, because they triggered my curiosity at a young age. If my mother was present, she would have been able to deter me from investigation, but in her absence, so was her influence.
This brings up the debate of nature versus nurture, because it illustrates the battle between parental influence and the influences of personal experience. Luckily, for my mother, I didn’t allow these messages to affect me too greatly in my childhood, and they did play an important role in my life. I never act inappropriately around children in a public place, because I remember how those couples at the pool and those messages on the playground affected me. I never want to be responsible for exposing children to negative situations or poor family values.