Harvard Design Magazine relaunched with March 2021’s Harvard Design Magazine 48: America, an issue that interrogated the essence and the history of the United States. This December, the publication returns with Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics, another timely inquiry that questions how public spaces operate in a fragmented social and political environment, both in the US and abroad.
The issue is guest-edited by two leading voices in the design of landscapes and cities: Anita Berrizbeitia and Diane E. Davis. They have convened a broad range of contributors from architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, law, and the social sciences and humanities to examine the fate of “the public” in a world where xenophobic thinking and challenges to communal responsibility are becoming ever more dominant, and in which individualism poses a corrosive challenge to collectivity and unity.
Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics integrates theoretical and spatial debates over the topic of public space and design, using the world’s tense contemporary moment and contested near-future to question who holds the power to define what is public; what roles class, ethnicity, and other identity matrices play in the concept of the public; and how the core idea of a public may survive—or atrophy—given looming environmental crises and deepening political and economic divisions. Ultimately, the issue asks how a public is constructed and shaped through design and cultural production.
Collaborating with Editorial Director Julie Cirelli and Publications Manager Meghan Ryan Sandberg, Berrizbeitia and Davis invited design critics and practitioners from within the Harvard Graduate School of Design and beyond. The magazine’s introductory essays and conversations include contributions from Walter Hood, Sara Zewde, Elijah Anderson, Bonnie Honig, and architectural collective Assemble.
The heart of Harvard Design Magazine 49 applies the immersive editorial structure and spatial rhythm established by its predecessor; dialogue is organized by scale and concludes with a conversational call-and-response. Readers encounter Sites, in which Toni L. Griffin muses on “South Side Land Narratives: The Lost Histories and Hidden Joys of Black Chicago,” among other contributions. Spaces analyzes how cities, sites and buildings constitute public space on a conceptual and cultural level, including an interview between Sala Elise Patterson and Frida Escobedo, and essays by A. K. Sandoval-Strausz and Ali Madanipour. Scales investigates how spaces and sites engage with shared cultural concerns, including environmental justice, public health, and Indigenous land rights; the section includes a roundtable on First Nations and land reclamation, featuring Daniel D’Oca with Khelsilem, Gil Kelley, Toby Baker, and Andrea Reimer, and a dialogue with Dr. Abraar Karan about the crisis of American public health. A final Subjects section surveys public space and design by asking a simple question: for whom is public space created? Contributions include Thaïsa Way, Emmanuel and Jia Lok Pratt, Malkit Shoshan, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Harvard Design Magazine 49 concludes with a Call & Response section, in which contributors including Christopher Hawthorne, Lizabeth Cohen, and others respond to a provocative prompt: “What is the most important public space worth preserving now?” Answers range from city sidewalks to Boston’s Franklin Park, to the Mississippi River Gathering Grounds, to your own backyard.
The editorial structure Cirelli introduced with Harvard Design Magazine 48 provides an avenue through which design observers and others can explore complicated issues and themes. Noting the value of appointing a landscape architect and an urban planner/sociologist as guest editors, Cirelli observes that the guest-editor model presents an opportunity to infuse fresh and diverse direction in each issue.
“By exploring what constitutes a public, Anita and Diane have struck at one of the fundamental questions of our moment: What are our rights, as human bodies on this earth? What belongs to us? What should belong to us, but doesn’t?” says Cirelli. “The scholars and practitioners we’ve invited to explore notions of the public have demonstrated how health, education, housing, access to food and clean water, and the right to advocate for oneself and one’s community all have a common thread. And as we pull that thread, the mechanisms of power and privilege are revealed.”
