An Essay to Accompany the Sand Palace Project

In our highly legislated and enforced system of spatial definitions, spaces are either ‘public’ or ‘private.’ They are controlled by one or another entity—the city, the individual homeowner, the commercial real estate holding company, and so on. They are defined for one or another purpose—recreation, transportation, habitation, retail commerce, et cetera. In this system of mutually exclusive definitions, it is to the leftover space, the unmaintained and unsupervised space where no entity admits responsibility, that we need to look for a different understanding of ‘communal.’ The leftover space is the intersection, the transition, between all these enforced definitions.

The transitional space is communal because it is not controlled by any individual or group. With no hierarchy of authority, it is accessible to any who choose to use it. The leftover space often attracts those who are shut out of other more controlled spaces—the ones who traffic in censored activities, sex and drugs; the homeless in their separate sphere of survival activities; the youth who define their own system of status and authority, sometimes violently enforced. The transitional space can also serve as an invitation to some to cultivate and care for it, to create a shared space that is defined not by ownership but by effort and involvement.

The designer can shape the use of transitional spaces up to a point by understanding what kinds of configurations support what activities—what lighting, structures, obstructed or unobstructed views, dense or open canopies, will attract particular users? The designer assumes the role of a civic authority in choosing which activities to support—though it’s a provisional authority at best, as users eternally reinvent and redefine the designer’s vision. The transitional space—and what space, in the end, is not transitional?—is a continual collaboration of varying intentions. The designer needs to be in continual transition too, to understand the processes bearing on the space and the weight of favoring one group of users, one system of value, over another.

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