Firstly, I think we need to define what the public realm actually is. The public realm is defined as any publicly owned streets, pathways, right of ways, parks, publicly accessible open spaces and any public and civic building and facilities. Living in Cheshire in a well-developed country, we might often take public space for granted. However, in many other countries, and certain places in the UK, the public realm can be a forgotten piece of city planning.

The private realm is the opposite to the public realm. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other institutions. I think this video gives an insight to what the private realm really means for our modern society.

This person has trespassed into the under-construction, 34-storey Lexicon skyscraper near the Silicon Roundabout in London. After a good night’s sleep, the interloper unzips the front flap of the shelter and steps into the early-morning air. The city unfolds before him in a stunning vista, suggesting the view that future occupants of the skyscraper will enjoy – or, more likely in London, the view that international investors will use as a selling point when they put the flat back on the market after a few years of not living in it.

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. The problem with privately owned public spaces is that the rights of the citizens using them are severely hemmed in. Although this issue might be academic while we’re eating our lunch on a private park bench, the consequences of multiplying and expanding privately owned public spaces affects everything from our personal psyche to our ability to protest.

Corporate ownership often prescribes how our public spaces are used. Occupy activist Naomi Colvin noted that POPS are the part of ‘a vision of society in which you work and shop. At times when you are not working or shopping, you may go to restaurants…but there is no scope for people to do something of their own – to do something spontaneous’. A corporate model of public space will obviously encourage consumerism and high footfall, rather than spaces of community and sustainability. Squares and thoroughfares that keep you on your feet and encourage you into shops for entertainment and comfort are obviously perfect outside environments for corporations whose ideal citizen is an isolated consumer.

Tate Modern is a perfect example of high quality public space. It is Britain’s national gallery of international modern art and forms part of the Tate group. Based in the former Bankside Power Station, Tate modern holds the national collection of British art from 1900 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art. Tate Modern is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world. It is the 6th most visited art gallery in the world. As with the UK’s other national galleries and museums, there is no admission charge for access to the collection displays, while tickets must be purchased for the major temporary exhibitions.

In 2001, when a developer first proposed building a tower on Tate Modern’s doorstep, Serota, the director of Tate, slammed the plan, calling it “an opportunistic attempt to cash in, for private gain, on the public benefits that have been created” by the gallery. Now we find ourselves in 2016, with the new neo bankside apartments just completed. At a minimum these cost upwards of £2 million each, with pent houses going for close to £6 million each. Tate modern and the south bank are a cultural hub of London. Public spaces where people of any kind can learn and explore without constraint. Private apartment towers are diminishing the ability of the south bank to serve as a freely open public space.

I think Oliver Wainwright of the guardian puts it best, he says “in a moment of exquisite justice, you can peer straight into the living rooms of Neo Bankside from the top of the Switch House – and observe the bleak still lives of mail-order luxury, as sterile as a stack of Damien Hirst’s tanks. Having accidentally spawned this exclusive enclave, it’s as if the Tate has now co-opted it as a site-specific installation.”

As I said, this is not just happening in England. Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon and also one of the oldest cities in the world, having been inhabited more than 5,000 years ago. Following the devastation incurred by the city center from the Lebanese Civil War, the Beirut central district underwent a thorough reconstruction and development plan. The master plan, Solidere, was founded by Lebanon’s second postwar prime minister, the late billionaire Rafik Hairiri, who returned to the country in 1992 after amassing a fortune in the construction business in Saudi Arabia. Hairiri established his firm as the lead developer in the national reconstruction. In early 2014, Solidere was Lebanon’s largest company by far, the firm’s real estate and financial assets were close to $10billion, which was nearly one-quarter of the entire country’s GDP. While the masterplan promised a “vibrant, 24-hour active downtown” that would help “reconnect the city,” including through “landscaped public space” and other “outdoor escapes that forge … a special relationship with the growing community of residents, workers and visitors.” Belén Fernández, of Aljazeera says the BCD has not delivered. He says It is nothing more than a militarized playground for domestic and international elites, characterized by astronomical rents, multimillion-dollar apartments, high-end shops and fancy eateries. It’s an aseptic bubble meant to shield rich folks and their investments from the chaos outside. The ultimate effect of the forcible enclosure of public space is to make public cohesiveness impossible, preventing challenges to the current regime.

This is also happening elsewhere in the Arab world, Municipal officials point to the plethora of private malls as safe, clean spaces where families can mix and consume. But the environment there is as regulated as the air-conditioning. Security guards in Riyadh prevent the entry of single men, and stand ready to evict anyone who might even consider causing a disturbance. “Urban values of civil participation are almost absent in the Arab urban context,” sighs Rami Nasrullah, a Palestinian city planner who researches Arab urban growth.

Some Arabs hope things will change. Over the past year, tens of thousands of people have repeatedly filled Baghdad’s Freedom Square, next to the Green Zone, the vast enclave where the government rules. The Aga Khan has turned a Cairo rubbish dump into the city’s largest park (though you need a ticket to enter). In an attempt to greenify a square in Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated areas, for its rallies, the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, dragged tons of turf through its tunnels under the border with Egypt. Environmentalists in Lebanon have, at least, stopped the construction of a highway through Ashrafiya in Beirut. But when last summer they began to mass in the city’s Martyrs’ Square to protest at a pile-up of rubbish, riot police quickly dispersed them. For now, the Arabs’ best open place is cyberspace.

Canary Wharf is a major development, with more workers working there than in the former financial center of the UK, the city of London. It is wholly privately owned. Bishop’s square is a large commercial property currently owned by JP Morgan. St Giles consists of two buildings of 15 stories’ in height arranged around a public courtyard lined with shops and restaurants.

More London is a major development of the Southbank; private ownership includes City Hall. It was sold off in 2013 to Kuwaiti property company St Martins for £1.7bn. The King’s Cross development is turning Granary square, one of the largest public squares in Europe into a privately owned public space.

I am not saying we should not develop our cities. Development is essential for the growth of our cities. I however object to the increasing concentration of new public spaces that are privately owned.

If we want to keep our public spaces public, and open to everyone, we must act now in order to save them. Bradley Garrett of the guardian explains, the moment for direct action against the loss of public space is upon us – an action that would echo the mass trespass of Kinder Scout by the Rambler’s Association in 1932, described by Lord Roy Hattersley as the most successful direct action in British history.

Another solution is to map out public space in our cities. Oliver Dawkins of UCL has created a privately owned public spaces profiler, which is available on open street maps. But this map is largely incomplete. However, in New York, POPS uses crowd sourced information to map privately owned public spaces in New York City. Mapping POPS makes us more aware of the extent to which our cities are no longer ours. And maybe might inspire people to do something about it.

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