Public art as a function of urbanism

Abstract

The collection examines the continual evolution of public art, moving beyond monuments and memorials to examine more fully the development of socially-engaged public art practice. Topics include constructing new models for developing and commissioning temporary and performance-based public artworks; understanding the challenges of a socially-engaged public art practice vs. social programming and policymaking; the social inclusiveness of public art; the radical developments in public art and social practice pedagogy; and unravelling the relationships between public artists and the communities they serve.

Full text

Public Art as a Function of Urbanism
John Bingham-Hall
Public art needs to be seen as a function not of art, but of urbanism. It needs to
be thought of in relation to, rather than insulated from the numerous other
functions, activities and imperatives that condition the fabric of city life
(Deutsche, 1996, p. 64).
Introduction
Art, unlike architecture, has no interior as an urban element. It works as an image, so
is not interpreted as a spatial object and has therefore been largely absent from the
discourse of urban morphology (the study of the shape and layout of urban form).
Many writers have brought the city into valuable discussions of art in the urban
public. Sara Selwood, Malcolm Miles and Lucy Lippard amongst others describe how
cities are gendered, politicized and commodified and how art negotiates these values.
The city, in this reading, is a sociological entity consisting purely of patterns of social
relations. This is not at all wrong, but it is incomplete. What is missing is space –
concrete, real, three-dimensional space. So while Dolores Hayden asserted that “no
public art can succeed in enhancing the social meaning of place without a solid base
of historical research and community support” (Hayden 1997, p. 75) this chapter is an
attempt to argue for the addition to these criteria of an understanding of the
measurable shapes and syntaxes of urban spaces designated for new public art.
Drawing from space syntax, a theory of urban morphology and social form (Hillier
and Hanson 1984), the chapter describes measurable attributes of urban space that can
be impactful for the way art objects are encountered and experienced, and therefore
what kinds of cultural effect they can have. With case studies drawn from an original
study applying the methodological techniques of space syntax to public artworks in
the London Borough of Lewisham it will be argued that there are surprisingly regular
ways in which the ideologies that produce different types of city layout also shape the
ways art objects use space.
Before making this argument, a few terms should be clarified. We talk often of what
art can do to public spaces: invoking memory, creating a site to negotiate conflicting
practices, stimulating social encounters between its audiences in shared moments of
spectatorship. The argument here, however, is that we know little about what public
space does back to art. This depends of course upon which definition of public is
being invoked. Public can mean being “on stage” (Goffman 1966), being visible in a
crowd of strangers (Lofland 1985), negotiating their many conflicting ways of
occupying that stage, and playing a supporting role in the performance of public
civility (Sennett 1993). In this regard, what public does to art is constrain, asking it to
serve the cause of civility as a background prop, not to disrupt the performance with
demands on attention or unsanctioned incursions on space. This constraining is well
explored and constantly challenged, from modes of production that aim to refine this
performance by working within constraints, as part of place-making, and seeking to
disrupt it by consciously breaking these constraints, to amplify political messages, for

example. “Public” is also a set of communication practices that take place through
mediated, national and international media to give rise to what we perceive as public
opinion. In this regard, what public does to art is to make it answerable to demands of
taste and involvement in the democratic processes of city building, of which public art
commissioning forms a part. But public is also something else. It is a spatial and legal
reality formed of the exterior spaces within settlements to which everyone is allowed
access for the purposes of mobility and social gathering (notwithstanding the current
issues arising around its privatization through by-laws). In this form, publicness can
be measured as an assemblage of solid and virtual boundaries between jurisdictions
and varying surfaces in the urban exterior, with geometric relationships to one another
in a network of routes and spaces. It is this form of public that is under question here:
in what way do these measurable spatial conditions impact the way art is applied into
the public and experienced through it?
Public Space as Gallery
The city cannot act as a replacement for the gallery, creating passive environments for
the display of art with minimal signal interference. Art in public will always negotiate
with other demands on urban space: for movement, commerce and inhabitation. If,
therefore, we are to use the city to create ways to view art we must surely learn to
better describe the spatial specificities of urban places and the hierarchy of functions
supported through spatial structure.
As such, the history of art objects in public space can be told not simply through style
and content but also through measurable changes in their spatial conditions. These
conditions in cities are not just representational of social practices but in fact form and
perpetuate these practices through the structuring of patterns of movement and
encounter and separation in the city. For example, a residential back street does not
only become so simply because it happens to be populated mainly by homes, but
inversely it is populated mainly by homes because its relationship to other streets in
the city means it is not viable as a through-route for traffic at city-wide scales. Its
limited spatial connections means that it becomes a setting for the quotidian comings
and goings of residents and therefore whilst legally public it is parochial, constrained
in its potential as a gallery by the very immediate concerns of a clearly defined set of
users. So the spatial conditions of the residential back street mean that artworks
encountered there will be so in the context of instrumental, daily activity (as opposed
to occasional ceremonial events, for example) and within a social setting that is in a
sense only semi-public. As a result of this position within the hierarchy of spaces, the
street is also likely to be shorter and narrower, with every inch utilized to support the
needs of travel and inhabitation of its residents, leaving no “value-free” ground (Miles
1997, p. 56) to act as a plinth for abstract art objects. Artwork here must instead make
use of vertical surfaces such as walls, which lend themselves to forms of unfolding
narrative that are encountered through movement along a street rather than in the
fixed, head-on views that would be possible in larger spaces like town squares. This is
just one example of the constellation of effects that could be traced between an
artwork, its spatial settings and the social practices afforded by that space, showing
how demands over space - formed in part by its geometric attributes - assign value
across its surfaces and structure views and encounters.

With this in mind a brief overview of the development of public art can be retold with
these spatial concerns in mind. From the nineteenth century art began to be
disseminated to a wide public through the establishment of municipal galleries and art
schools, but also the filling of public space with sculptures of political and colonial
figures. Although the aim was mass education and enculturation, the message was
fixed – on the triumph of colonialism and industrial power over the darkness of the
past – and communicated one-directionally (Willett 1967). To achieve this kind of
unimpeachable, rigid communication, the objects themselves were raised up on
plinths, untouchable, located in state-controlled civic spaces for the largest possible
audiences and positioned in the centre of large, commanding views rather than in
intimate recesses or corners.
At the beginning of the 20th century, public art was re-imagined by Robinson (1904)
as a civic rather than colonial expression. This came as part of the rationalisation of
cities at that time through transport technology and urban planning, and the freeing of
the city centre from the industries of the Victorian era, leaving the possibility for open
space, “trees and turf” and a project of urban beautification. Civic art was to serve a
unified urban aesthetic – the “visible crown” (Robinson 1904, p. 17) of the successful
modern city at the apex of its historical evolution and so it did not need to represent
anything other than the ability of a society to invest in urban beautification. With the
simultaneous move towards pure abstraction in art, we can see how dominance of the
historical or political monument began to subside, and space be made for a public
expression of increasingly autonomous and non-representational art forms.
Correspondingly public art moved from being the focus of space, positioned in the
centre of a void to create monumental views, to being built into the very fabric of the
city through artistic approaches to the production of built form. Artists such as Victor
Pasmore were appointed as consultants to urban planning departments as part of the
“town artist experiment” (Petherbridge 1979). In Glenrothes in the late 1960s,
resident town artist David Harding applied abstract reliefs to the walls of road
underpasses, demonstrating a new spatial ideology in which art is an embellishment
of small urban spaces and a backdrop to public life rather than a monumental totem to
be gazed upon in reverence. Later we will see in specific spatial terms the difference
between these two ideologies. As we will also see in more detail later, modernist
planning itself also created the kinds of blank urban surfaces – around road
infrastructure and the raised walkways of housing estates for example – that were rare
in the traditional urban layout of streets and terraces, and appeared to provide inert
canvases on which to apply rarefied artistic forms.
Malcolm Miles (1997, p. 59) criticized this attempt to provide public access to a
“privileged aesthetic domain” by treating these blank surfaces like the white walls of
the gallery. He used feminist and Marxist readings of public space to argue for public
art policy that treats space as value-loaded and personal, and for art forms that are
always either applied as urban design or work with social rather than concrete forms.
The archetypal example of this approach is the community mural, popular in the late
20th century, which brings public art practice into the kind of parochial residential
spaces described earlier. Public art can enter into these socially constrained spaces
when artists enable a micro-population – such as that of an individual street or estate –
to produce forms that represent them to themselves. This level of cultural specificity,
in which an artwork depicts the unique experiences and cultures of this micro-
population, is again reflected in a spatial specificity: segregated, minor streets and

tight visual fields occupied by these kinds of community works naturally limit their
audiences to those deeply embedded spatially and socially in this locality.
Now, though, this kind of social art practice, with its parochial modes of production
and spectatorship, struggles to compete with a neoliberal ethos that employs public art
as part of an armoury of techniques in the competitive marketplace of urban real
estate. Councils vie to attract business and developers by showcasing the cultural
output of their borough and advertise the presence of the “creative class”, to use
Richard Florida’s much criticized terminology (Florida 2005). As developers, in turn,
compete to establish theirs as the new ‘urban village’ du jour, public art must once
again angle for maximum visibility, both at the focal points of commercial plazas or
luxury private courtyards and in the glossy pages of advertising brochures.
In what is perhaps a final stage bringing public art to the situation we recognise today
has been the amalgamation of both planning-led public sculpture and artist-led public
art practice into a 'cultural economy'. In Lewisham, south-east London, the case study
presented later in this chapter, the borough council runs an agency called Creative
Lewisham, through which it promotes two distinct but now clearly interrelated
agendas: public realm improvement and support for the creative industries. Art, then,
is seen as a way to support desired forms of economic activity and to present a desired
image of the borough to a wider public. The key distinction in the context of this
study is that where previously official policy has put artists to work along specific
briefs based on social betterment or civic pride, the council now supports existing
forms and highlight “Creative Enterprise Zones” where culture is self-generating,
such as in the dense urban north of the borough as opposed to the more suburban
south.
In this section, we have seen hints of the ways that changing ideological and
economic concerns within the production of public art have been intimately linked
with historical paradigms in the spatial formation of cities, in terms of the ways the
accessibility and visibility of artworks are structured by spatial conditions. In what
follows, these terms will be elucidated further through concrete examples and
reference to existing theories on the creation of monumental urban form, setting the
scene for the survey of public artworks in Lewisham, which develops these notions
through systematic analysis and comparison of the spatial conditions of 52 individual
art objects and locations.
Monumental Objects or Monumental Space?
Doreen Massey, in her study of public art in Milton Keynes, argued that a 'place'
should be seen as a meeting point of various layers of activity which extend across
urban networks, rather than as a discrete entity (Massey and Rose 2003). In other
words, a place is not just a set of social conditions determined by local cultures or
populations but also an intersection of movement flows at varying scales dependent
on its position within the hierarchy of spatial typologies and the network of routes
through the city. This is one of the central premises of space syntax theory, which
models space at two scales to describe Massey’s observation empirically (Hillier
1989). At the most local scale, space is in enclosed into immediate sections, within
which people and objects are fully co-present. These sections – distinctly bounded
urban squares or stretches of street can be measured in terms of size and shape by

modeling all open space in the city as a series of “convex” shapes (see Figure 1)1.
Any space with an obtuse angle within its boundary would create a corner, blocking
views and meaning part of it is outside of the realm of immediate perception, and
therefore within the domain of the “elsewhere”. Every space is, though, connected to
the elsewhere and space syntax analysis measures the form of this connection mainly
in terms of the degree to which it is permeable from the rest of the street network. The
measurement 2 demonstrates whether a convex space, such as a street section, is
integrated into or segregated from the wider network, providing a relational
description that is not contained within space (in the way size and shape is) but is
syntactic. Hillier illustrates the way that this syntactic aspect of space shapes its social
functioning through the example of the archetypal parade ground and the market
place. To paraphrase, imagine two hypothetical examples of archetypal urban forms
identical in size and shape but with very different ways of being embedded into the
wider urban morphology (Hillier 2004, p. 185). The parade ground, for example, is
the focal point of a formal planned layout consisting of straight ceremonial routes
with inactive street frontages and freestanding buildings that reproduce the fixed
social hierarchies of military power through their lack of emergent, unplanned
functionality. The market place, on the other hand, is embedded in an organic network
of small streets whose form is often organic and has developed to serve the demands
of unplanned, emergent commercial activity of many individuals acting
independently. Space in and around the market place is instrumental and resists over-
investment in the symbolic, non-functioning forms like monuments that parade
grounds and other ceremonial places are structured around. So places enclosing
similar amounts space in one immediate moment can afford very different social
practices according to their syntactic relations with the rest of the city. Furthermore,
according the Hillier, the more space is enclosed the greater the symbolic emphasis on
the syntactic attributes. So the grander the parade ground the more focal it is likely to
be in a symbolic urban or nation-scale performance of political power, and the larger
the market place the more central it is to the instrumental workings of an urban
economy.
Hillier also describes how the visibility of buildings or objects, structured by their
immediate spatial environments, can forms their role in what Zukin has called the
“symbolic economy” of urban form (Zukin 1996, p. 5). Hillier relates religious
architecture – in which the sacred focal point is almost universally placed at the end
of a long line of sight through the building, to the classic morphologies of urban
centres of power such as Brasilia or London’s Westminster – where long, straight
ceremonial routes meet symbolic buildings facades or monuments head-on, creating
fixed views or “isovists” (see figure 1) (Hillier 2004, pp. 171-176)3. In contrast places
focused on trade and everyday life rather than ceremony (such as the City of London)
tended to align buildings alongside routes through the city, so that their instrumental
value as movement spaces supersedes any symbolic value. These spatial effects and
the ideologies they relate to are hinted at in studies of cultural urban form but not
explored in spatial terms. Doreen Massey, in her study of public art in Milton Keynes,
wondered why artworks were tucked away in recessed adjacent to streets, limiting
their visibility (Massey and Rose 2003) and this practice in modernist planning will
be explored more later. Discussing privately managed Bryant Park in NYC Sharon
Zukin refers to how "an Alexander Calder sculpture stands in the middle of the lawn,
on loan from an art gallery, both an icon and a benediction on the space" (Zukin 1996,

p. 31), implicitly relating the object’s spatial centrality to a quasi-religious effect
symbolizing the investment of private wealth in this space.
Figure 1: (clockwise from top left) isovists from a façade in a hypothetical urban
layout [Image (Hillier 1997, p. 188)]; open space (grey) between buildings (white)
split into convex spaces with axial lines showing potential movement routes [Image:
Hillier (1997, p. 117)]; axial map of Lewisham with artwork locations starred (more
integrated routes appear darker and less integrated routes appear lighter) [Image:
author].
Polly Fong undertook to quantify this by to modelling the visibility of monuments in
the historic layouts of the cities of London and Westminster (Fong 1999). She
measured the area each monument could be seen from, finding fixed, symmetrical
views along wide straight streets in Westminster as opposed to unfolding views along
narrow angular routes through the city of London. A monument, it is suggested, is
created as much by space as it is by content.
Spatial Typologies of Public Art

This research is developed from a case study of 52 varied artifacts listed by the
London Borough of Lewisham (at the time the study was carried out in 2011) in a
guide map to public art within its jurisdiction. 4 It was not a comprehensive survey of
every artifact in every public space in the borough that could be considered “art”. It
excluded traditional monuments and instead consisted almost entirely of works made
since 1970, suggesting an implicit definition of public art as a modern practice,
distinct from the historical depictions of the Victorian city. However, this list was
useful in defining a sample for investigation, and interesting for its framing of a
collection of public art that the council wished to present as part of its civic provision
and promotion of Lewisham (a somewhat unfashionable part of inner London at the
time). The guide was interesting for other reasons as well. It revealed a surprising lack
of knowledge on behalf of the council about what exactly the artworks were that
lurked in the public spaces of its borough. The map offered only approximate
locations for the artworks, and even on the corresponding council web page (since
then moved and updated) most of the names given for works came without a
reference image to suggest what kind of object they referred to, and where exactly
they were to be found. So, even locating and identifying the objects that constituted
these works was a significant first step in the investigation, requiring extensive use of
non-council resources such as the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association’s
National Sculpture Database (http://pmsa.cch.kcl.ac.uk/). Facts such as artists’
names, dates of creation, and commissioning bodies were even more scant in the
Council’s own information, and were found instead in online chat forums about local
places as well as the PMSA database. So, although public art commissioning is
thought of as having reached a point of mainstream acceptability in urban planning
and development, it remains marginal enough that even a council may not possess
archives revealing what it holds in its very own hands.
Once every art object had been located, documented and catalogued with background
information, a process of urban modeling was undertaken based on the space syntax
methods described above, in order to show the way the way that the visibility and
accessibility of each is shaped by the urban morphology within which it is embedded,
and the size of the immediate space containing it. First a map was created from
Ordnance Survey geographical data showing with all visual obstructions – buildings,
walls, trees, raised rail lines and freestanding structures. Depthmap software 5 can
then generate isovists, defined by Benedikt as “the set of all points visible from a
given vantage point in space and with respect to …visible real surfaces in space”
(1979, p. 47). As such, each artwork can be discussed in terms of the size and shape
of the area from which it can be seen.
The next concern was accessibility: the way the location of each work can be
encountered unexpectedly as a by-product of movement through the city. One of the
“generic functions” of urban space is to allow access from every location in the city to
every other location along axes of movement, through streets and across larger open
spaces (Hillier 1997). An “axial line”, in this theoretical model, is the longest possible
path of continuous movement through any given space in a straight line before a
change of direction must be made. So an axial map represents all our options for
moving through the city and calculates, according to something like a “path of least
resistance” model the routes most statistically likely to be taken from every point in
the network to every other point. For every segment of space between intersections, or
changes in direction where in human terms a route decision must be taken, a value of

accessibility can be calculated. This calculation takes into account how many other
segments from every point on the network can be reached within a given distance, or
in a limited number of changes of direction. Whilst two streets may be only metres
apart “as the crow flies” their distance is measured along the street network itself and
may be greatly increased if they are cut off from one another, as is often the case in
the cul-de-sacs and dead ends of post-war residential development. This calculation
gives a numerical value of “integration” into the network, and in repeated
observational studies this value has been shown to correlate positively with the
volume of pedestrian traffic through that space (Hillier 1997). When analysed with a
limited distance of 800 metres (around 10 minutes walk) for example, this calculation
tends to show local high streets and local shopping parades as the most integrated
parts of the street network. This, according to Hillier’s theory of the “movement
economy”, is because shopping areas have arisen organically where the network
promotes pedestrian traffic, or have been planned to allow access on foot to
commercial areas from the surrounding residential neighbourhood. When the whole
network is analysed, showing how far every segment of street is from every other, it is
the long “spokes” – direct routes from city edge to centre with few changes in
direction - that show as the most integrated, allowing quick movement at larger
distances, usually vehicular, that brings people through the area on longer journeys.
This “foreground” network of integrated routes for travel and commerce tends to be
superimposed on a background of much more segregated residential streets, where
short segments and sharp corners segregate space and decrease the likelihood of
through-traffic. So again we see how space syntax models space statistically and uses
this to demonstrate how it fulfills its urban function. For each artwork then it is
possible, by calculating values from an axial map of Lewisham (Figure 1), to say how
accessible it is as a location, and what kind of space it occupies
Finally the immediate urban space containing each artwork was drawn out on a map,
in relation to the physical boundaries surrounding it, once again producing shapes
whose size and form can be described empirically and related to both urban functions
and, as discussed above, to symbolic emphasis. Wide, regular openings in the urban
fabric, such as squares that contain activities, allow us to stop and be in a place in
static co-presence with other people. The larger that opening is, the greater the
emphasis on its importance within the hierarchy of spaces, for example distinguishing
a local garden square from a grand town centre civic space. Long, narrow sections of
space tend on the other hand to be streets, where our experience of sharing that space
with both people and art objects is transitory and in passing.
So, for each of the fifty-two public artworks in the sample defined by Lewisham’s
Public Art Map we have a model of the size, shape, accessibility and visibility of its
location. These models have measurable attributes such as spatial integration, size,
length of longest view and so on. By combining these measures statistically it begins
to be possible to observe patterns in the spatial conditions of these locations that are
interpreted here as morphological typologies, or categories of space. Each typology
with its set of conditions, I would argue, brings spatial constraints, affordances and
functions that describe in surprisingly regular ways how art is used in those spaces.
Through its structuring of movement and visibility, urban form plays a large part in
shaping what kind of urban functions artworks can fulfil. In what follows, some of
these typologies will be illustrated through examples chosen from the survey.

The measures taken from these models can be compared in the form of data plots,
comparing attributes to one another. We can compare, for example, the size of a space
with the amount of spatial integration on the routes that pass through it. Using the
example of the market place and the parade ground, it was shown that the larger a
space the greater the symbolic emphasis on its syntactic description. This emphasis
can be shown statistically, by placing these two measures on either axis of a graph
and plotting each artwork according to each attribute. Splitting the resulting plot into
four quadrants gives us a systematic way to describe each location, given its
distribution within the sample: small and segregated, large and integrated, and so on.
A narrow high street, for example, is a highly integrated but purely functional space
for movement and commercial exchange, whereas the large town square at its end is
similarly integrated but the extra investment in space lends it symbolic value as a
representation of civic life and vitality.
Symbolic segregation
In these terms, large open spaces that are poorly accessible from the street system are
symbolically segregated. Parks are the physical manifestation of this, where the state
has given over significant amounts of valuable land to economic unproductivity,
symbolizing social values centred around nature, health and well-being. In the
artworks found in these large segregated spaces in Lewisham artistic concerns are
subservient to functions relating to these values. All but one of the examples with
these characteristics are artist-designed mileposts for walking routes, while the last
one is a wind vane referencing river wildlife. None of them were commissioned by
Lewisham council: the mileposts are from green transport charity Sustrans and the
windvane paid for by the Environment Agency. The park, being segregated from
passing movement, is not a location valuable enough for the council to invest in
promoting its creative talent or civic pride (as will be seen in other examples) and
they, in fact, explicitly recognize in their cultural strategy that the abundance of open
space in the south of the borough acts as a spatial barrier to home-grown cultural
activity there (Creative Lewisham Agency 2002).
Non-symbolic segregation
Fourteen of the nineteen artworks within the dataset representing small spaces with
low integration are murals or wall-mounted reliefs applied to vertical surfaces rather
than floor standing. It is common sense that artists produce non land-consuming work
in confined spaces such as small streets but it is also notable that murals are more
likely to be found in relatively segregated locations. As was suggested previously
commercial activity is more likely to occur along routes that are spatially integrated,
as statistically they are likely to attract a flow of pedestrian traffic (Hillier 1997), and
shop entrances mean there are not usually the large non-permeable sections of wall
required for a mural to be realised in integrated streets. Murals are found instead
where street frontages are impermeable: amongst infrastructure like the railway
underpass home to the graffiti mural Get the Message in Forest Hill, or quiet post-
industrial areas such as Creekside in Deptford where Gary Drostle’s Love Over Gold
mural adorns the wall of a warehouse overlooked by council flats. Both works were
created together with local school children with part funding from social charities and
the local education authority. The mural is the classic form of community
participation that art often involves, as in the case of Pink Palace in the Crossfields

Estate, local residents. We might well expect this kind of mural to be found where
lack of footfall means there is less mixing between inhabitants and strangers;
residents are in greater control of this space and perhaps feel more inclined to invest
in its appearance than they would in a more integrated and more publicly used space
that is shared by a wider population.
Symbolic integration and consensus landmarks
In Catford, the civic centre of the borough and the location of its town hall, London’s
South Circular meets the A21 (see map in Figure 2) – two significant trunk roads that
form part of the highly integrated network of long-distance movement routes
described before. At this convergence they widen out, changing from linear
thoroughfares to “fat” convex spaces: from roads to move along to places to be in.
This widening creates symbolic integration: large convex spaces that are highly
accessible, focal points of the street network. The two public artworks here are large,
abstract, three-dimensional sculptures of around 2 metres each in height, standing on
lawn beds surrounded by low fences and embedded into the wide pavements. Both are
by non-local artists: Water Line, commissioned from the prolific public artist Oliver
Barratt by Lewisham Council, and Chariot - bequeathed to the council by the family
of the Russian artist Oleg Prokofiev after his death (see images in Figure 2). Both
these artworks were installed in Catford town centre in a project led by Creative
Lewisham – the borough’s arts agency, with funding from the developer Desiman
Ltd, placing them firmly in the category of high-visibility cultural regeneration-led
commissioning previously outlined.
In his classic text The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch (1967) describes how urban
elements can become landmarks. When placed for optimum visibility they reach a
point of consensus, featuring repeatedly in cognitive maps of the city. “Location is
crucial: if large or tall, the spatial setting must allow it to be seen … Any breaks in
transportation – nodes, decision points – are places of intensified perception …
Buildings at route decision points are remembered clearly, while distinctive structures
along a continuous route may have slipped into obscurity. A landmark is yet stronger
if visible over an extended range of time or distance” (Lynch 1967, p. 101).
Reinterpreting these Lynchian criteria in the same terms used in this study, Ruth
Conroy-Dalton has described a landmark location as one producing large isovists with
long fingers representing views over an extended range of time or distance
overlapping with well-integrated, intersected axial lines representing decision points
on well-used routes through the area (Conroy Dalton and Bafna 2003). To look for
these landmark attributes in Lewisham using the spatial data collected in the survey,
the size of each isovist was plotted against the number of axial lines it meets. In other
words, the extent of the area from which each location can be viewed compared to the
number of different routes it can be viewed from. The artworks in Catford town centre
came out with the highest values in this data comparison – they can be seen from far
down the wide main roads (471 metres away at the furthest) as well as the many
junctions with side roads that meet them. So the locations of these two artworks
provide spatial conditions that, according to Lynch’s definition, can turn art objects
into landmarks. But how do these objects in these particular locations respond to that
potential? With their spatial conditions elevating them to landmarks the artworks
themselves are not required to have any further urban function: as depictions of local

cultures, as street furniture, signage or other such elements that were common in other
less conspicuous spaces like the parks or back streets described previously.
Given the spatially integrated town centre location, where land is highly valuable
commercially and infrastructurally, the spatial investment made to display these
works – on protected, dedicated canvases of land in almost quasi gallery conditions –
is evidence of a position of prestige. Not only are these landmarks for local people,
but also emblems intended for a wider audience of passers-through, demonstrating the
ability of this borough to invest both spatially and economically in the display of
“international” art. In its cultural strategy published in 2002 (four years before the
installation of these works), Lewisham identified Catford as an “emerging cluster” of
the local creative economy, proposing that “Lewisham's visual environment needs a
significant uplift to mark a change of attitude” and that “external recognition” was a
key ambition (Creative Lewisham Agency 2002). The relationship of these artwork
locations to the city-wide network of movement space means they can reach this
“external”, non-local audience, and their alignment within that location takes
maximum advantage of their landmark visibility along these routes. This can also be
thought of as the most public of public space. With greater volumes of local and
through-movement, an intense mixing of people occurs, no-one can be thought of as a
stranger and the performance of personal identities becomes subservient to civic
responsibility to the generic crowd. Artworks within this kind of space seem not to
respond to specific cultural identities, but rather take on more abstract visual forms.
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Art as backdrop
At the opposite end of the spatial spectrum to such landmarks were more hidden
locations, visible from smaller areas (around 4,000 square metre) and only one or two
street sections. These are works set back from linear spaces, and adjacent to the
direction of movement, forming the effect noted by Doreen Massey in which art
works are not viewed head on. Four works in the sample were positioned like this,
adjacent to the street but semi-enclosed in either entrances or enclaves. Feed the Cows
artist-painted recycling bins in New Cross, for example, are functional objects
decoratively treated. They are encountered within an enclave whose purpose is to
provide a partially protected space to stop and make use of that function. The
Horniman Mosaic adorns the entrance to a local museum in Forest Hill and Pensive
Girl sits just outside Lewisham Council’s offices just off the main road in Catford
(see Figure 2). Both are set back from the street into semi-private recesses that limit
viewership to those who choose to enter that building. These are not abstract, self-
sufficient objects that, like the sculptures nearby in the centre of Catford, become
meaningful by being fixed in view as landmarks but decorative interventions forming
a backdrop to other moments of activity such as taking out the recycling, or crossing a
threshold into a cultural space.
Amorphous landscape
Another similarity with Milton Keynes comes when looking at the urban landscape in
Lewisham with a wider lens. Lewisham centre can be thought of as one of London's
'villages', historic settlements incorporated into the metropolitan area as they grew
themselves as satellites, and as London grew outwards towards them. In space syntax
terms, the roads around Lewisham centre act as a 'hub' from which emanate 'spokes'
towards the borough's edge and into London's large-scale movement network (Hillier
1999, p. 8). Much of the historic town centre itself, however, was destroyed by
bombing in 1944 and was redeveloped from the 1950s, including the addition of an
indoor shopping centre in 1977 and the pedestrianisation of the adjacent section of
high street in 1994. The result is a combination of a traditional morphology of small,
street-fronted shop units lining the east of the high street, and the typically post-war
morphology of a large commercial building with interior permeability and inactive
exterior facades facing onto busy traffic arteries. So the high street itself acts as the
overlap between a landscape of streets and houses to the east surviving from before
the war, and a post-war landscape of open space, roads and large residential and
commercial buildings to the west.
Julienne Hanson defined this historical shift in urban morphology by calculating the
ratio between built and open space. She found that in post-War developments such as
housing estates, new towns and urban restructuring projects like that in Lewisham
town centre, open space became more significant in proportion to built mass (Hanson
et al. 2007, p. 55). Art, she suggested, would be used in this context to act as an
interface between the home and this new, alienating landscape. This morphological
change has also been described by Matthew Carmona as the shift from traditional to
modernist space, with the latter described as an 'amorphous landscape' which
surrounds 'freestanding pavilions' (Carmona et al. 2003) as opposed to the clearly
defined streets and squares contained by solid blocks of built form.

In the 1990s the Lewisham 2000 scheme was initiated to regenerate the commercial
centre through the improvement of the public realm. Lewisham appointed renowned
sculptor John Maine to the role of town artist, as had many new towns during the
1970s. In this role, Maine created Ridgeway, Column and Bollards, which a
contemporaneous critique of applied arts saw as “likely to outlast many of the
buildings which might more readily be taken as Lewisham's ‘thereness’” as it was “to
the bones of the landscape that John Maine applied his art” (Nuttgens and Heath
1992, p. 36). Though landscape is used poetically here, it describes accurately the
open modernist morphology, which leaves large sections of ground unused by either
building or infrastructure. The works that form part of the Lewisham 2000 project
were inserted as retrospective improvements into the pre-existing open spaces and
blank facades resulting from 1970s planning around the shopping centre. John
Maine’s work both stylistically and spatially characterises civic art which was to be
an abstract expression of the height of modernist rationality and to occupy a cleansed
urban landscape of ‘trees and turf’, apparently removed from daily functions of space
such as commerce, which are only one street away on Lewisham High Street.
Ridgeway, if it were inched slightly south east of its location, could fill the fixed
views along the streets that approach it and become a monument. Instead modern
council-commissioned works shy away from large-scale spatial structuring of
ceremonial routes in favour of localised effects. The ideology they help to project is
not one of overarching order as observed by Polly Fong in Westminster, but of
restorative cultural intervention into pre-existing sections of unused space. The
redundant surfaces created by post-war planning become blank canvasses for art and
are thereby justified in their existence.
Urban scale patterns and historical shifts
Hopefully these examples have given an idea of how public art could be seen
primarily as a function of urbanism, even before we start to consider the cultural and
political issues raised by its content and its modes of production. As we zoom out
from individual settings however there is also a wider pattern in the way art is
produced amongst the urban landscapes across the area. The Social Logic of Space
(Hillier and Hanson 1984) puts forward a model that predicts certain forms of cultural
representation in certain types of urban space and does not look dissimilar to a
description of the data collected in this study.
The argument, in short, is that two kinds of socio-spatial mechanisms cooperate to
produce and maintain social forms. On one hand ‘organic’ city-building emerges from
spatially dense and unritualised social negotiations, generating new socio-spatial
forms that go on to become reproduced in wider society (“local-to-global” in Hillier
and Hanson’s terms). On the other hand planned city-building allows the state to
project “a unified ideology and a unified politics over a specific territory” through
representational artefacts and morphologies that reproduce existing social structures
in space (“global-to-local”) (Hillier and Hanson 1984, p. 21). Settlement morphology
is formed by both mechanisms, in varying degrees, according to the role of that
settlement. Local-to-global space appears as a “dense system, in which public space is
defined by the buildings and their entrances”, like the traditional street morphologies
in the denser urban north of the borough. Its inverse is a “sparse system, in which
space surrounds buildings with few entrances” more like the modernist landscape in
Lewisham town centre (ibid). Lewisham Council itself has noted the creative energy

that seems to be produced in the north of the borough, and their main practice is to
identify artists who have emerged unplanned from this social milieu and support them
to produce artworks generated locally. Deptford artists Artmongers produce non
space-consuming works that are applied to inactive surfaces, located in relatively
small spaces along the busy, narrow Deptford High Street, which lacks symbolic
emphasis but is prominent at a local scale. These works are impermanent and can
easily be changed or removed with few financial implications, as social and urban
forms in the area continue emerge and change.
In the open landscape of Lewisham centre, and wide streets of Catford centre, we find
a tendency towards a greater spatial and financial investment by council and
developers in permanent, freestanding sculpture through which commissioners aim to
produce rather than respond to local identities, through cultural regeneration and
rebranding. These works signify the cultural and economic wealth of the overarching
political body, in exactly the way Hillier and Hanson suggest is indicative of the
global-to-local logic in space. Again an adaptation of this logic occurs in the
segregated but sparse space of the parks, which the council has recognised as a barrier
to a home-grown cultural economy. Here, national environmental organisations like
Sustrans and The Environment Agency have installed route markers among a sparse
morphology where society's central beliefs are reproduced through representational
forms; in this case the recent belief in the importance of environmental responsibility.
Indeed the Cultural Strategy recognises that 'the continuing programme to naturalise
the river channels…have demonstrated Lewisham's role in - and commitment to -
maintaining and improving the natural environment' (Creative Lewisham Agency
2002, p. 16). These markers, as Hillier and Hanson put it, are a part of the same
centrally produced system of value representation.
Hopefully this study6 has shown that urban morphology is an important factor in
structuring the way art objects in public space are produced, and the roles they can
play. The city is more than an aesthetic and social ‘context’, on which much debate on
public art has focused. This is not to suggest that these immediate contexts are
irrelevant, but rather that - like architecture - public art should take these into account
alongside spatial implications, which appear to impact greatly upon the ideologies
embodied by this kind of urban object. By bringing in a social theory of space it has
been proposed that well-connected streets can be more public than segregated,
parochial spaces of habitation adding a spatial dimension to Massey’s ‘meeting point’
definition of public space. Whereas critical writing on public art has tended to assume
that ‘public’ refers to a limited set of individuals living in proximity to a location and
defining its socio-cultural identity, the syntactic method offers a more differentiated
view of the continuum between public and private, which could be used by artists,
commissioners and academics looking to add a spatial dimension to their
understanding of the relation between art and the public.
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1 A convex shape is contained entirely by boundaries with acute angles at its corners,
so that every point within it has a direct line of sight to every other point.
2 Defined using Depthmap software (Varoudis 2012) that, in simple terms, calculates
the distance and the number of turns from every segment of movement space in a

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street network to every other, giving a numerical value of integration for any one
place. See Bafna (2003).
3 “Isovist” is a term coined in Benedikt (1979) to describe the area from which a
specific point in space can be seen, or vice versa. See section 4 for more detailed
description and Figure 1 for example.
4 The full text of this study including data and methodological details can be found at
bit.ly/publicartasurban.
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