Shifting Public Spaces

Questionnaire on Shifting Public Spaces
Monument Lab Bulletin
Edited by Patricia Eunji Kim

From the Response:

Just as public spaces will be transformed, so too will publics themselves. Both will be arranged to accommodate intensified infrastructures of surveillance. This may involve machine learning tools that monitor individuals’ movements to ensure six feet of distance between pedestrians, compulsory biometric scans, or new mechanisms of geolocative tracking. Like previous technologies of surveillance, the effects of these measures will be asymmetrically distributed and are likely to exacerbate existing social inequalities—disproportionately impacting communities of color, immigrant communities, or unhoused communities. In this way, responses to the pandemic will recode which communities are granted access to public space, and by extension which communities are included in—or excluded from—“the public” as a formation.