99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-09- 99% Private

Episode Date: November 5, 2010

Privately Owned Public Open Spaces, or POPOS, are these little gardens, terraces, plazas, and seating areas that are private property, but are mandated for public use. City planners require developers to add these little “parks” to their buildings to make … Continue reading →

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from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Privately owned public open space. Popos. P-o-p-o-s. And it has this logo that says public open space and with kind of this little tree that's shaped like a house and all of them have the same logo. The city requires that logo to be on there. It's a cool logo. Yeah. Pretty small sign though. My name's Blaine Merker. I'm an artist and part of a group of artists and designers called Rebar, who are based in San Francisco.

Popo, they're a kind of unique set of spaces that were required to be provided by the developer as a condition of approval for the developer's building. So the Popo is around private property. They're owned most likely by the owner of the building. They look like public space, they feel like public space for the most part. This one that we're standing in is granite walkways and the fountain and grass. But technically speaking, these are totally privately owned.

The only catch is that the developer is legally obliged to make this open to the public and to allow anyone to use it. And no one's quite sure what's allowed here, who's in charge, and what the codes of behavior should be. And just because they're public doesn't mean they're easy to find. So this is sort of a strange environment to walk through to get to a public space. Yeah, it's got nice art though. 536 missions. It feels like walking into a library.

You'll see when we walk through the security, like, they'll be this moment where you're like, okay, I just crossed a threshold. Making eye contact with people in authority and sort of acknowledging them, that's not something I ever feel in a park, right? I mean, I don't like walk into the Dolores Park and have to like nod to somebody like, yes, it's okay that I'm here.

There's cameras. One, two, three cameras in here. You want to try some badminton? In here? Yeah, why not? Yeah, why not? Yeah, yeah, let's do it. There's a whole set of invisible codes and regulations that shape our behavior.

Most of us aren't really consciously aware of them. How you hold yourself in public, where you think you can sit down, who you can talk to. It's only by doing something that push back against those codes that you actually can see the codes. Sort of like a scientist firing an electron at an atom to see where it is. If you fire an electron at an atom, you actually change the course of the atom. When you're in one of these spaces, when you start to push back against the code's behavior, you actually change the codes of behavior while you do that. Nothing happened.

Everything happened. Everything was just like, alright. We definitely played long enough probably to be noticed on camera, right? Right. And nobody came. Nobody came. Score one for public space. But if you really want to test the tolerance of a privately owned public open space, bad

meant may not be the best test. I mean, if you really want to make someone an authority uncomfortable, the most subversive act especially right now, maybe doing nothing at all. There's a few behaviors that you can sort of plausibly do that allow you to be idle, like fiddling with your phone or smoking or reading a book. But to just lie down and do nothing, not okay. It draws attention to do nothing. The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, which is better known as Burr, has a great guide to all the popos in the city and recommendations about how to improve

current and future popos, including a proposal to codify some of these rules for the social aspects of privately owned public open spaces. I think it's key to keep in mind that popos will never fully supplant the need for a true comments for true public spaces in a city. Popos can be these great hidden gems and the nooks and crannies of a city, but even if you're allowed to play Batman, the fact that you have to test for it means these spaces aren't really ours. This episode of 99% Invisible was produced by Roman Mars and Stephanie Foo with support from Lunar. It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design.

To find out more or maybe tell the world about your favorite little private corner of the city, go to 99%invisible.org.