99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-60- Names vs The Nothing

Episode Date: August 7, 2012

New Public Sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces. These are the liminal spaces within cities that are not traditionally framed as “public space” because, quite frankly, they are … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's this 80s movie that I have a real soft spot for. I saw it in the theater, in fact. Now I get to show it to my kids. It's a good one, which is a good thing because when your kids like a movie, you end up watching it over and over again. It's called The Never Ending Story. The Never Ending Story? What's that? The Never Ending Story is a tale of a boy adventure or named...

A TRIO! He and his luck dragon named... A TRIO! ...are trying to save the world from the onslaught of a terrible force called... Look at Trio, the nothing! But this story also takes place inside of a book that's being read by a present day boy, a boy named. Pretty much all the dialogue in the movie is written with exclamation points.

Anyway, so Bastion the Reader realizes that he is actually written into the story and it's up to him to save the storybook world. Bashin winds up defeating the nothing, since spoiler alert, by giving the Empress of the Fantasy World a new name. It's really hard to hear but he names her moon child there. I didn't know that for like 20 years. The power of one child's imagination saves an entire world. Seriously it's a great movie. Anyway, there is a reason why I'm telling you this story. I want you to hold on to that idea that a name can defeat...

...unnothing. Okay, with that in mind, here's our producer, Sam Greensman. Hey, Roman. Alright, everyone, in a listener land. Names versus... nothing. When I was a kid growing up in South Florida, there was this beautiful green place where I always wanted to go play. It looked perfect for a kid to run around and throw a ball.

It was a flat mode lawn that just stretched into infinity, but my parents wouldn't ever take me there. But with good reason. It was inside of a giant highway interchange. My 5 year old self would never have been able to convince my parents that this would be a good place to play, because no responsible parent takes their kid to play catch off the side of i95. But I don't think I would even have known how to ask them to place to play, because no responsible parent takes their kid to play catch off the side of i95. But I don't think I would even have known how to ask them to take me there, because this

place isn't really anywhere that we think of as being a place. There's no name for it. Let's call it a nothing. As a kid, I couldn't look away from these perfect grassy areas, but as I grew up and became a driver, I learned to ignore them like everyone else. So what happens when you give that nothing to name? That's totally what I'm doing. Giving things a name. So this is my friend Graham. My name is Graham Carell Allen.

Graham's an artist in Baltimore and he has this project where he's trying to categorize and classify all the different kinds of invisible public spaces that we overlook. He published a field guide for how to spot them. It's part of a bigger project called New Public Sites. New public sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces within cities that are not traditionally framed as public space.

It's important to name these places because by giving these places succinct and fun and poetic names, we can help start a discourse about our public spaces and how we wanna envision them for the future. I'm reminded of the never ending stories. Bastion, you must give me a name. Call my name!

See? Graham gives these tours where he puts this language to use, describing incredibly boring pieces of the Baltimore landscape. This is the first site along the tour, and here we have a void. I remember the building that used to stand here, it was painted blue. Passing through it you can imagine how us as ghosts should the building be standing here would have to actually be invisible to pass through these walls and now it's the reverse. The building is the ghost and

we're we're passing through its walls. So Graham is really giving a tour of a vacant lot. Vagan lot is one way to put it, but notice what Graham called it. A void. And if you pull up his book that Graham published sort of a field guide to these new public sites, you'll see... I hang on. Okay, I don't have the book handy, but here this is a PDF. I want to do command F, the OID,D, page 14, void.

A framed open space imputed with the psychic presence of a former mass. Andor the profound immersion of seductively infinite nothingness. That certainly is a something. To find out more about these invisible public spaces, Graham and Sam load bikes to the edge of East Baltimore to look at a few, like the one Sam pint for as a kid. It looks like there's a small parting that we can actually see through. Right now we're at the foot of a small embankment that's probably 15 feet tall or so.

We're going to walk up to the edge of this embankment and meet a low-lying concrete wall that will safely separate us from the clover leaf of traffic. Right beyond this on ramp on to we'll be able to hopefully actually look into a freeway eddy. So let's do that right now. Right now we're starting across the street during a huge lulling traffic. So we're looking at this curved highway exit ramp coming in front of us and it's maybe

about 15 feet, 20 feet ahead of us. There's kind of this almost like a wilderness area. Fence Stins is no trespassing by the Maryland Transportation Authority. With the invisible public space and site, Graham turns to his field manual. Freeway Eddie, an interstitial fragment of space between intersecting curves of highway pavement. And there you have it.

That grassy, non-place I'd always wanted to hang out in as a kid. Now is the name of Freeway Eddie. Graham's field guide to new public sites to hang out in as a kid, now as a name, a freeway eddie. Grampsfield God to new public sites is full of new identities for these kind of places. So here we have median refuge, a liminal zone of linear respite between parallels of churning traffic. In lightened elevation, supple terrain,

providing the ideal incline from which one may gaze from a wise viewing distance. Monumental isolation. Big loose parts, movable materials that invite playful reconfiguration. It is actually an architectural term. Big loose parts. It's a pretty fun sounding term if you ask me. Paralax of chance. Triangle crossing. A three-sided concrete platform or asphalt zone, providing solace for street crossing pedestrians. I don't see too many pedestrians. We have oral saturation. The overwhelming occupation of a surrounding soundscape by sight generated occupation of a surrounding soundscape by sight generated, droning noise. A median refuge, a liminal pause of restraint.

Empty signifier, a post or a pole absent of its original sign and or meaning. If there's a common theme connecting these sites, it's that they're mostly the empty leftover spaces from Car Centered City Planning. And it's an odd celebration of these nothing places. Listen to how Graham describes them. Beauty, beauty, beauty that one can enjoy, spectacular and sublime, quite beautiful.

This is a really beautiful spot. We're actually standing right now in a long strip of sunlight that is created by the space between these two elevated highways. We're at the Chinatown bus stop across the street from the Baltimore travel plaza. Miles outside of the city, perhaps the most unglamorous way to enter Baltimore and yet it's a gateway for hundreds a week and it's a quite beautiful space. What were... Here's where I got to drive the line, Grant, because there's some trees, there's some birds,

you know, there's, I guess, some intent of landscaping this area around here. But I mean, it's basically a big parking lot with some trucks, with diesel gas across the street. There's a subway, there's a bus stop. What are your grounds for calling this beautiful? Let's be clear here. You can call that grassy patch off the highway, a freeway eddy, all you want. But I'm not going to take my kids to play ball in one. A highway exit ramp by any of their name is still justice unattractive and dangerous.

This is beautiful because it's a space that's shared by so many and yet it was completely undesigned. This space was designed as a parking lot and it's become this huge nexus for people coming in and out of Baltimore. And so it's not necessarily what it looks like, it's more about what it represents. Yeah, there's no denying the experience of being in these new public sites is actually pretty terrible. But for Graham, the beauty is in their potential. Sometimes every day unremarkable spaces can become something more simply by virtue of people being there. It's worth noting here that Zucati Park in New York City,

the birthplace of the Occupy movement, was a privately owned space and not a public park. So if your goal is finding new spaces for engaged democracy to happen as it is for Graham, then you need a way to redefine the places in your neighborhood where that kind of activity can happen. And I think it's important not not to fetishize public spaces as only existing in town squares or you'll simmity your Yellowstone or something like this, not just the National Mall and DC, for example, but any place are everyday public spaces, you know, the spaces that we all share, it's everywhere and we all have access to it. These spaces are the places where this happens.

It doesn't just happen over the internet. It happens in physical spaces. New public sites are these physical spaces that we can appropriate, that we can make our own. If it's only for a temporary demonstration, then so be it, but maybe it's for a farmer's market, maybe it's for a community garden, maybe it's simply for a playground

or a place where we need to add a few benches to make it a better bus stop. But nevertheless, there's potential there and by giving it a name and by starting that conversation, we can kind of get these ideas moving into reality. So it all comes back to a name against a nothing. When you give a nothing a name, you can reimagine it as a something. If we can create terms for these otherwise invisible experiences and places and things, that we all share, that we all of us share in these public spaces, these new public sites,

then it's a starting point. It's a starting point for that conversation. By giving it a term, we can then talk about it, and we all know what we're talking about. Then that's the first step. The second step is envisioning, okay, well, how does this need to be improved? And the third step is how do we do that? The naming is where it starts.

I don't know if I name anything in the moon child though. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sam Greenspan with help from me Roman Mars. It's a project of KALW-91.7 local public radio in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, I tweet at Roman Mars to find out more about Graham's project and his mobile app, which will help you identify and even make up new names for your new public sites and your own backyard. Check out our website at snoninepersoninvisible.org.

You too, beware. From PRX.