Setha Low: Spatial Justice and the Right to Public Space

Setha Low is the American anthropologist, professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who has made public space an object of ethnographic study and a question of justice. Her starting point is simple: a plaza, a park or a beach is just when everyone can reach it, use it and feel at home in it, and unjust when design, management or surveillance exclude someone because of class, race, age or gender. With that yardstick she has measured plazas in Costa Rica, parks in New York and gated communities in Texas over four decades.

On the Plaza: the ethnography of public space

Her first major work, On the Plaza (2000), compares two plazas in San José, Costa Rica: the Parque Central, a colonial legacy that a 1990s remodelling emptied of vendors, pensioners and preachers to make it safe for tourism, and the modern, commercial Plaza de la Cultura. Low shows that the plaza is a space of conflict where different groups contest their presence, and that every design intervention takes sides. Her method, the ethnography of space, combines observation, interviews, history and policy analysis, and has become a tool for evaluating public spaces before and after they are transformed.

Behind the Gates: gated communities and fear

In Behind the Gates (2003) Low moved into gated communities in New York, Texas and San Antonio to understand why middle-class families chose to live behind walls and guardhouses. She found fear, but also a desire for homogeneity and control, and a paradox: residents did not feel safer and had lost contact with the city. She concludes that gated communities privatise space and citizenship, and that their spread, together with that of shopping malls and parks run by private foundations, shrinks the territory where diversity can meet.

Six principles for inclusive parks

With Suzanne Scheld and Dana Taplin she wrote Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity (2005), based on studies commissioned by the National Park Service in New York. There she sets out six principles for an inclusive park: if people do not feel represented in it, they abandon it; access, use and management must allow diversity; cultural differences call for different uses and facilities; the history of the place matters to those who inhabit it; participation must be continuous; and symbols and maintenance communicate who is welcome. Applied to Battery Park or Prospect Park, those principles changed concrete design decisions.

Spatial justice and public space as democratic infrastructure

Spatializing Culture (2017) and Why Public Space Matters (2023) synthesise her position. Spatial justice, for Low, is not only the equitable distribution of park space by neighbourhood; it is also recognition, so that groups see their culture and history reflected; participation, so that they decide about the spaces they use; and care, so that maintenance and management push no one out. She argues that public space is the infrastructure of democracy, because it is the only place where strangers and unequals are forced to coexist, and that its privatisation and surveillance are ways of eroding that democracy.

Low's contributions are applied today in public space audits with a gender and diversity lens, in the evaluation of park regeneration projects and in the defence of plazas threatened by privatisation. Her lesson is that a just public space is not achieved by good design alone, but by observing who uses it, who is missing and why, and correcting the design, the management and the rules until nobody is left out.