From one of North America's most influential public space experts comes a compassionate, powerful treatise on how urban planning, design and policy inform how much joy we experience as our bodies navigate the world.
How do you feel when you walk through a park? A parking lot? A main street at night? Now, how much do you know about how history and design impacts those feelings? For a couple of decades, Jay Pitter has been thinking about public space, and the ways it can be designed to not only contribute to social equity but also inspire joy for everyone. Her award-winning work helping cities navigate complex issues such as reimagining Confederate monument sites, the creation of cultural districts, and the adoption of gender-responsive street design make her one of our foremost thinkers on the way bodies exist in a space, and what a space can do to bodies.
In this book, Pitter specifically focuses on how Black bodies are perceived—from the history of the slave auction block to the way many Black mothers burden their children with public space rules to protect them—tracing a vital cultural history and deeply personal narrative that looks at both the complication and beauty of Black public joy. Through compelling prose interwoven with expert analysis, Pitter guides the reader through Black people's public space pageantry, sacred spaces, powerful protests, and intimate yearnings for public joy. She also reveals vulnerable personal stories as ground for the book's journey. The themes of the book—our collective desire for safely exploring places, feeling belonging, and freeing ourselves from fears of judgement— are universal. Every reader will find space for learning, pause, and affirmation in these pages.
Pitter has worked with the United Nations, lectured at Cornell, MIT, and Princeton, and edited a collection of writing about cities, but this is the first time readers will experience her stunning breadth of knowledge in her own intimate volume: both deeply researched and deeply personal, it promises to be a definitive work on public spaces and our collective negotiation of them during unprecedented urban development and our divided times.
