Annette Koh

Public space, the right to the city, and civic engagement. How can we improve equity and access through participatory urbanism? Ph.D. student in Urban & Regional Planning at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Former resident of Seoul & San Francisco.
Recent Tweets @spamandkimchi
Posts I Like
This Space Available
New York’s High Line Park recently got called out as “the distressed skinny jeans of public parks, the gourmet taco truck of urban tourist attractions” in The Millions. The minor internet brouhaha (skinny jeans-wearing food truck aficionados are the younger cousins of latte-drinking liberals?) reminded me that it was impossible for me not to read the High Line as a cause and symptom of gentrification because of all the luxury brand billboards. Nearby billboards and buildings, including some that straddled the track, featured the same global brands that line Fifth Avenue. 
 
I think the High Line billboard that started me growling was a Burberry one, plaid-clad model languidly gazing down at the public.  Even David Shrigley’s non-commercial billboard can still be read as a cultural takeover of a once-working class neighborhood.  
I’ve become resensitized to outdoor advertising after 2.5 years in Hawaii, one of four states to prohibit billboards. Hawaii, thanks to the ladies-who-lunch-and-legislate of Outdoor Circle, banned billboards in 1927, decades before statehood. New York, in contrast, is the home of larger-than-life crotch bulges, 10 stories high above Houston Street. 
Other people thinking about public space & who gets to plaster it with images, or jail those who seek to write on it without permission are a father - daughter duo:
The feature documentary This Space Available began as a discussion between a corporate branding guru, Marc Gobé, and his daughter, Gwenaëlle Gobé, a filmmaker who is passionately against advertising in public space. The debate blossomed into three-year investigation of outdoor advertising and its effect on communities, from São Paulo to Toronto, and what activists, street artists, and cities are doing to stop it. (via Atlantic Cities)

Trailer from This space available on Vimeo.

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