Occupied: Public Space and the 99%

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

-1^st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Occupation as a method of protest has a long history in the US. In the late 1700s, veterans gathered at the capitol for several weeks to demand pay. In 1932 the Bonus Army veterans’ encampment at the Mall in Washington DC was dismantled by tanks and cavalry after several months of occupation. In 1971 and 1976 Vietnam War vets occupied the statue of liberty to bring attention to their cause. With varying success, occupations of public space have been used since the founding of the United States to draw attention to under-recognized problems and, very literally, to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Each time, the protests have been dismantled by force, and that decision has often been politically unpopular. More recently, the #Occupy movement has demonstrated once again that the right to use public space for protest continues to be extremely limited.

Occupy Wall Street began as a protest against the inequalities inherent in our current political and economic systems, but the forceful crackdowns on protesters across the nation indicate that something else is at stake - the right to public space. By losing our ability to occupy public space, we are losing a major outlet in the free expression of our 1st amendment rights. Furthermore, by repeatedly dismantling protest encampments using military tactics, the government is sending the message that dissent will not be tolerated unless it can be carefully contained. In this new realm, public civic space is valued not for its democratic purpose of civic engagement, not for public debate and the exercise of free speech, but as a highly controlled dressing to be adorned to the layout of a city grid.

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Jessie Square + Yerba Buena Lane: Privatizing Publics

It is often that the phrases we hold closest to our national identity are the hardest to define. This couldn't be more the case for the phrase 'public space'. The discordant grouping of phrases, one firmly evoking democratic images of equality amongst subjects, the other the intangible places we occupy. The material culture that results from the interaction of the public to a space is temporal, vague, and in constant flux. This fluid nature can clearly be seen in public spaces in rapid transition, those at the poles of new and dying public spaces. The SoMA district of San Francisco is a district that has reinvented itself many times over in the past half century. This change has enticed the emergence of distinct publics, the 1880's laborers of light manufacturing, 1930's long-shore men of the port, 1970's hookers and pushers of skid row1, to the 1990's dot com geek entrepreneurs and finally the current high end culture and tourist destination. Within this rich history is a small one-acre square and an adjacent pedestrian lane, called Jessie Square and Yerba Buena Lane, both illustrate a narrative seen in many high-end downtown spaces; a search for its publics.

In this essay, we examine the roles multiple publics have in engaging or ignoring these new spaces. When spaces do not have powerful publics to claim them as their own, private interests emerge. These private interest at Jessie Square and Yerba Buena Lane are able to manifest due to three unique factors: unusual scale, a variety of nearby open spaces and an aligned interests of privatizing publics.

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Temescal Farmers' Market: Defining Local

Nicholas Buccelli, Micah Burger, Dominique Elie | Architecture 219 | 2011.12.13

Farmers Market: from DMV to Organic Produce

OVERVIEW

The Temescal Farmer’s Market is a small to mid-sized weekly market held on Sundays from 9am to 1pm in the Claremont Avenue DMV parking lot in Oakland's Temescal neighborhood. It hosts over 50 vendors who sell a variety of products and goods, including produce, prepared and baked goods, crafts and other artisinal products. It is a lively and well-attended market that has been in operation for almost 5 years. 

Of interest in the study of the space were issues of temporary urbanism and a questioning of the construction of the idea of “locality”. These concepts were considered particularly as they pertain to ideas about authenticity and "realness" in terms of how an event with strong associations to deliberate and idealized choices about modes of interaction in the public sphere plays out in real experience.  

Our research mixed ethnography, observation, and demographic analysis; we visited the market on Sundays throughout the fall, documented the event with video footage and photography, and recorded interviews with vendors, buyers, and market representatives. The following report organizes the research through the prism of what we have identified as three vital constituencies: the farmer’s market association, the vendors, and the market's consumer base. Although only the latter of these constitutes a real “public” in question (as opposed to a more focused interest group), the roles played by the other two actors (the association and the vendors) are vital to understanding who the public is and how they operate within the space of the market. Through these three lenses, inherently mixed and overlapping, we have also identified relevant theoretical underpinnings: the market is an example of Margaret Crawford’s idea of “urbanism as a by-product of economic activity,”; a mix of Henri Lefebvre’s triad of “spatial practice,” “representations of space,” and “representational space,”; and a modern-day take on the inversions of daily life associated with the concept of the Carnivalesque.


THE ASSOCIATION

[figure 1] Urban Village Farmers' Market Association Website

The Temescal Farmers' Market is administered by the Urban Village Farmers' Market Association, an organization based in Fremont, California running ten such markets in the wider Bay Area. Administration by Urban Village consists of three key aspects: securing of spatial infrastructure with the aid of local sponsoring civic groups, selection of vendors through an application process, and promotion of the market to consumer publics. This position of managing not only the layout of the physical space but also its projected identity makes the association the primary arbiter of the market's intended character. 

Interpretation of how the physical layout combined with definitive language and graphic identity about the markets goals influences user experience and encourages a reading of the roll of the Market Association within Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the production of space. In each case, a top-down construction of both real (spatial practice) and imagined (representations of space) elements strongly influences lived meanings (representational spaces) by visiting publics. 

Physical Character
The spatial practice of the market is defined by the pre-existing infrastructure of the Claremont DMV. The fact that the DMV is also a public space drawing from a neighborhood constituency lends it a useful position as a foil for what goes on at the market. Urban Village pays rent to the DMV, currently under a two-year lease, for its parking lot, and on Sundays, market tent stalls fill its modular parking spaces. The physical space is inscribed with signs and symbols that reassert the representations of space promoted by the Association. For example, signs outside a tent for use of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) are clearly visible. Somewhat expected waste strategies like composting and recycling are accompanied by a recent ban on plastic bags (Oakland Local, 2010), and the words “local” and “organic” are prominent throughout the space. Indeed, two visitors that were interviewed about the distance they traveled to the market indicated that despite having closer markets available, they routinely chose the Temescal market specifically because of the perception that it better emphasized organic produce.

Identity

The mission of Urban Village is clearly self-identified by descriptions on its website as aiding an authentic and important---but increasingly threatened---form of food commerce. The concept is that there is a holistic connection between support at an institutional level for growers of artisanal or heirloom produce and the benefits to consumers of support for the same at an individual level: farming the “right” way carries benefits that buyers should be privy to and sellers should be aided in promoting. These ideas have been bundled by researchers studying such material as the notion of a “foodshed”. (Sanderson 11)

This mission is articulated by Urban Village to carry both practical and moral weight, ranging from support for small farms to the creation of a venue for public interaction and economic revitalization to fuzzier declarations that “put simply, certified farmers' markets are the real thing”. (Urban Village, 2011) Such language has been consistently identified by researchers as typical of material from farmers’ market associations (Smithers 219), and indeed the wording used by Urban Village continues in the same vein:

“The markets produce a strong sense of community identity bringing people from diverse ethnic and other backgrounds together. They also serve to unite the urban and rural segments of the population”

“Markets have become instrumental in many cities’ successful efforts to revitalize economically and socially depressed areas”

“In most parts of the world the local market is the heartbeat of the community”

[figure 2] Green Ideals

Ultimately, the representational space of the farmers’ market finds its resolution in the weekly interactions of actual lived experience by the two groups it proposes to serve: vendors and consumers. Their interaction is guided by a mix of social and economic factors, with vendors coming to sell their goods at a desirable or in some cases singular practical venue. Consumers shop at farmers' markets for a mix of economic and social motivations, skewing toward the social at Temescal.


VENDORS: ECONOMIC IMPACT OF FARMERS’ MARKETS

The Temescal Farmers’ Market is an example of public space produced as a byproduct of the economy. A formerly homogenous parking lot, a pseudo-public place during the week, becomes a flourishing public arena under the guise of economic transactions. Farmers’ markets produce many direct and indirect economic benefits for the vendors, consumers and community.

For vendors, farmers’ markets provide a distribution channel with lower barriers to entry than traditional wholesale produce supply chains. Traditional supply chains often require high volumes of “packing grade” produce to be delivered on a regular schedule. Small or new farms that might struggle to meet these criteria see farmers’ markets as a more desirable venue for distribution. In addition to being able to sell smaller quantities with less stringent grade and consistency demands, these farmers are able to cut out the middle-men in the supply chain and realize higher returns. Through farmers’ markets, producers are able to take control of all levels of the supply chain from sorting and grading to marketing and retail. One study showed that producers can realize 40 to 80% higher returns when selling through farmers’ markets as opposed to traditional supply chains (Sanderson et al, pg 5).

Farmers’ markets provide low-cost, low-risk venues for producers looking to start selling commercially or market new products. Gianna from GDS Clothing Goods has a full-time job, but uses the Sunday market to sell her goods that she makes in her home studio. She sees the market as a jumping off point for her company. The market provides her with a base clientele without the expenses of a storefront and allows her to sell small quantities of her goods. Surrounded by a community of vendors, Gianna has the opportunity to learn from their business practices and develop her young business. Gianna only sells at the Temescal Market because, as she said, “the Temescal clientele has some extra income on their hands.”

Consumers often realize cost savings as a result of the higher returns experienced by farmers. In our informal survey of product pricing, we found produce at Temescal Market to be comparable in price or cheaper than similar produce at both Whole Foods and Safeway [see figure 3]. Prepared foods, meats, and other specialty items tended to be more expensive at the farmers’ market, probably because market products were more specialty, gourmet, and small-run. While there is little published research on farmers’ market pricing compared to conventional supermarkets, one study of 15 farmers’ markets in California found that on average, prices at farmers’ markets were one-third less than supermarket chains (Sanderson et al, pg 6.) While bargaining is not typical at farmers’ markets, it is not uncommon for some bargaining to take place at the end of the day when consumers know that vendors are trying to unload the remainder of their stock. Haley, a vendor with Thomas Farms from Santa Cruz county explained how bartering is more prevalent at the Grand Lake farmers’ market than at Temescal. The Grand Lake market is in a lower-income neighborhood, which might explain the increase in bartering. She said that a good portion of her sales took place near the end of the day. In addition to bartering, there is a tradition of trade between vendors. At the end of the day, vendors will often trade their overstock with each other.


[figure 3] Price Comparison

There is also evidence of positive economic impacts from farmers’ markets on the communities in which they are located. The Temescal market, like many farmers’ markets, is sponsored by the local business improvement district and is seen as a way to attract people to the neighborhood and increase spending in nearby shops. One study, looking at farmers’ markets in Oregon, found that between 38 and 63% of people attending the market planned to do errands in the neighborhood on the same day as the market (Brown, pg 6). One couple we talked to at the Temescal market named the market as one of the main reasons they moved to the neighborhood.

All of these economic efficiencies work together to allow producers and consumers to come together in way that produces urbanism as a byproduct. As described in “Everyday Urbanism” by John Leighton Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, “The sites for multiple social and economic transactions, these mundane places serve as primary intersections between the individual and the city (Crawford et al, pg 26).” The DMV parking lot, a landscape normally experienced through the automobile, is given new meanings through the individuals and groups that appropriate the lot for the market. A temporal place, the farmers’ market imbues the DMV lot with “social, aesthetic, political, and economic” meaning (Crawford et al, pg 29). As opposed to traditional retail outlets, which are typically rated on a sales per square foot basis, farmers’ markets produce spaces that represent more than a monetary value. More than a place of monetary exchange, vendors and consumers bring to markets a social atmosphere and local identity that is absent in the traditional economic sphere.

While the economy plays an important role in defining the identity of the Temescal Farmers Market, ultimately we found that its public is primarily engaged in a social act, motivated by a desire to assert their localness by participating in a weekly neighborhood event.


BUYERS: "HIP DADS WITH TATTOOS AND BABIES"


[figure 4] Neighborhood Demographics


[figure 5] Usership Statistics

The Temescal farmer’s market is a largely “local” destination in that the majority of buyers are traveling from within a two-mile radius [see figure 5]. Most people surveyed walked from nearby homes, with the exception of some drivers traveling with small children. The market is an important weekly neighborhood activity and both supports and reflects the self-consciously “sustainable” lifestyle the local residents have chosen to engage in.  As stated above, more than one buyer emphasized that “the farmer’s market is part of the reason [they] moved to the neighborhood.” To understand the nature of the public of the Temescal farmers' market is to understand the nature of the neighborhood. The market usership very clearly reflects the neighborhood demographics, which consist mostly of young white families with children. It is a definitively gentrifying neighborhood, bordered on the North and East by wealthier and whiter Rockridge and Piedmont, and on the South and West by the less wealthy and more diverse neighborhoods of Mosswood and Longfellow [see figure 4]. Despite the market association’s acceptance of food stamps and desire for an ethnically diverse clientele, the usership remains largely homogenous and its sphere of influence expands geographically at times but not necessarily ethnically. As one vendor put it, the clientele consists of “hip dads with tattoos and babies.” Almost all the vendors mentioned that the clientele at this market was “wealthier” than at others, or had “extra money to spend.” The missing “public,” in this case, are lower income residents of the adjacent neighborhoods that are ostensibly welcome but choose to go elsewhere.

For the “public” that is present, much of the attraction of the market exists outside the economic realm. From interviewing both vendors and buyers, it was clear that for many a trip to the farmers' market is a repeat activity—a ritualistic practice they look forward to and engage in every Sunday. They participate in the farmers' market not necessarily because it is the most convenient or efficient way for them to buy their groceries but largely as a social activity. They bring their kids to listen to the live music or participate in neighborhood hula hooping with other children. Many will buy produce, but the majority come simply to get a cup of coffee and a pastry which they enjoy while people watching and chatting. It is a space to see and be seen, a space to assert their presence in the Temescal neighborhood and mingle with people that they will likely see again both at the market the following week and at another local neighborhood establishment.



[figure 6] Activating the Temescal Creek


[figure 7] From Sidewalk to Seating Area


[figure 8] From Carport to Hula Hoop Zone

[figure 9] Activity Zones

These coexisting activities -- economic, social, and sometimes political -- play out spatially as well. Although the parking lot itself, occupied by the vendors, is the more formal sight of economic activity and exchange between vendors and buyers, areas adjacent to the stands become vital to the market’s success as a thriving public space. The Temescal Creek, a normally underused natural area that runs next to the DMV parking lot, becomes an overpopulated zone of sitting, eating, hanging out, and friendly conversation [see figure 6]. The DMV carport and adjacent plaza area, become entertainment spaces hosting the aforementioned hula hooping corner and live music [see figure 8]. In-between spaces get populated with folding tables and chairs, which become hot commodities [see figure 7]. People often resort to sitting on curbs, ledges, and tree stumps. These surplus areas, hosting carefree social gathering, contrast activities that take place at the entrance to the market where activists will often loiter with flyers and petitions. These coexisting zones and activity areas are clearly bounded and adhered to by the varying constituencies, existing in proximity to each other but never mixing [see figure 9].

One way to understand the Temescal farmers' market is through the concept of the carnivalesque. Like the carnival, the market is a ritual of overabundance that allows participants to escape daily life for a determinate and recurring period. In this way it acts as a foil to the official culture and consequently comments on normative practices through an inversion of the norm. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, make this very point in a larger argument about the role of hierarchical binarisms. They cite Bakhtin, who writes, “As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrates temporary liberation from the prevailing truth of the established order; it marks the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true fest of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal” (Bakhtin 1968: 109). In the case of the Temescal farmers' market, its inversion of daily life, although not extreme, is perhaps a critique of the commercialization and anonymity associated with current methods of food production and distribution---it creates a slow, local, healthy option in a fast, globalized food world.




BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Brown, Alison. Farmers’ Market Research 1940-2000: An Inventory and Review. School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University, MA. 2002.

• Chase, John Leighton, Crawford, Margaret, Kaliski, John. Everyday Urbanism. The Monacelli Press.

• Lefebvre, Henri.  The Production of Space.  Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.

• Oakland Local. (2010). Oakland Farmers' Markets Ban Plastic Bags. Oakland, CA. Retrieved from http://oaklandlocal.com/article/oakland-farmers-markets-ban-plastic-bags

• Sanderson, Kim, et al. Farmers’Markets in North America: A Background Document. Community-UniversityInstitute for Social Research: Saskatoon, SK. 2005. 

• Smithers, J. & Joseph, A.E. The Trouble with Authenticity: Separating Ideology from Practice at the Farmers’ Market. Springer Science+Business Media B.V, 2009. Published Online.

• Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

• Urban Village Farmers' Market Association. Retrieved from http://www.urbanvillageonline.com.  2011. 

The Albany Bulb: Informality and the Public Sphere

Stacy Farr + Corey Schnobrich l Architecture 219 l 2011.12.13


THE ALBANY BULB

Introduction

The Albany Bulb is a 30-acre land mass located at the western shoreline of the city of Albany, California. Projecting approximately one mile into the San Francisco Bay, the Bulb, as it is commonly called, is a multi-use, multi-jurisdictional space that has been created, used, claimed and altered by a variety of publics. In this paper we will explore the multiple publics that currently use the Albany Bulb. We will describe the way these publics constitute themselves, and how they relate to and organize space at Bulb. Additionally, we will attempt to connect the condition of urban informality with the ability of the Bulb to foster and promote an expanded notion of the public sphere.

In both its history as a site of discard and abandon as well as in the current condition of jurisdictional overlap and neglect, the Albany Bulb represents an example of informal public space. Similar to conditions of informality observed in Los Angeles by Margaret Crawford in “Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life”, the conditions of informality at the Albany Bulb have allowed the site to support multiple and simultaneous publics and uses (1999). Within this multiplicity of publics and uses, it would be inaccurate to claim that the space at the Bulb remains equally and completely accessible to all who desire to use it. However, the condition of informality allows for the continued evolution of the space, both through active contestation by its users as well as more gradual shifts in land-use patterns.

This informality fosters the type of democratic public space that Nancy Fraser describes in her essay “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In contrast to the idealized bourgeois notion of the public sphere described by scholars such as Jurgen Habermas, Fraser advocates for an expanded notion of the public sphere, one which is constituted by voices and actions of contention and contestation. Informal public spaces like the Albany Bulb enable these voices and actions of contention and contestation, and in doing so allow new user groups to emerge and claim different rights at the space. In Crawford’s assessment of the difference between formal (normative) and informal space in Los Angeles, we can see a parallel to conditions of informality at the Bulb: “Unlike normative public spaces, which produce the existing ideology, [everyday spaces] help to overturn the status quo” (1999, p. 28). At the Albany Bulb, preservation of informality can be equated with the preservation of existing multiple publics and uses, the preservation of the site’s ability to evolve in response to new claims by new users, and the preservation of an expanded notion of the public sphere.

Figure 2: Aerial view of the Albany Bulb

Site History and Jurisdiction

The current site of the Albany Bulb has historically been a liminal site of contested use, a battle between the benign neglect of a discard pile and the active intentions of capitalism and industry. The area saw its first human site modifications approximately fifteen hundred years ago by the Ohlone Indians, who intensively harvested tidal shellfish and created massive shellmounds out of the material remains of their harvest. In 1769 a Spanish Land Grant brought the area under the ownership of the Spanish settler Luis Peralta, and the flatlands abutting the Bay were primarily used during this time as grazing land for the massive Peralta cattle empire. The discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1848 shifted land use patterns throughout the entire Bay area, and by 1880 the Albany waterfront was an industrial site, dominated by two large dynamite factories. Dynamite was an integral part of the gold mining process, and a pier was constructed at the current site of the Bulb to assist in the transport of this dynamite up the Sacramento River and to the gold fields.

By 1880 rail had emerged as the preferred mode of transport, and the pier at the site of the Bulb fell into gradual disrepair. In an effort to promote industrial development, the U.S. Congress and the State of California granted a continuous swath of waterfront land along the east side of the San Francisco Bay to the Santa Fe Railway company. However, by 1905 multiple deadly explosions had compelled the dynamite factories to relocate further north, and the area where we now find the Bulb was emerging as an informal garbage dump. The city of Albany was incorporated in 1909, in part to combat the persistent dumping by Berkeley residents of garbage at the foot of Buchanan Street.

The tidelands of Albany, the current location of the Bulb, were officially granted to the city of Albany in 1919 by the State Lands Commission with the understanding that the area would be developed as a harbor to increase commerce and navigation. However, the harbor never materialized and throughout the first half of the twentieth century the area was largely neglected, used much as it is today as an unstructured recreational area by local residents.

The start of construction in the late 1930s of the Golden Gate Fields horse racing track saw the demolition of a large mound of bedrock and the emergence of the Bulb as it appears today. Infill of the marshland directly to the south of the Bulb was followed by the City of Albany’s extension of Buchanan Street and the formation of the areas of the Bulb now called the neck and the plateau (see figure 2). Infilling expanded rapidly after 1961 when the City of Albany and the Santa Fe Railway, which still owned the land, signed a contract to use the site as an industrial landfill for the city. This landfill created the “bulb” section of the Bulb, and filled the site out to the size and shape existing today. Much of the landfill material came from the construction of the expanding freeway system in the 1960s. Through the 1970s illegal dumping of toxic materials led to high levels of methane emissions and sporadic fires on the Bulb. Lawsuits against the landfill operator ended active dumping at the site in 1984, after which time the Bulb was placed under a Regional Water Quality Control Board closure order which was not officially lifted until 2005. A lease agreement with the State Department of Parks and Recreation began in 1985 and established the basis for transfer of the property to the State for State Park purposes.

Figure 3: Eastshore State Park map from the California Dept. of Parks and Recreation

The Bulb falls under several jurisdictional boundaries while at the same time receiving the kind of supervisorial neglect that would imply that it falls under none. In preparation for the transfer of the Bulb from the City of Albany to the State of California, intensive environmental cleanup of the Bulb was undertaken, funded by federal money as well as money from the Santa Fe Railway company. The State began purchasing the land in 1992, and in 2002 portions of the Bulb including the plateau, the neck and the beach were formally incorporated into the larger Eastshore State Park. The “bulb” portion of the Bulb is still owned by the city of Albany, which is responsible for the maintenance of the Bulb until the State determines that “an integrated shoreline park has been developed to its satisfaction” (Eastshore State Park General Plan, 2002). Transfer of ownership of this portion of the Bulb requires further environmental clean-up and is currently on hold due to budget constraints. The Eastshore State Park General Plan (2002) calls for restoration and public access improvements, including restoration and protection of Albany Beach and dune habitats, expansion of dune areas behind the beach, enhancement of water access to San Francisco Bay, closing of a gap in the San Francisco Bay trail, shoreline stabilization, public access improvements, and other park facilities such as picnic areas, interpretive signage, and restrooms. Currently, the position of the State is that the “plop art” must be removed, dogs must be leashed, and hazardous construction materials including metal rebar must be removed or mitigated (Eastshore State Park General Plan, 2002). The remainder of the Bulb will be transferred to state ownership by 2053 if clean-up efforts do not make transfer possible sooner.


The Publics

In the course of direct observation as well as text and Internet research, we have identified four discernible publics that use the Albany Bulb. In our determination and classification of these four publics we were guided in part by our own research amongst the users at the Bulb and in part by several of the constituting characteristics laid out by Michael Warner in his essay “Publics and Counterpublics.” Following Warner, our four publics are self-organized, “independent of state institutions, law, formal frameworks of citizenship, or pre-existing institutions such as the church” (2002, p. 51). Our publics can also be described as engaging in a relation among strangers, as well as being constituted through active uptake rather than sustained, engaged participation. And to an extent, our four publics also engage in the “poetic world making” Warner describes, the “performative dimension” (p. 82) of public discourse which will be described in further detail in the later portion of this paper. These four publics at the Bulb are in some cases overlapping and in other cases extremely disjunctive. After a brief examination of the publics currently using the Bulb we will examine how these publics interact with, perceive, and relate to space at the Bulb and to each other.

Figure 4: View towards Albany Beach

Off-Leash Dog Walkers

Both in observation and Internet research, off-leash dog walkers emerge as the largest and most well-constituted public that currently uses the Albany Bulb. In our field research we encountered numerous dog owners, walking alone and in groups, over nearly every portion of the Bulb (see figure 9). Even though dogs are not permitted on the Albany beach as part of Eastshore State Park regulations, these rules are not enforced, and the beach is a popular and well-populated spot for dogs. Nearly all of the dogs we observed during our field research were off-leash, running, fetching, and swimming in the cold, brackish water. On the plateau, dogs were running off-leash, although this is also forbidden under Eastshore State Park regulations. Dogs also ran off-leash along the perimeter paths and within the rugged interior of the Bulb, despite what would seem to be substantial hazards such as exposed rebar and broken concrete crevices. Dogs are currently permitted to run off-leash in this area, although the city of Albany is reviewing this policy as it prepares for the eventual transfer of the Bulb to state ownership.

The potential revision of the dog policy at the Bulb has activated the off-leash dog-walking public to constitute itself in several ways. People we interviewed at the Bulb reported having been approached by anti-leash-law advocates, bearing petitions and information on potential leash-law changes. Online, three websites provide a forum for alliances and action on behalf of the off-leash dog owners’ agenda: The Albany Landfill Dog Owners Group (www.aldogs.com), the Coalition for Diverse Activities on Water, Grass, and Sand (www.cdawgs.org), and The Albany Bulb (www.albanybulb.com). All describe the emerging restrictions on current dog policy at the Bulb and keep readers abreast of petitions that can be signed, politicians that can be approached, and Albany city council meetings where advocacy is needed. Additionally, an open letter authored by CDAWGS organizer Paul Kamen and posted on the city of Albany blog Albany Patch (www.albany.patch.com) addressed shortcomings in the City’s waterfront revitalization plan and has drawn a healthy and surprisingly civil response dialogue between, as of December 2011, over 80 people (P. Kamen, personal communication, November 21, 2011). There is evidence that this online activism makes the jump to active participation as well: at a February 2011 meeting of the Albany city council over 100 people rose to speak their opposition to proposed adjustments in the city’s dog policy at the Bulb.

Figure 5: The Water Lady by Osha Neumann and Jason DeAntonis

Art-making

The Bulb is saturated with art, taking a range of forms from hasty graffiti to more complex and permanent assemblages. It marks a range of identities, from clearly signed and authored pieces to completely anonymous works. Some of the largest, most permanent and most iconic pieces of art have been created by Osha Neumann, a Berkeley attorney and homeless advocate who became familiar with the Bulb in the late 1990s when he defended the Bulb’s resident community in the face of eviction by the City of Albany. Since then, Neumann, often in collaboration with his son-in-law Jason DeAntonis, has been creating art at the Bulb. One of his larger pieces, called The Water Lady, has been discussed as a potential Albany city landmark. A collective of four painters which calls itself SNIFF is also credited with many of the more permanent and iconic works located on the large concrete blocks that line the north side of the Bulb. Additionally, in an interview with two local residents, we learned that a graffiti crew from nearby Richmond visits the Bulb to paint large murals wherever they find space available. Smaller pieces of painting and assemblage are visible at almost every nook and cranny of the Bulb. Nearly all of the art at the Bulb has a fleeting quality, with the understanding that either the elements or the continued cycle of painting and re-painting will continue to change the artistic landscape.

Through the course of our research we found little basis on which to claim that the art producers at the Bulb represent a particularly well-constituted public. However, the body of work that they have collectively produced certainly represents an important aesthetic and iconic facet of the Bulb. The Bulb remains one of the last public spaces along the East Bay waterfront where “plop art” is still allowed to be created; tideland assemblages used to pepper the waterfront in Emeryville and Berkeley before the takeover of these areas by the East Bay State Regional Park. The visually rich environment of the Bulb was a stated draw for many of the people we spoke with during our field research, and presents a contrast to other shoreline parks in the area such as Cesar Chavez Park (the Berkeley Marina) and Point Isabel further to the north. Additionally, as detailed below, production of art at the Bulb is a way in which some users of the Bulb modify and claim personal and private rights to this public space.

Figure 6: Encampment near the center of the bulb

Residents

The residential community of the Albany Bulb began to emerge after the landfill officially closed in 1984. By 1990 there was a large enough community of people living on the Bulb that the City of Albany undertook a concerted eviction and enforcement program, which brought the estimated population down to less than a dozen residents. By 1999 this population had returned and redoubled, with an estimated one hundred people occupying the Bulb (McCabe, 2003). In the same year, the city passed an ordinance prohibiting camping and gave the resident population three months to relocate. The city’s effort was met with harsh public criticism and widespread press coverage. Evictions did take place, although the terrain of the Bulb and the overall lack of law enforcement enabled the residential population to return, only to be subject to another wave of evictions in 2007. Within these larger cycles of population rise and fall, several long-term visitors and residents of the Bulb whom we interviewed described smaller population fluctuations tied to economic and seasonal conditions. Several interviewees commented that population seems to be higher than usual right now.

During our site visits we observed nearly thirty active and several abandoned encampments of varying sizes, concentrated largely in the central and northern sections of the Bulb. Camps ranged from single canvas tents to larger compounds constructed of canvas, plywood, and other building materials. One resident named Frank estimated that around sixty residents occupied the Bulb in the fall of 2011, though numbers were dropping with winter rains (2011). Residents have addressed the almost complete lack of infrastructure on the Bulb in a number of ways. Bikes and attached wheeled trailers appear to be integral to residents, serving as a way to transport all needed supplies from off-Bulb sites as well as transport of scrap metal to West Berkeley for sale. During our field research we observed coolers, propane stoves, and gasoline and water jugs at many encampments, further illustrating that life on the Bulb is one of daily or semi-daily self-provisioning. Other observed self-created infrastructure improvements included a pulley transport system up a steep embankment and the use of a five-gallon bucket lined with a trash bag and topped with a toilet seat as a make-shift toilet. Although not specifically mentioned in the Eastshore State Park General Plan, the residential population clearly represents an aspect of the Bulb which will need to be “cleaned up” if the land is to be successfully transferred to state ownership. However, lack of available funding has made the continued enforcement of these routine evictions impossible. Meanwhile, the residential community constitutes itself as well as it is able. Although residents keep mostly to themselves, a resident named Thomas told us that decisions that are seen to affect all members of the community are raised informally through a “word of mouth” system (2011). Historically residents have also attended City Council meeting that are known to feature agenda issues that impact the Bulb (McCabe, 2003). Bulb residents are willing, in varying degrees, to talk to media, and have willingly participated in several media representations of themselves, including the 2003 film Bum’s Paradise. Residents also have a dedicated legal advocate in the form of Osha Neumann, a lawyer in private practice who routinely defends residents both in individual and group legal cases.

Figure 7: Sign marking the protected burrowing owl habitat on the plateau

Conservancy/Improved Access

The last public is actually comprised of two distinct groups , but they are paired for the purposes of this paper because they both seek an increase in regulatory order at the site of the Albany Bulb, and in doing such often find themselves in opposition to the previously described publics. In this desire for increased regulatory order, this fourth (dual) public advocates for a definition of public space which necessitates the exclusion or restriction of the three well-constituted publics we have so far introduced.

Due to its location protruding into the San Francisco Bay across from the Golden Gate, the site of the Albany Bulb is attractive to local and migrating bird populations. Despite its origins as an industrial landfill, much of the habitat of the area has either persevered, as in the case of the vast tidal mud flats at the north of the Bulb, or emerged in response to site conditions, as in the case of the vegetation that has overgrown much of the site (this is true only of certain vegetation: much of the Bulb’s vegetation is non-native and is therefore recommended for removal by some conservancy proposals). A vocal conservation public has emerged that would like to see the Bulb treated as an environmentally protected area with “sited, designed, and managed” public access, which will foster the preservation of native plant life and enable the use of the Bulb by bird and other wildlife populations (Save The Bay, 2001). This public is led by well-funded groups like the Sierra Club and Save the Bay and has had multiple successes, including the co-effort of Save the Bay and the Sierra Club in spearheading of the move to transfer ownership of the East Bay shoreline to state ownership in the 1990s and, most recently, the 2008 creation of an 8-acre set aside habitat at the plateau section of the Bulb for the burrowing owl (located on land already within the purview of the Eastshore State Park). This public has broad ideological and financial support from an environmentally conscious Bay Area population as well as the notable advantage of working in concert with the larger goal of the City of Albany: the clean up of the Bulb for eventual transfer of the land to the State. The improved access public would like to see the the Bulb physically accessible to a wider range of users, although this “wider” range notably excludes specific users. At the Bulb, improved access means several things. First, it involves improved infrastructure such as widened and paved paths through the Bulb and to the Beach, as well as picnic areas, interpretive signage, and more restrooms. Second, it means enforcement of dog leash policies where they exist and the extension of mandatory dog leash policies to include the entire area of the Bulb. A third expressed desire of this public is the removal of the resident population, which is perceived as threatening to some user groups (Kamen, 2011). Members of the improved access public are very active in online forums as well as at community meetings, filling a special February 2011 Albany City Council “Beach Improvement Workshop” session to capacity. The results of a 2011 East Bay Regional Parks user survey indicate that this public is in the majority regarding the question of enforced and enhanced leash laws when the question was posed in a random telephone sample but in the minority when answered by online form, indicating the organizational powers of the off-leash dog-walking public to know about and respond to surveys of this type. And as mentioned earlier, this public has the advantage of its desires aligning with the larger goal of the City of Albany: the clean-up of the Bulb for eventual transfer of the land to the state.

The conservancy/improved access public at the Bulb, in their desire for increased formal control of the space at the Bulb, represents a user group that would benefit from a reassertion of what Fraser describes as a bourgeois public sphere constituted by significant exclusions. (59) While all of the publics at the Bulb to some degree exclude members of other publics, it is only this fourth public that would require explicit exclusion. Implementation of the desires of the conservancy/improved access public, which will happen de facto by 2053 at the latest when the State takes possession of the Bulb, will see a decrease in informality at the Bulb and a reassertion of the notion of the bourgeois public sphere, accompanied by the loss of the ability of the site to evolve socially and physically.


Their Spaces

In addition to constituting themselves socially, the publics that use the space constitute themselves spatially. Beyond their mere presence on the Bulb, these publics shape and mark the landscape, whether through built structures or painted surfaces. Along with natural forces, they affect the landform’s physical evolution through excavation, erosion, and construction. They are both users and, to a lesser but significant extent, creators. In this section we will first briefly describe the physical space of the Bulb and how the publics use these geographies. We will then discuss how social perceptions of this informal space encourage appropriation.

The Physical and Social Landscape

As a landform, we divide the Bulb’s geography into five somewhat discrete areas: the plateau, the beach, the neck, the bulb, and the tidal flats (see figure 2). The plateau lies just north of Buchanan Street and the formal entry to the park. It hosts the fenced-off burrowing owl habitat created in 2008, and despite its explicitly environmental function, is used more frequently by off-leash dog walkers on the looped path than the conservancy public. The Albany Beach, located southwest of the plateau and directly adjacent to the park’s main path to the bulb, is an approximately 600 feet long and 60 feet wide stretch of sand with hewn logs and small groundcover on its inland edge. Dominated by dogs running and swimming off-leash, the beach is the most densely used part of the Bulb by humans and animal alike. The neck, just north of Albany beach, connects the plateau and the beach to the bulb by two quarter mile long paths, one running along the waterfront and another along its ridge. Dog owners and visitors predominate along the waterfront, while many residents ride the ridge trail to and from their encampments. The bulb, the amorphous land mass for which the whole site derives its name, protrudes into the San Francisco Bay, rising to a height of roughly fifty feet at its center. Much like the neck, the bulb is predominantly covered by a mix of shrubs and grasses growing around the industrial rubble and land fill that covers most of its surface. The resident population is scattered throughout but particularly concentrated in the bulb’s center (see figures 8). Visitors pass by some of these encampments on the way to Mad Mark’s Fairy Castle to the southwest and the largest sculptural pieces to the north. Though grafitti art is present on thousands of surfaces across the bulb, the biggest attractions lie along this shoreline. A thin, rocky path connects this area to two tidal pools, one at the bulb’s western edge and another to the northeast, part of a popular loop for all visitors.

Figure 8: Encampments on the Bulb, November 2011

The Informal Landscape and Loose Space

The confluence of these publics in this space, if not always side by side, has been called “a complicated stew of people and competing interests” (Moon, 2005) or, more simply, “anarchic” (Kristin, 2011). Some of the conditions that make this possible are social, including the multiple jurisdictions at the site and the lack of regulatory enforcement mentioned earlier. But some of the conditions are spatial, as site conditions encourage these publics to appropriate their own portion and make use of it in ways they see fit. This type of space is what Karen Franck and Quentin Stevens call a “loose space”, an urban site of informality and indeterminacy (2007). Whether under a freeway overpass or in a vacant lot, these spaces are “characterized by an absence or abeyance of the determinacy which is common in place types with assigned and limited functions” (17). By catering to no one in specific, they encourage and perhaps require individuals and groups to adopt or shape them to be suitable for use.

The Bulb bears many of the characteristics of Franck and Quentin’s notion of a loose space. The authors write, “Such (loose) spaces may be oddly shaped or difficult to get to, they may lack a name or be a secret; yet they become places of expression and occupation- often because of these very characteristics” (7). The Bulb is similarly accessible to nearly all, yet paradoxcially remote. As we found through our interviews, many if not most of the Bulb’s users are from Berkeley and Oakland, while the population of Albany itself is oddly unrepresented (see figure 9). Physically the bulb is isolated from foot-traffic by the adjacent freeway and from easy vehicular access by the mile-long length of the neck. And even though the site is regularly patrolled by police, their presence is easily observed on the bulb’s wider gravel paths and communicated by word-of-mouth among the residents (citation). The landscape, too, conceals and hides; at least two residents’ campsites were never discovered during 2005 evictions (Zamora, 2005). As Simon Abrams, an off-leash dog walker and longtime visitor said, “If you're going to be homeless, this really is a nifty place . . . It's remote, but not too remote” (Zamora, 2005).

Figure 9: Publics interviewed on the Bulb, October-November 2011

Second, as a former landfill whose industrial waste remains strewn across the site, the Bulb offers material easily appropriated. Franck and Stevens write, “Elements that are moveable, flexible or malleable can be appropriated . . . but also parts of ruins or junk left behind in abandoned spaces” (2009, p.9). The Bulb’s art-making public uses the industrial rubble as a canvas for two dimensional work and material for sculptural assemblages. The residents scavenge for sheet metal and rebar, creating a local informal economy that networks with the formal economy of scrapyards in West Berkeley. Residents have also used material dumped on site in combination with purchased items to create several structures, including a small library and reinforced concrete castle, a popular attraction for Bulb visitors. While these structures use appropriated material, they also appropriated space. As with all the encampments on the Bulb, their enclosure provides an inside and an outside, a bounded space. But in contrast to the public interiors of the library and castle, the space claimed by resident encampments represents not only the difference between inside and outside, but between private and public. While holding no legal claim to these spaces, both residents and visitors alike honor the sometimes subtle boundaries between appropriated “private” space and unclaimed public space. Several people we interviewed, both off-leash dog walkers and art admirers, expressed their discomfort at intruding on resident encampments.

Figure 10: Posted City of Albany park regulations

Third, the looseness of the Bulb is enabled by its programmatic indeterminacy. With the exception of the owl habitat, no part of the landscape defines activity in the way that playing fields or a formal campsite would. The Bulb offers “freedom of choice” (Franck and Stevens, 2009, p. 2), in practice if not in rule (see figure 10). On the Bulb, anything goes, or at least the potential exists for anything to go. The amphitheater, a small bowl shaped depression in the bulb’s center, is and has been the site of both day picnicking and night raves (Thompson and Cathcart, 1999 ). The castle is a playground for children, a mural for spray paint artists, and late night drinking spot for teenagers . The tidal pools serve migratory birds and as pathways for contemplative explorers.

The future of the Albany Bulb, however, is almost certainly not as an informal, loose space. Whether through immediate action by the City of Albany or the eventual action of the State of California via the Eastshore State Park, the Bulb will become an ordered space of increased regulatory control. Physically, it will become a place of no, or maybe just less, industrial waste, informal art, and non-native species. Socially, many fear or desire that it will mean the prohibition or curtailment of the resident, off-leash dog walker, and art-making public in favor of the conservancy/ improved access publics. These first three publics, or at least the activities that define them, will be explicitly excluded and the public sphere’s efficacy as a whole diminished relative to the state. A space that currently encourages appropriation, agency, and freedom of choice will likely give way to a more programmed, defined, and determined space.


Conclusion

Throughout its history, the Albany Bulb has been formed and re-formed by a variety of actors from private corporations to state agencies. Since 1985, individuals and groups in the public sphere have also had a significant role in this process, shaping the Bulb physically and socially. Often acting outside of or in opposition to the state, these entities have organized and asserted their right to use and inhabit the Bulb according to their interests. Today there are a least four discernible publics with interests in the Bulb: off-leash dog walkers, art-makers, residents, and conservancy/ improved access publics. Each entity has constituted themselves in different ways, from the digital petition-signing of off-leash dog advocates to the largely anonymous graffiti art on the Bulb’s landform itself. The first three publics, organized independently but not exclusively to one another, often express a common sentiment: we want the Bulb to stay the way it is- off leash, wild, free. The last (dual) public, though itself divided between environmental and recreational goals, desires change. This public, though largely invisible on site, holds many affinities with the vision of the state, particularly the City of Albany and the Eastshore State Parks system.

Inevitably, the Bulb will change from an informal, indeterminate, loose space of contestation in the public sphere to a more ordered, regulatory space of the state. Whether the increased formality of the state’s vision for the Albany Bulb is enacted in the near future or at the latest possible date of 2053, the diminishment of informal or loose space that the state plans require will have an effect on the kind of public sphere that the public space of the Bulb can support. In its existing form, the Bulb, in its informality, supports an expanded notion of the public sphere, one described by Fraser as a site of active contestation amongst user groups.





References

Moon, Amy. (2005, August 1). Endangered Art: The Controversial Beauty of Albany Bulb. San Francisco Chronicle.

California Dept. of Parks and Recreation, East Bay Regional Park District, & California Coastal Conservancy. (2002). Eastshore State Park General Plan.

Crawford, M. (1999). Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life. Everyday Urbanism (pp. 22-35). Monacelli Press.

Department of Environmental Sciences. (2007). A Brief (and approximate) History of the Albany Bulb. Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from http://environmentalsciences.berkeley.edu/es100/downloads/A%20history%20of%20the%20Albany%20Bulb%202006.pdf

Franck, K. A., & Stevens, Q. (2007). Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life. Taylor & Francis.

Frank. (2011, November 13). Interview with Resident.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, (25/26), 56–80.

Kamen, P. (2011, March 28). Open Letter on Albany Beach: Lack of Consistent Dog Policy is Serious Oversight. Retrieved from http://albany.patch.com/articles/open-letter-on-albany-beach-lack-of-consistent-dog-policy-is-serious-oversight

Kristin. (2009, November 19). Interview with Off-Leash Dog Walker.

McCabe, T., & Rozen, A. (2003). Bum’s Paradise. Documentary, Tomas McCabe.

Save the Bay. (2001). Save the Bay’s “Creeks to the Bay” Restoration Vision for Eastshore State Park. Oakland, CA. Retrieved from http://www.savesfbay.org/publications

Thomas. (2011b, October 30). Interview with Resident.

Thompson, C., & Cathcart, F. (1999, April 9). Edge City. East Bay Express, p. 1. Oakland, CA.

Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. Public Culture, 14(1), 49–90.

Zamora, J. H. (2005, July 26). City Clears Out 19 Campsites Used by Homeless People: Squatters Returned to Future Park after Bigger Eviction in ’99. San Francisco Chronicle, p. 3.