IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

Over the three years of its existence, the Black Lives Matter Memorial Garden in Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park was a point of contention between the City’s Parks and Recreation Department, the activists who planted it, and others in the city.Contrasting definitions of community and public space lay at the heart of this contention, reflecting divisions in the Seattle’s political and social landscape that were heightened during the summer of 2020. There have been multiple studies on public participation and the notion of the commons in parks and community spaces (Gilmore 2017; Parker and Schmidt 2015; Anglada 2022; Sevilla-Buitrago 2014; Upton 1994) and work on the often political nature of urban gardening (Müller 2011; Wright and Young 2019; Classens 2015; Crossen et al. 2018), but this situation seems unique as it crosses urban gardening and social justice with the nature of the commons and vernacular space, creating a singular situation for study. In many of the studies cited above, the fundamental definitions of community and public space are rarely addressed. In this exploratory case study, I question how conflicting definitions of community and the appropriate uses of public space play out in the material existence of public space by means of discourse analysis and visual discourse analysis from a variety of sources such as community meeting minutes, traditional media, and validated social media sources.