Trust in public knowledge, and the public institutions that protect it, is falling. This is a global problem causing political strife at a time in history when we are grappling with climate change, terrorism and the apparent end of economic growth. What can we do to arrest this slide and rebuild our confidence in public knowledge? One response is that people tend to trust things more when they see the work that goes into making them: sunlight is the best disinfectant; you have confidence in the sausage that you have seen being made. This simple idea has profound implications when examined through the lens of public space, implications that might just offer some ways to get out of this mess we’ve made for ourselves.

This idea is centred on two key claims. Firstly, rather than being understood as something that can be owned or held, knowledge is better conceived of as something that is practised. Secondly, public knowledge is something developed through doing things in public spaces. The argument follows that we need good public spaces, supported by strong public institutions, to negotiate the problems we face as a society. So instead of focusing on the politics or technologies involved in the rise of populism as many other critiques do, I will look at the spatial aspects of public life and institutions.

In day-to-day life, it is common and convenient to use short-hand references to explain much more complex entities and concepts. French philosopher Bruno Latour calls this the ‘double-click’,¹ the small movement that barely requires thought yet produces immediate results and enfolds thousands of moving parts and segments of code or action that remain almost entirely invisible in casual use.

Latour’s double click is a useful concept that helps us ask questions about what lies beneath the illusion of the independent fact. When people claim that knowledge is fact, they are performing a kind of double-click on the vast amount of work (politics, labour, research, documentation and so on) that has gone into making the piece of knowledge seem concrete and dependable. We might make a claim about the sea level rising, or carbon dioxide increasing, or the temperature on a given day. Each of these can be concluded as a fact measured in metres or degrees. But we often overlook the thousands of scientists, research reports, social conventions, measuring devices, standards, broadcasting technologies and labour that produce each of these facts.

In reality, knowledge is created through debates and discourses that progressively shift something from a speculation to something evidenced, and then to something that is accepted as true or factual. Much like the importance of being able to use software without looking at each line of code, the making of stable, unarguable pieces of knowledge helps us to communicate and survive as a society. But it can be dangerous to lose sight of the work beneath. For example, the past two hundred years of intense capitalist experimentation and colonial misadventure are in part built upon this ability to turn complex and dispersed practices into ownable and controllable units. Knowledge can be packaged into encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, museums, YouTube videos, university courses – into things that can be sold and/or stolen. Packaged knowledge can, like land, be privatised and placed into a world of commercial imperatives and corporate or state control.

In contrast, knowledge as a practice, as something that is sustained, performed and kept alive through ongoing institutions and embodied cultural experiences, is much harder to capture and sell. But because these practices require sustained performance and maintenance, it is also easier to damage and lose them. Good examples of this are the world’s indigenous languages, cooking recipes from our grandparents, or farming techniques from our ancestors. Although they can be recorded, they are practically lost once they are no longer used in day-to-day life. These forms of knowledge need to be practised to survive.

The making of knowledge through practice is the result of arranging all sorts of dispersed and heterogenous things (documents, technologies, people) into alignment or a kind of reliable assemblage. To produce meaningful public knowledge, these things, and the work that went into arranging them, must be accessible and understandable to the public. One of the key things that makes knowledge stable is the support of the wider public, and this comes from the public being able to see how it is produced. Once this is fractured, even the most rigorously argued fact loses its effect. We see this happening with challenges to climate change, the moon landing, vaccination – the list is long.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a range of public institutions supported and protected a common base of public knowledge through libraries, journals, political bodies, courts and so on. In the 1920s and 30s new technologies such as radio, widespread print media and global shipping routes, combined with massive economic depression, pushed people to reconsider politics and the international order. Following World War II, a kind of stability (and suffocation) was established through TV and international media, as well as international economic and media empires. This later twentieth-century assemblage has more recently been disrupted by the rise of the internet, leading to a repeat of the disruption to the confidence in fact, as seen in fake news and populism.

This disruption also plays out in urban settings as the world’s banks, bookshops, music shops, courts and post offices have been translated from large, solid public edifices with a presence in public space to shiny interfaces on the internet. A walk around any downtown city in the Western world shows hundreds of great old institutional buildings now occupied by fashion stores, cafes and apartments. The problem with this is that we no longer see these institutions in public life – they’ve literally been reduced to a double-click. What were once human relationships with power and authority are now browser-based interfaces, automated phone calls and stock market announcements on the news; they’ve moved from physical places to online portals.

This shift from the material and spatial to the digital has created efficiencies but it has also reduced the visibility of the practices that generate public knowledge and has created a massive variety of opaque and unverified sites that contest existing public knowledge. The disappearance of the public institution has contributed to a lack of trust in expertise and public knowledge, as well as helped create the conditions for the kind of populist demagoguery we are increasingly seeing.

Yet, with disruption comes opportunity, and there are clearly many new forms of spatial practice and smaller civic institutions emerging in the contemporary city. What might these new kinds of public spatial practice offer? To answer this, I need to define the word ‘public’. I use the word in three ways: when things happen in public (spatially); when things are done with the public (participatory); and when things are done as a public (politically). Each of these definitions draws upon a different historical tradition; collectively they help to articulate ways in which public knowledge can be rejuvenated through public practices.

So, what new kinds of institutions and public space are emerging that might build new public knowledge? What patterns or trends can we find in terms of developing civic behaviour and the production of common or public knowledge? What kinds of practice are being promoted and supported in these new spaces, and how does this differ from the past? I’ll develop this inquiry through three examples: new co-working spaces, contemporary public libraries and new placemaking practices.

In the past twenty years, massive changes to manufacturing, resource extraction and contract law have disrupted workplaces. The erosion of long-term jobs and financial stability has led to a fascination with innovation, new tech, new common resources and a sharing economy. Collectively this has opened up opportunities for small, ephemeral, emergent and experimental companies that require new spaces to do their business. In these places, people are exposed to different ways of making and doing; they see different technological sausages being made in different ways. The spaces created for these small companies lead to a limited form of public knowledge-making, which enables some people to get behind the double-click that guides most corporate technology.

The way that new co-working spaces produce public knowledge echoes the well-known metaphor of the cathedral and the bazaar. In this analogy, a building that is constructed by a singular organisation (the church) – with its accompanying solidity, large spans, structural innovation and singular voice – is compared with the relative simplicity of the bazaar and its many competing, complex and dynamic means of exchange. This metaphor also offers insights into public knowledge. The cathedral provides collective experiences of song, teaching, prayer and other spiritual experiences, all important to understanding our place in the world. But this doesn’t provide the breadth of observations and knowledge that can be experienced from a bazaar, which presents social life, diverse traditions, entrepreneurship and direct access to the colour and variety of daily life.

This metaphor is used to illustrate the difference between the cathedrals of Apple, Microsoft and other monolithic companies, and the relative messiness and transparency of open-source software. The bazaar exemplifies my first claim about how knowledge is made: open-source projects work through the shared practices of thousands of people working cooperatively and watching each other build things together. This builds trust in the software that is developed. Scholar Christopher Kelty calls this a recursive public and argues that they are ‘constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public.’² He is identifying groups of people that both talk about a certain kind of practice and use the medium created by the practice to have the conversation.

Co-working spaces and open-source software provide some people access to seeing new things happening in public. However, the end goal of much of this labour is to privatise the knowledge so that it can be packaged, sold and capitalised. But other forms of public buildings are enabling participation – the rise of contemporary public libraries are a good example.

It wasn’t so long ago that there was widespread fear for the future of public libraries. It looked like books were becoming obsolete. Right-wing cost-cutting in the 1990s and the recessions of the 2000s produced direct threats to their presence in public life. Access to digital books led to questions about the need for material storage. Yet, despite the disappearance of many other forms of public architecture, the public library continues to be widely celebrated.

There are a number of key characteristics that make contemporary public libraries so valuable, and these closely follow the three forms of public I introduced earlier in this article. Firstly, they are host to a diverse range of activities. Visit any of the new breed of public libraries today, whether it be Tūranga in Christchurch or Green Square Library in Sydney, and you will see people engaged in a range of non-traditional library practices: using 3D printers, playing games and attending talks. Secondly, these activities occur in public for other people to see, learn from, critique, think about and participate in. Thirdly, these all happen in a non-commercial space that does not require the kind of packaging of knowledge that inevitably comes with the pressures of commercialisation. This last point is critical: unlike commercial places, such as malls and shopping centres, which specifically prohibit gathering for political purposes, libraries are designed to support and facilitate public discourse (as political publics), albeit in a limited form, as I will explain below.

Public libraries are in many ways the last great bastions of meaningful and deeply civic public architecture, but they do have an inherent limiting factor. If we think about them in relation to recursive publics, we can see that they don’t offer publics many opportunities to practice or perform new kinds of knowledge with each other. There is good reason for this – they are intended to be used by as broad a segment of the population as possible. Subsequently, they are good at hosting meetings, but not at creating diverse forms of public or sharing practices.

So, new working spaces, good; public libraries, better. But what are the really transformative spaces that are replacing and even possibly improving upon the old public institutions that are disappearing? There is a new public movement that goes by a bunch of different names: adaptive, temporary, transitional, tactical. Regardless of the name, this movement creates projects in public spaces for public use and with the specific (if sometimes hidden) intention of building political publics. ‘Placemaking’ is a term that covers most of this activity.

Many of the new placemaking interventions offer very specific forms of activity. This might be a bike repair store, a new space for performance or an urban farm. The key difference here is that the projects are inherently about public practices, so any participation in the project means that the three forms of public are being cultivated. These projects occur in the space of a city or town and are therefore visible to new audiences. Furthermore, as these projects are outside and open for public use, participation is facilitated.

A free public bike repair store, such as RAD Bikes in Christchurch, is not just a place to watch people repair their bikes; it’s a place for anyone to access the knowledge and practices of this process and learn how to repair their own bike. The first two public aspects create the condition for the third and arguably most important form of public to emerge: a public that is politically invested in the use and repair of bicycles has been able to develop the competency to argue about the value and role of cycling in the contemporary city. This is a form of public knowledge that is meaningfully contextualised in the debates and discourses of a place. It is a public knowledge that is developed through practices undertaken in public space.

Another type of insurgent placemaking project is the urban farm. A number of these emerged in post-quake Christchurch and are great examples of this mode of public knowledge-making. In 2013 a new urban farm called Agropolis was created on a central city site. This project was framed as an urban farm because the creators (Jessica Halliday and Bailey Peryman) wanted to emphasis the relationship between land, food and infrastructure in ways that were not captured by the term ‘community garden’.

Projects like Agropolis are directly positioned as challenges to conventional farming systems. Farming, as we presently know it, is often large scale, takes place away from public view and involves increasing amounts of automation. Our food, and our knowledge of how it is grown, has quite literally become packaged. It is something we purchase and consume through the double-click of the supermarket supplied by the distant, unseen farm.

One of the major benefits of an urban farm is that the practices are undertaken in public view. People are able to see the planting and growing of vegetables happening in public. People are able to participate in these processes, whether that be working the compost, watering the plants, weeding or harvesting. People can start to gather politically through these processes and talk about the relative benefits and problems of the different ways of producing food.

The knowledge required to gather, grow, harvest and protect food is an archetypal form of knowledge that exemplifies the idea of knowledge as practice. This knowledge has occupied our behaviours, our patterns of inhabitation, and where and how we have lived for millennia. Almost all knowledge about food is learnt through doing; farming is something taught through observation and training on the job. The processes of watching people do things, asking them questions and getting advice are essential forms of knowledge-making, and in the case of urban farms, are developed in public space.

These kinds of projects help arrest the slide in trust in public knowledge that we are experiencing more broadly at the moment. When you are eating a sausage made from the food you’ve seen grown and harvested in an urban farm, you inherently trust and savour it.

When placemaking does involve the three kinds of public activity – being in public, with the public and as a public – it then offers exemplary new forms of making public knowledge through practice. Through these activities, we generate new kinds of public spaces or institutions. These are not envisioned as a return to the former era of public institutions, which became too big, too monocultural and too removed from the externalities and pollutions they were creating. Instead these new forms offer smaller and more local networks, which can be tailored to the ecological, social and cultural needs of a place and time.

Most of the examples I’ve given in this article come from post-quake Christchurch. This is because of the vibrant scene that emerged in the city after the quakes, which was enabled to a large degree by the excess of open public space that was present in the city, as well as the funding that was available during its recovery.

This kind of land surplus is very rare in contemporary cities. However, public space in the forms of parks, public squares and streets does exist and is often either designed for a generic activity in which no one is allowed to do anything active, or is lent to a specific dominating activity like parking and moving cars. The way to emulate the relative success of places like Christchurch in building new public practices and public knowledge is to use existing public space in more active ways. This involves shifting our perception from seeing public squares, parks and streets as places in which activity is banned or restricted, to seeing them as places that enable new (non-commercial) forms of public life and experimentation. Examples could include gardens, maker spaces, lending libraries, bike repair, and child and elderly care. At the moment, this shift in perspective most frequently occurs when spaces are taken over during public demonstrations and occupations as we’ve seen in the Occupy movements and protests in Hong Kong, Greece and elsewhere.

The reactivation of public space, and the associated regeneration of public trust, raises the potential of there being a new kind of citizen – one that is created and sustained by these spaces’ commitment to local ways of being, and the associated public knowledge and practices. This, in turn, could lead to the creation of a bigger and more differentiated world.

This is an excerpt from the book Public Knowledge, part of the Radical Futures series; it has been republished with permission. Click here to read Paul Walker’s review of the book.