Every time the pavement showed sinkholes, some municipal worker came to fix it. This became quite a routine because rats would still dig holes under the tiles in order to enter their underground domain. why not make easy for both parties?

With more bikes than people, bikes are part of the street-scape in the Netherlands. This also challenges the idea of an immaculate environment, because bikes often end up as forgotten orphans, demolished and left behind. “Deterioration” is what the government calls this. We don’t want deterioration, we want “clean“. But this causes a problem, because officially these orphans are someone’s property. Even the government can not just take someone’s property away.  So, the following will happen: when the law enforcement notices a forgotten or damaged bike, they attach a warning sticker on it: “This bike will be removed on a specific date”. On that particular day, the bike will be removed and brought to a bike storage, where the owner can get it back after paying a fine. Bikes that will not be picked up, get either sold or demolished after 3 months.

I was surprised by the amount of warning stickers I found. And  I was also surprised by the variety of criteria the bikes were selected on. Some where just fine, some were barely bikes anymore. A person had to decide whether a bike gets a sticker or not. 

When I welded two –well maintained– rears of bikes together and placed it back on the street, it got removed within a week and without a warning. Although all parts in this bike were perfectly fine (no flat tire, no rusty chain) it was clear to the authorities this was not a bike anymore but ‘an object’.

Mail gets collected every now and then after 5pm📮

The interventions I did so far were all quite humble. It would be nice to create a private space to use within public space. The use of it should be private too. I made a bathroom. At first I wasn’t sure what the function of the bathroom should be, but it had to be used by someone. When I finished the bathroom, I thought of the movie ‘La riappropriazione della città’ (Reappropriating the city)–1977, where Ugo La Pietra tried to reclaim the public domain by a variety of interventions.

He opened his film with a close-up shot of him shaving. While zooming out, the shot reveals more of the context: he is out on the street. For me this little gesture of a private routine in public shows how clearly defined the use of public space is. It’s not that he shows indecent behaviour, neither it’s a loud scream for attention. He’s just shaving. And yet, he claims public space in such a powerful way. I decided to make a tribute to La Pietra by shaving myself in my bathroom on the street. I expected a variety of responses. It may have been the location, or the fact that the camera was too close by, but the reactions I got varied from being unnoticed to being ignored. The main effect was me feeling uncomfortable with claiming the street.

I wanted to see if I could  claim a part of the public domain. A volume. I started noticing all the elements on the street owned by utility companies. I saw them everywhere. Companies like Eneco and Evides own thousands of little volumes all over the city. I thought that if I would replicate these elements, nobody would notice. As long as it looks normal, nobody sees it.

After placing the electricity box on the street nothing really happened. Nobody seemed to notice something changed. But when I met Perzsman, a homeless man from Iran, the closet instantly found its purpose. I gave Perzman the key so he could use it as a locker. It now serves as his private public property. 

An empirical research on the
use of public space

Who owns public space and to what extend can someone claim a part of the city? With several playful interventions I tried to stretch the consensus on the public domain. But when my attempt to appropriate public space got appropriated, the project took an unexpected turn.
This is the story of the bike and the polish people.

For the full story check publication here