The Term “Urban Space”, Term Paper Example

The term “urban space” does not have one specific meaning, but the first thing that comes to mind when considering urban space is an image of a city. Cities usually have tall buildings where businesses, homes, and streets are all crowded tightly together. But urban space also contains areas for leisure, such as parks and other open areas. These smaller spaces inside the larger urban spaces are typically designed to constrain the activities that take place within them. This is also true for the rest of urban space, where streets and sidewalks and stairs and buildings all restrict and direct the flow of people within the space. Artist like Andrea Zittel have challenged the restrictions and constraints of urban space in ways that put the focus on human activity instead of permanent and unmovable structures. The structures and objects within urban spaces may be deigned to constrict and constrain the flow of people, but imaginative artists have found many ways to rethink these constraints and find new ways to flow in and around them.

Urban space describes a wide variety of things, from skyscrapers to underground parking lots to apartment buildings to parks, and many more. In one sense, urban space is an endless variety of different things, but in another sense urban space is the same everywhere. Urban space is designed to accommodate a large number of people in a relatively small area, so the designs are intended to ensure that most people conform to their expected roles and activities. For example, an urban park might look at first like just a wide open space that can allow almost any form of leisure activity. A closer look at the average urban park shows that there are many constraints on activities. Some are physical, like bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, or pet areas. Other constraints are social, like the laws or restrictions against certain activities. Urban space is designed to shape activities from business to leisure to ensure that people behave the way society expects.

Artists like Zittel have challenged these ideas about urban space in a number of ways, and also challenged the rules and expectations of art itself. For many people, the idea of “art” (especially in urban space) is something that is confined the same way that many other activities are confined. In this limited view of art, the artist is someone who works in a studio, away from the rest of the world. The artist might be a painter or a sculptor or work in some other medium, but the idea of working in a confined and separate space is common. Once the artist in the studio finishes a piece, it is displayed in a museum or put up for sale in a gallery. These limited approaches to art do not just confine artists, they also confine the entire idea of what art is supposed to be. Zittel used different spaces and settings for her art so she could remove the limitations and constraints of the home/studio/presentation approach to art. She used found objects and unusual buildings and spaces to create and present her pieces in new ways.

The personal impact of artist like Zittel is that it has helped me see urban space (and the entire world) in a different way. The biggest lesson of Zittel’s work is that art is not just an object, or a finished product such as a painting or a sculpture.  Art also encompasses the process of creating, the space used to create, and the way art is presented. By taking art out of the limitations of the traditional studio or art gallery, Zittel’s art becomes something that can be experienced, instead of just something to look at. Zittel creates art that is not just about the object, but about the space in which the object was created or where it can be seen. Her art is not something that can be boxed up and moved from one gallery to another and still mean the same thing. Zittel challenges us to think about how we use space and how we use space without thinking, and how we can look at space differently and find new ways to use it and new ways to move through it.

Millions of people live in urban space without questioning how or why it is designed. We move through it from home to school to work and back again without thinking about it, as if the space just exists the way it does for no reason. Artists such as Andrea Zittel challenge us to ask those questions, and to look at the world around us and question how we use space and objects. Zittel uses found objects (like a broken table she repaired) to show the difference between form and function. She takes her art out of the studio and gallery and into the real world of urban space, which is often ugly and strange. She challenges all of us to see the world in new ways.