The Urban Library: Creative City Branding in Spaces for All [1st ed.] 9783030579647, 9783030579654

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Julia Nevárez

The Urban Library Creative City Branding in Spaces for All

The Urban Library

Dictionary in the New York Public Library (Nevárez 2019)

Julia Nevárez

The Urban Library Creative City Branding in Spaces for All

123

Julia Nevárez School of Social Science Kean University Union, NJ, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-57964-7 ISBN 978-3-030-57965-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4

(eBook)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my dad for his respect and civil conversations

Preface

Public libraries remain one of the few genuine democratic institutions in contemporary societies, globally. Public libraries are public spaces that provide access to all and cater to their communities’ needs in buildings that connect cities to people and knowledge. Libraries have been an intrinsic part of my life. The “Biblioteca Lázaro” in the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras was a refuge and source of myriad encounters and intellectual conversations that merged into the “Placita de Humanidades” where engaging conversations was a praxis. At the beginning of my Ph.D., the New York Public Library was located across the street from the Graduate Center, City University of New York on 42nd street. In the late 1980s, I was told not to visit Bryant Park because drugs were rampant and women were assaulted. This was a very different New York City from the family entertainment district that characterized Bryant Park and the Times Square area right before the pandemic in 2020. It was the New York of fiscal crisis before the city was branded for the entertainment of the global professional class, tourists, and investors. After visiting many libraries throughout my academic life, the Salt Lake City and Seattle Public Libraries as well as the Vancouver Public Library changed my view of them. Their exquisite spaces, where talented architects designed buildings that are awe-inspiring as well as practical, evidently placed people first to elevate their experience through iconic architecture. My interest increased after recognizing that the Salt Lake City and Seattle Public Libraries were intentionally positioned to alter the urban fabric of the areas under disinvestment in which both of these libraries were located. More intriguing was the transformation that both places underwent where libraries, among other cultural institutions, became key players in the branding and revitalization of both cities. In Medellín, Colombia, thanks to an invitation to present my work at the Universidad Nacional, I was able to visit many branches of the public library system including the Spain Library Park (Parque Biblioteca España) and many library parks in Medellín and Bogotá designed to embrace access to books and cultural activities in different neighborhoods with iconic, interesting, and beautiful buildings strategically positioned in neighborhoods challenged by social and economic opportunities. New libraries integrate urban development, community support and iconic buildings to be recognized for vii

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their signature architecture that renders unique their location, for instance in Chicago, San Francisco, San Antonio, Paris, Amsterdam, Sweden, Norway, or Tianjin Binhai, China among many others as well as those included in this volume. They create a remarkable legacy of public libraries around the world. The Vienna Public Library and their collection of world globes and the Institute of Esperanto now translated into the new language of computers impressed me with its beauty. And by thinking about libraries, I could not help but remember the ship full of books that used to visit Puerto Rico in my childhood years, nor the small community library in Port St John, Transkei, South Africa, or the public library in Durban, South Africa, where my friend and I borrowed and took turns to simultaneously read “Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game” by Herman Hesse or the desperate attempt to obtain reading materials by exchanging books among travelers in the remote corners of Africa where libraries were impossible to reach or were non-existent. Today’s small libraries where free books are available in Asbury Park or at a beach town in the coast near Palermo, Sicily, offered a different kind of access to books in a small scale, surprising and unexpected. Nor can I forget how I witnessed the evolution and growth of the People’s Library in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. All different kinds of libraries, under different circumstances, are open to all. Many thanks to those who inspire this work; among them, are books and inviting spaces as well as friends, colleagues, students, and institutions. A heartfelt thanks to Kean University for a sabbatical leave that helped conduct interviews with staff members at the Seattle, Salt Lake City, and New York City Public Libraries. The Urban Affairs Association in which many chapters of the book were first presented at their conferences provided invaluable feedback to a work in progress. The Wertheim Study in the New York Public Library provided support with a space from where to conduct research and write the book at its early stages. The Universidad Nacional de Colombia for their invitation to present my work and visit many of their public libraries in Medellín and Bogotá. And to all those who within the information overload of the urban and digital places we inhabit can find a space of respite, connection, and transformation in the beautiful libraries of our world. Union, NJ, USA

Julia Nevárez

Contents

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Introduction: Developing the Archive: Public Space and the Urban Library in Contemporary Perspective . . . . . . . . . 1.1 A Brief History of the Meaning of Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Labyrinth, Heterotopia, Icons of Democracy and Community: The Meaning of the Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Libraries and Urban Development: Branding and Revitalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Urban Development Models . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The Creative City and Branding the City . 2.3 Branding: Consuming Places . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Public Libraries as Anchor Institutions . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Seattle’s Public Library, Libraries for All: “To Bring People, Information, and Ideas Together to Enrich Lives and Build Community” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Seattle Public Library: Libraries for All . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Library Design for the Commons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The City and Public Space: Public Libraries as the Commons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Library and the City: Bringing People to the 3.3 The Meaning of the Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Iconic Architecture and Library Design . . . . . . . 3.5 Community Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Salt Lake City Public Library, the City Library: “To Advance Knowledge, Foster Creativity, Encourage Exchange of Ideas, Build Community, and Enhance Quality of Life” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Salt Lake City Public Library: The City Library . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: “To Inspire Lifelong Learning, Advance Knowledge, and Strengthen Our Communities” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 New York Public Library: “Knowledge is Power” . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67 67 76

Biblioteca España (Spain Library Park), Medellín, Colombia: “Actions with My Neighborhood” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Urban Temples for the Neighborhood’s Education . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 77 83

Halifax Central Library, Nova Scotia, Canada: “A Vital Centre for Learning and Culture in the Heart of the Community” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 World-Class Public Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85 85 91

Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt: “A Place for Open Discussion, Dialogue, and Understanding” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 The World’s Window on Egypt and Egypt’s Window on the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10 Conclusions: The Urban Library: Archiving the Future . 10.1 Explicit Connections to the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Iconic Public Library Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 Community Building Emphasis: Programming . . . . . 10.4 Archiving the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109

About the Author

Dr. Julia Nevárez research focuses on urban issues, urban development, public space, climate-related issues, and technoculture. Her interdisciplinary analysis seeks to address the complexity of urban living, evident in her written work with chapters in books about public space and globalization in Central Park; large video screens, public space, and governmentality in Times Square; and public space and gentrification in Harlem. She edited the book: On Global Grounds: Urban Change and Globalization to examine the emergent globalization processes of the early 2000s in different cities around the world. Her interest in theory as a way of conceptualizing contemporary urban space has focused on issues such as global urbanization, the networked society, critique of the global city, and social justice in the city. Her second book Governing Disaster in Urban Environments: Climate Change Preparation and Adaption after Hurricane Sandy focused on climate change in urban areas where her conceptual work sought to expand our critical understandings of resiliency, political ecology, as well as to provide alternatives for social and physical infrastructures. She served as an Executive Board Member of the Urban Affairs Association. She is the Sociology Coordinator and teaches at Kean University.

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5

Outside view of the Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Book Spiral-1. Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . Main escalator through book spiral. Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Living Room-1. Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Living Room-2. Seattle Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . The “Living Room,” Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reading Area Upper Floor-1, Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez, 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Study Area-2, Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salt Lake City Public Library. Inside study areas and the urban room (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salt Lake City Public Library Public Plaza-1 (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salt Lake City Library Plaza-2 (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Salt Lake City Public Library Plaza-3 (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . The Rooftop Garden, Salt Lake City Public Library (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nancy Tessman Plaque (Nevárez 2009) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York Public Library main branch, entrance (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York Public Library entrance lobby (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . New York Public Library first floor hallway (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York Public Library stairs and ceiling fresco (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York Public Library entrance lion (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . .

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11 Fig. 6.12 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

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Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4

New York City Public Library side entrance leading to Bryant Park (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York Public Library Rose main reading room (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York Public Library Rose Reading Room ceiling (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New York Public Library store entrance sign (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tourists leaving designated area for picture taking in the Rose Reading Room, New York Public Library (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . Bryant Park art cart on front plaza New York Public Library (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dictionary in the Rose Reading room, New York Public Library (Nevárez 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spain Library Park, Medellín, library against Andes Mountains. (Iwan Baan, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019) . . . . . . . . . . Spain Library Park, Medellín, library and the neighborhood (Iwan Baan, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spain Library Park, Medellín, library and the city (Sergio Gomez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spain Library Park, Medellín. Outside public space (Sergio Gómez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spain Library Park, Medellín. Inside with windows (Sergio Gómez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spain Library Park, Medellín, Inside 2 (Sergio Gómez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Halifax Public Library, outside (Adam Mørk 2019) . . . . . . . . . . Halifax Public Library. Inside stairs (Adam Mørk 2019) . . . . . . Halifax Public Library. Inside study areas (Adam Mørk 2019) . . . . Halifax Public Library. Outside street (Adam Mørk 2019) . . . . . Halifax Public Library and Plaza (Adam Mørk 2019). . . . . . . . . Halifax Public Library. Inside overlooking sidewalk (Adam Mørk 2019). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliotheca Alexandrina outside against the Mediterranean Sea (Google images, 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliotheca Alexandrina outside (Google images, 2019) . . . . . . . Bibliotheca Alexandrina inside (Google images, 2019) . . . . . . . . Bibliotheca Alexandrina inside-2 (Google images, 2019) . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Developing the Archive: Public Space and the Urban Library in Contemporary Perspective

Abstract This book will examine the changing roles and meaning of public libraries and library design responding to cultural and social values within the context of the creative city, branding, iconic architecture, and as an anchor institution. The global trend of the creative city urban development model and branding is anchored in the cultural institution of the library among other cultural institutions to attract the global professional class of creatives, tourists, and investors. Contemporary urban public libraries are also representative of democratic values to offer universal access. They seriously adopt as part of their mission the provision of important programming that highlights the interests of their constituents engaging in the processes of community building and establishing a strong connection based on tolerance and inclusivity to the cities in which they are located. The book is composed of an analysis of the creative city model, branding, and the library as an anchor institution to attract skilled knowledge labor to the city as well as tourists, residents, and investors. The public library design as a cultural institution for the commons that belongs to all will be a chapter that focuses on the meaning of the library, its relationship to the city, and other important components from the perspective of library staff and designers based on interviews and visits to some of the libraries selected. Descriptions of the public library main branches in Salt Lake City, Seattle, New York City, in the United States; Medellín, Colombia; Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; and Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt will be examined in a chapter for each main library. The final chapter of the book will offer a comparative perspective among the different libraries to highlight the best practices in library design, programming, and special features that make libraries distinct and iconic. Public libraries are some of the remaining genuine public spaces in the contemporary neoliberal city, and future trends indicate that their meaning and importance will likely increase as these public institutions change and adapt. Keywords Public libraries · Creative city · Anchor institution · Commons · Heterotopia · Public space · Network society · Urban development · Iconic architecture Contemporary public libraries represent democratic values of universal access, tolerance, and inclusivity. They provide a public space that supports different views not © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_1

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only in their collections but also in the contents of their programming to service different constituencies. More recently, public libraries have joined other cultural institutions in the city as anchor institutions within the creative city model (Evans 2009; Ferreri and Sanyal 2018; Florida 2006, 2002; Vivant 2013) to implement a softer intervention to brand themselves as icons (Rantisi and Leslie 2006) in a strategic image management (Parkerson and Saunders 2005), to communicate a specific city image (Kavaratzis 2007), and to develop an experience of place as a commodity. The public library crafts a destination image to attract visitors who are also attracted to other amenities in the city, to live in the city, and to invest (ElGhazali 2019). The creative city urban development model, implemented as a global trend, is the most generalized urban development model and is represented in the discourses of city reports and institutions missions in a consistent manner over the last 10 years. Global in the context of libraries refers to both, their broad approach to expand collections, reach to attract customers and visitors, as well as vehicles to brand cities as a global urban development strategy. Perhaps in a paradoxical way, the critical perspective adopted in this book seeks to both address the latest contents of profit-driven global urban development lately epitomized by the creative city model and branding as well as the sustainable practices that characterize cities’ development initiatives that are not accidentally inscribed in the meaning of the public library emblematic of democratic and intrinsically urban values of participation, tolerance of difference, and inclusiveness. The book seeks to frame urban development as a global issue with similar initiatives applied in different locales in a competitive drive among cities. The economic gardening that cultivates local entrepreneurship growth with existing businesses is fostered by improving local workers skills and facilitating a nurturing and information-rich environment for new entrepreneurs (Horrigan 2016; Manjarrez 2007; Sharpe and Stierman 2007). The creative city model, which has led to global urban development, focuses on attracting those creative, knowledgeable workers with sufficient earning power that sustains the urban development cities are branding. There is a double entendre in this initiative to develop cities that are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, creatives prefer cities that are tolerant, diverse, and that offer exciting cultural events in a vibrant place, while urban development initiatives cater to this group these experiences in the cultural sector through cultural institutions. The discourse that frames these interventions mimic and replicate themselves from city to city and to a certain extent turn into selffulfilling prophecies where indicators to measure the value of these interventions are developed in the form of indexes. The creative city model and branding are actively reproduced in the discourses used by cities and cultural institutions to find an echo in the way the interventions applied. As part of the creative city model, different cultural institutions also become part of the urban development initiatives that brand the unique characteristics of a locale. These are anchor institutions that amplify and reproduce the specific contents of urban development strategies for each city. Public libraries are among those institutions that anchor and serve urban development directives to transform cities into desirable places for residents, visitors, and investors. Public libraries reproduce social relations and sustain people over their life course (Frederiksen 2015). Public libraries therefore support and highlight, as part of the

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network of cultural institutions, the values by which a city seeks to distinguish itself while seeking to multiply revenue by bringing people to consume the urban public space experience. They are also tourist attractions and contribute to the amplifier effects of downtown vitality and iconic characteristics (Kemp and Trota 2008). Public libraries are also catalysts for community participation as anchor institutions already rooted in the community that strengthen and bridge relationships within the cities with other educational institutions and businesses (Cantor et al. 2013; Harris and Holley 2016; Mersand et al. 2019). Public libraries are complex institutions that epitomize different social and cultural values. Libraries in general contain the paradoxical intention to accumulate all knowledge, a challenge in itself precisely because of the ulterior impossibility of that task. Libraries intrinsic desire to encompass all records is based on the drive to expand collections, while acknowledging that this task will always remain insufficient and incomplete, a paradoxical quality of libraries (Crawford 2015). Between the desire for all inclusivity and the impossibility of that task, the manner in which libraries took shape and evolve is varied.

1.1 A Brief History of the Meaning of Libraries The general purpose of the library and the conditions for its existence are dependent upon the historical conditions, cultural sensibilities, and ideological intentions laced with privilege during changing circumstances throughout history. Libraries are institutions that carry ideological contents while to a large extent determine the role of and access to knowledge and information along the cultural values of the societies in which they thrive. The purpose and meaning of libraries, therefore, is tantamount to the significance societies place to knowledge acquisition and information dissemination according to those they seek to conquest, govern, and educate. This value has changed and expressed itself in different ways throughout history as well as the shape of space to accommodate such endeavor. Many libraries throughout history perished were destroyed or censored. The original Library of Alexandria represented the values of knowledge not only in the papyrus collection but also functioned as a research institute in antiquity (305 B.C. approximately). Alexandria epitomized imperial conquest and elite through the empire expansion of Greek culture’s elite in Egypt (Battles 2004). Alexandria is one of the first examples of a library as an institution (Crawford 2015). The purpose of Alexandria’s library was to preserve Greek literary works in their entirety and to obtain copies of every known work of their time, including a powerful monopoly in medicine, engineering, and theology. The library was an instrument designed to preserve intact the memory of humankind, and by doing so, it represents a tolerant and cosmopolitan ideal. In the library of Alexandria, rooms were furnished with tables and chairs, and indoor book stacks were surrounded by a series of colonnades or covered walkways to the shade scholars while studying and discussing among themselves in a shady grove filled with papyrus (Crawford 2015). Papyrus, however, was fragile and hard to preserve. The sheets of papyrus were kept together with an

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umbilicus where authors names and titles hanged, heaped together into scrolls piles. Scholars ate together in a dining hall and held their property in common (Crawford 2015). Alexandria was the first library with universal aspirations, with its community of scholars; it is the prototype of the university of the modern era. China, third century B.C. and Mesoamerica Pre-Columbian societies recorded culture in books and architectural details of stones under the imperial impetus to advance political prowess. Roman libraries offer another example of the symbolic attributes of libraries as constituted in the public biblioteca that originated in the public baths as part of the hedonistic culture that pervaded Roman civilization under Caesar, built after his death in the Forum around 39 B.C. (Battles 2004). Similar in design to the library of Alexandria, the Roman library had open rooms and columns surrounded by sideby-side rooms with niches where scrolls were deposited in armoires and doored bookcases. Roman libraries are the closest resemblance to today’s incorporated, official cultural institutions. They were designed for leisure and times of “otium” where literature reading was a hobby for the population (Battels 2004). Monastic, medieval, and Persian libraries emblematized the tension between the sacred and the pagan, heavily influenced by religion as a powerful cultural force to signify wealth, status, and cultural aspiration symbol (Battles 2004; Crawford 2015; Gameson 2015; Pettegree 2015). It is in the Renaissance and Enlightenment that libraries became to signify elite knowledge contained in private collections throughout Europe. With the invention of the printing press, access to books became more generalized, and knowledge became more dispersed and fragmented. Industrialization and modernity emphasized knowledge gained through science and the proliferation of books served that purpose. The book became a commodity. Public libraries in industrial society mainly served the purpose of immigrant assimilation with a progressive agenda, especially in the United States. Globalization revolutionized the increased connectivity with the movement of ideas, people and goods based on transportation advances and digital technologies. The manner in which cities develop under globalization follows global trends based on competition among cities to attract and retain a global professional class for the knowledge economy largely based on workers in creative industries and finance. Neoliberalism have shifted state priorities to be market-based and privatization has substituted many social services originally led by centralized governmental bodies (Nevárez 2018). Even public libraries in the United States are some of the first hybrids that even today function as part of state and private partnerships. This public–private dynamic forges a tension in the provision of services that public libraries offer since they still rely on public funding but also coordinate private support and the commercialization of services such as cafes and library shops. At a more conceptual level, the boundary between public and private is shifting constantly, as with other technological changes that conflagrate the public–private boundaries between home and work, for instance. Research libraries, private libraries, university libraries, and public libraries each functioned differently and emerged at different historical moments, speaking for the different intentions of their patrons and the social, political, and physical arrangements of their societies. Libraries as cultural institutions have responded to the ideologies of different societies historically. Libraries offer resources that also render visible

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global, national, community, and personal identities (Hudson 2018). In contemporary public libraries access to physical and digital records, to public space, and programming based on community needs symbolizes the values of tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness of global cities. The value of books is tied to their contents and is the most important object upon which libraries’ purpose rest. The materials for their production also changed according to the environments in which they were produced as well as the spaces designed for that purpose. From the societies of antiquity, Roman empire, medieval times, renaissance, industrial societies, and mass production to the neoliberal city, papyrus, parchment, clay, paper, and digital forms of collections produced specific design of buildings that promoted the use of these artifacts. In the United States today, there are a total of 16,766 public libraries. Many were originally built by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie who between 1883 and 1929 built 1689 public libraries in the United States (Kevane and Sundstrom 2014), as well as in many different countries around the world based on the notion that libraries can help acquire knowledge for personal improvement and provide a free service to all. Libraries have, therefore, fulfilled the function of research centers in Alexandria, religious knowledge in European monasteries, enlightenment and renaissance incipient proliferation of books, and mass knowledge production to acculturate immigrants in industrial cities, and more recently, public libraries are the centers where community needs are addressed and prioritized within the changing demands of contemporary society. When in the past libraries faced the perils of fires and destruction and assaults, today’s threats to public libraries are largely based on legislation, budget cuts, and censorship (Battles 2004). Since the establishment of the library of Alexandria, all the subsequent libraries are global in their attempt to contain a vast selection of works, act as a receptacle for a wide variety of contents, and serve as highly valued institutions that represent and showcase the cities where they are located. Books and the buildings that house them are symbolic of the values heightened in different societies throughout history. The design of the library spaces throughout history should provide a context for the way libraries are designed in contemporary societies and the meanings they carry as part of city branding in the creative city model that currently underscores urban development. The meaning of the library changes throughout time.

1.2 Labyrinth, Heterotopia, Icons of Democracy and Community: The Meaning of the Library Battles (2004) references Borges well-known short story The Library of Babel (2000) as exemplary of a unique piece of literature completely devoted to the library. Borges proposes the notion of valid and invalid information where everything both relevant as well as irrelevant information accumulated in the library mirroring the universe in its attempt. His take on the library then, characterized in an almost ironic manner,

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entertains the notion of how the desire to include all written records will have the fate of also including that which is not relevant. Borges describes the infinite task of an all-encompassing and all-inclusive endeavor, that of containing all humanly produced knowledge and written word into how a library is defined and understood. In doing so, Borges develops in literary terms, the archetype of the typical library. For Borges the archetype of the typical library is the “true compendium of the totality of human knowledge−less a model of the universe−than simply another kind of ritual representation of collective wisdom” (Battles 2004, p. 211). Borges equated the library to the endless universe. The elegant hope of Borges unlimited possible books repeats in the same disorder, and that repetition of disorder becomes the order. The enduring quality of libraries and the physical structures that support their function is translated into the repetition of possible arrangements throughout history and a basic component to cities. The repetition of library design has evolved to include now a more urban-like space that provides continuity from the library to the city and vice versa. The contemporary design of public library offers many amenities, distinct components and a relationship to the city that is not only allegorical but in the practice of space provides continuity to the urban area where the library is located, historically and spatially. More recent conceptualizations of the role and function of libraries include the view of the public library as a therapeutic landscape that contributes to the well-being of urban residents (Brewster 2014). They also have the goal to contain, preserve, and propagate information and to preserve the “sacrosanct space of inner thought” (Battles 2004, p. 212). The library provides a forest of books while also illustrating the evasiveness of a complete collection in that they will never fully contain in one space all possible records or will ever be a total library, for that matter. Libraries are intrinsically doomed for failure (Crawford 2015). The perplexing task or endeavor of collecting books and creating buildings to house them shows humans admirable capacity to assemble, encompass, and contain the world’s knowledge (Crawford 2015). Libraries are driven to collect a body of knowledge and produce a way of organizing its content with specific spatial qualities that is always an utterly incomplete undertaking. The library has become to emulate a space of distinction for what a city has to offer to its citizens in a democratic society, or as Manfredini stated, public libraries epitomize some of the few remaining genuine democratic spaces (2017). Throughout history libraries have been affected by political shifts, changing power dynamics, growth and disintegration of empires, built up with gusto and enthusiasm, destroyed by wickedness and neglect (Crawford 2015). Libraries throughout history can be considered incredibly purposeful and anxiously useless, “channel order and chaos, house both print and digital, old and new, they can control and liberate the knowledge they contain” (Crawford 2015, p. xviii). Libraries can be both an instrument to liberate or oppress and a tool for imperial conquest, assimilation, and control (Crawford 2015). Libraries’ aim to encompass the whole memory of humankind makes them vulnerable to complete erasure. Buildings where collections are housed can also be demolished, re-designed, or eliminated.

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Libraries have meant different things for different people over time, some of those meanings are: Universal memory, labyrinth, a repository of hidden or occulted knowledge, a sanctum, an archive of stories, a fortress, a space of transcendence, a focus of wealth and display, a vehicle of spirituality, an emblem of wisdom and learning, a mind or brain, an ordainer of the universe, a mausoleum, a time machine, a temple, a utopia, a gathering place, an antidote to fanatism, a silent repository of countless unread books, a place for the pursuit of truth (Crawford 2015, xviii).

Libraries can enrich lives and build communities for lifelong learning, recapture the spirit of openness, be centers of excellence in the production and dissemination of knowledge, expand knowledge, instill taste for reading, forge path breaking development, be a central memory institution, provide inspiration and enjoyment of the arts, a free space to discover, create, and share ideas and information, enrich knowledge, inspire community, foster innovative learning, develop scholars, be spaces for selfdiscovery and individuality, preservers of the past, opening the future, contribute to enlightenment, cultivation of education, access of information for all, a home away from home, a place to feel valued, safe, respected, and included. The library can be considered as a place to which attachment grows since they contribute to community development in offering community space, technological resources, connections to the local economy, a sense of pride and ownership to the community, and strengthen relationships of trust within the community for free, in an aesthetically pleasing environment according to the taste of the times (Aabø and Audunson 2012). Most people simply love libraries. The library itself can be considered a work of fiction where the imagination helps shape space. According to Warner (2015) the library becomes the place that can protect the legacy of fictional work, its self-reflexiveness that has always aspired to monumentality and eternity and as such from the verbal to the graphic, from a narrated story to an object to be read. Fiction needs libraries, “Without the libraries to preserve its creations, the imagination is mortal, like its protagonists” (Warner 2015, p. 157). As an archive, the library enshrines those fugitive, mobile, airy webs of words that make up stories, and its existence−its survival−warrants the work’s value and imperishability. The Thousand and One Nights, for instance, is a work of fiction that has an oneiric quality, symbolizes the archive of all stories, where a vast body of stories composes the whole, similar to a library. The Arabian Nights is a narration in a different time to the industrial, and an ongoing tale during unproductive time. As such stories function as currency circulating across cultures and time zones (Warner 2015). The Arabian Nights as a work of fiction is a microcosm of the ultimate library, and with the utopian fantasy that the book carries, the possibility that someone could be the keeper of memories in a vast and labyrinthic scale gives shape to the vision of the library (Warner 2015). The power of words affects reality in the Arabian Nights and its circular effect in the storytelling; like in Borges’ library, there is abundance, completion, and multiplicity where the world and words are interwoven (Warner 2015). The library becomes a generator for books to be stored, and that same impulse gives life to libraries. Libraries are places that poets adore. In films they structure order and mystery, the sublime calculation of maximum confusion achieved with the

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maximum of order (Marcus 2015). The library in fiction is a repository of hidden knowledge, and its organization creates a time machine kind of space (Warner 2015). In the absence of library, imagination is mortal, like the protagonists of the stories told to encompass the whole truth of human experience. Libraries and books have that kind of power. In the labyrinth where Borges describes the organization of libraries, readers can find themselves and get lost. Libraries become a space where real things can happen. Therefore, libraries can have many different meanings as meditative spaces, as sites of conflicts and devastation, menacing as well as nurturing (Crawford 2015). In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco depicts a historical murder mystery in an Italian monastery almost as an excuse to show the intricacies of the search for knowledge in this alchemist medieval society (Eco 2004). Wilkins (2015) described libraries as a sustaining culture and intellectual life because and/or perhaps despite of the changes that are occurring around them. He mentions that contemporary libraries stand on three pillars: research and learning, publishing, and the management of spaces for users and collections. Disseminating scholarly ideas have become as important as simply cataloguing and shelving the books in which knowledge is expressed. Libraries become places to pursuit truth by facilitating and widening thought to build an urban community based on the freedom to read, freedom of ideas, and freedom of communication. In the United States, figures show that public library visitation per capita included 1.57 billion visits during fiscal year 2010, showing a 10-year increase of 32.7, and the total operating revenue for public libraries was $11.30 billion in the same year (Grimes et al. 2013). More recently, in the 50 states of the United States there are 8,895 public library administrative units as well as 7,641 branches and bookmobiles (American Library Association 2017). The six public libraries selected and studied in this book are the main branch libraries of Seattle, Salt Lake City, and New York City in the United States; the Spain Library Park in Medellín, Colombia; the Halifax Public Library in Nova Scotia, Canada; and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. Even though they are library systems with multiple branches that offer library services to different communities, the libraries selected are the main flagship branches for the library system in each city. They represent a sampling of contemporary library design that focuses on iconic architecture and community-centered programming. The qualitative research is based on the analysis of 11 interviews with staff, architects and informal conversations with users as well as participant observation during my visits to the Seattle, Salt Lake City, New York City public libraries main branch and the Spain Library in Medellín as well as interviews with architects of the Salt Lake City and Bibliotheca of Alexandria in Egypt that took place in 2009. The structured interviews lasted from one to one-and-a-half hours, and they were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim by the researcher. Feedback from transcripts were obtained from some of the interviews. The identities of the individuals who participated in the interviews remained confidential and only evident by the name of the company’s approval. The interviews provide insight into the libraries’ functioning and meaning before they developed public relations offices that now craft and disseminate how the libraries are represented in their own form of branding. Horizontalization allowed for the use of

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expressions completely and clearly articulated, and statements that did not comply with that criteria were eliminated. Clusters of meanings, trends, and themes were reviewed, analyzed, and discussed with colleagues. Significant statements were used to write a thick description of what participants expressed to develop a composite description that captured the participants perspectives related to the creative city urban development model, branding, and anchor institutions, as well as the meaning of the public library. Particular common perspectives of the participants related to the best practices for public library design were also included in the analysis. More recent observations after visits to the New York City Public Library main branch in 2019 are also part of the composite description of the role of public libraries in contemporary society. Archival research, descriptive statistics and content analysis of libraries websites, mission statements, and city planning, marketing, and other reports are also part of the data to establish points of comparison focusing on the branding of libraries and the creative city urban development model as well as libraries as anchor institutions. The research question upon which the book is based seeks to understand the changing role of public libraries focusing on what is their meaning and how contemporary libraries distinct characteristics are branded within the creative city urban development model as anchor institutions in their relationship to the cities where they are located. The different forms of archiving information were collected in spaces built for that function and called libraries.1 The spaces that gave shape to libraries changed throughout history and the notion of the public library emerged forcefully during industrialization, especially to accommodate immigrants’ assimilation into modern societies, especially in the United States. The book economy at different historical moments concealed power dynamics attached to the book as a resourceful object whose value was highly dependent on its accessibility to powerful elites first and mass consumers later. The notion of global is addressed in two levels, one is as the definition of the library’s universal purpose to archive all human knowledge, and the other is as an urban development trend that more recently envisions public libraries as cultural resources in the revitalization and branding of cities for tourists and residents who expect a high standard of life in cities. Understanding the role of contemporary public libraries is a complex undertaking, and as such informed from an interdisciplinary perspective, they are presented earlier and critically examined from the different perspectives of the creative city urban development model, branding, anchor institutions and library design literatures in the following chapters. In the creative city, the urban dweller experiences the physicality of the urban in its most traditional and classical definition, the convergence of population size, population density, and heterogeneity (ethnic, cultural, and in terms of lifestyles) while also maneuvering the virtual spaces generated by digital connectivity (Varnelis and Friedberg 2012). In this regard, libraries as anchor institutions provide both physical

1 The

word library evolved from the Latin “liber” translated into book and libraries translated as “related to books” also from the Latin.

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proximity, face-to-face interaction, or propinquity, as well as access to information in the form of books, digital records, and programming. Chapter 2 , Libraries and Urban Development: The Creative City, Branding, and Anchor Institutions will examine how the creative city model has led urban development by branding cities and fitting public libraries as anchor institutions to promote the urban experience each city developed to attract tourists and the knowledge laborers or creatives for the consumption of the experience of the city. As public institutions, public libraries also function under the premises of a public space accessible to all. Chapter 3 , Library design for the commons will problematize the notion of the commons and public space including virtual access and the democratic spaces generated by this conflagration of the physical and the virtual in contemporary society. The chapter will present, from architects, designers, and library staff perspectives, what is the meaning of the public library, the libraries design relationship to the city, and how iconic architecture helps distinguish each library to represent a specific “brand” for each library based on their urban social, cultural, historical, and spatial contexts. Chapters 4–9 will focus on each library selected to highlight the processes through which they were designed, their mission, and distinctive characteristics for the main branches of the Seattle Public Library, Salt Lake City Public Library, New York City Public Library, Spain Library Park in Medellín, Halifax Public Library in Nova Scotia, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt, respectively. The final Chap. 10, Conclusions: The Urban Library: Archiving the future will conclude with an analysis of the similarities and differences among the public libraries selected and future trends in public library design and programming that tend to focus on community involvement, empowerment, and urban sustainability. The library as an alternative space developed by Foucault in the notion of heterotopia will help move forth the adaptability that public libraries have mastered as public spaces for community. As a postscript the concluding chapter will also contextualize the impact of the coronavirus pandemic which will certainly affect notions and practices in public space and in libraries more specifically as well as the protests against racism ubiquitous in urban areas of the United States during Summer 2020. Public space in contemporary society falls within a public and private distinction that is blurred by virtual access and the collapse of clearly defined boundaries along state responsibilities that have shifted to facilitate market priorities. The private sector has increasingly assumed roles once pertaining to the state, therefore the privatization of many social services. The public library, an institution that since early times devoted itself to the collection and in some instances production of knowledge and information, is the subject of complex dynamic to cater for diverse audiences. Public libraries, especially the ones selected in this book, follow a trend located within urban development and the creative city: (1) they utilize iconic architecture to strengthen the branding of the city and the experience of place to attract tourists, residents, and investors, (2) have become possibly one of the few alternative heterotopic public spaces that remain within the neoliberal, privatized society, (3) redefine public space and the commons, and (4) conflate the urban propinquity and connectivity in the provision of services to the communities they serve. Therefore, public libraries could be considered a heterotopia (Foucault 1986), a public space that due to this

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set of constantly shifting circumstances has become one of the few remaining public spaces that offers a semi-autonomous alternative to neoliberal private interventions per se as they are geared to provide community-centered programming. As a public space or a “commons” with universal access for free, the contemporary mobile audiences or networked publics find ease of physical and virtual access to information while also engaging in physical and virtual connectivity in the library. The public library is a gathering place designed by star architects in branded, iconic, spectacular, aesthetically pleasing, and highly functional space. Information has become the generalized form through which “knowledge” can be obtained. This notion of knowledge also needs to be unpacked critically since knowledge relationship to power is unevenly produced and distributed, and differentially accessed (Foucault 1986). The frenzy to accumulate knowledge or the “archive fever” so characteristic of the modern impulse requires an externality or outside, an audience. There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority embedded in the possibility of its own destruction. Archiving is a continuously open process (Derrida 1996). Challenged by the virtual access to information, libraries are vehicles that facilitate access to information that have been able to adapt to the changing conditions under which information is recorded and stored. Digital technologies serve as yet another platform where knowledge is distributed and where the attention economy of images, signs, and information compete as forms of address. It is easy to understand how libraries’ function emerges as a place where information can be acquired, processed, and even discussed or fine-tuned with the assistance of staff. In this regard, library staff become a compass in the search for what could be considered fleeting and overwhelming amounts of information, both in the physical content of libraries and the virtual archives to which they also provide access. Libraries’ function, the artifacts collected, the values that make them relevant, and the design and purpose of the spaces anchored on understandings of knowledge highlight the urban character of the cities where they were built. As archives and libraries have a privileged space in the social imaginary, the latest trend in library design is also led by facilitating social interactions in public spaces to attract residents and tourists to a city that offers high standards of quality of life and iconic library architecture to brand the creative city. The next chapter will provide a critical look at the creative city urban development model, branding, and the role of anchor institutions to which the public library can be considered an example.

References Aabø, S., & Audunson, R. (2012). Use of library space and the library as place. Library & Information Science Research, 34(2), 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2011.06.002. American Library Association. (2017). State of America’s Libraries 2017. A Report from the American Library Association, American Libraries. The Magazine of the American Library Association. Retrieved July 10, 2019 from http://www.ala.org/news/sites/ala.org.news/files/content/ State-of-Americas-Libraries-Report-2017.pdf.

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Battles, M. (2004). Library: An unquiet history. WW Norton & Company. Borges, J. L. (2000). The library of babel. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Brewster, L. (2014). The public library as therapeutic landscape: A qualitative case study. Health & Place, 26, 94–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2013.12.015. Cantor, N., Englot, P., & Higgins, M. (2013). Making the work of anchor institutions stick: Building coalitions and collective expertise. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 17(3), 17–46. Crawford, A. (Ed.). (2015). The meaning of the library: A cultural history. Princeton University Press. Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever: A freudian impression. University of Chicago Press. Eco, U. (2004). The name of the rose. Random House. El-Ghazali Kesseiba, K. (2019). Braning architecture: The logic behind brand promotion of architectural, product and iconic buildings in the 21st century. Conference Proceedings. ArchCairo8: Building the Future “Now”−Rights to Better Living, Architecture, and Contexts (pp. 8–10). Cairo, Egypt. Evans, G. (2009). Creative cities, creative spaces and urban policy. Urban Studies, 46(5–6), 1003– 1040. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098009103853. Ferreri, M., & Sanyal, R. (2018). Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London. Urban Studies, 55(15), 3353–3368. https://doi.org/10.1177/004209801 7751982. Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class (Vol. 9). New York: Basic Books. Florida, R. (2006). The flight of the creative class: The new global competition for talent. Liberal Education, 92(3), 22–29. Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. Frederiksen, L. (2015). Our public library: Social reproduction and urban public space in Toronto. Women’s Studies International Forum, 48, 141–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.11.009. Gameson, R. (2015). The Image of the medieval library. In The meaning of the library: A cultural history (pp. 31–71). Princeton University Press. Grimes, J., Manjarrez, C. A., Miller, K. A., Owens, T., Swan, D. W., Vese Jr, R. D., & Isaac, N. (2013). Public libraries in the united states survey: Fiscal year 2010. Institute of Museum and Library Services. Harris, M. & Holley, K. (2016). Universities as anchor institutions: Economic and social potential for urban development. In Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (pp. 393–439). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26829-3_8. Horrigan, J. B. (2016). Libraries 2016. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/ 2016/Libraries-2016/. Hudson, J. (2018). A place called home: Encounters with libraries. The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues, 28(1), 40–54. Kavaratzis, M. (2007). City marketing: The past, the present and some unresolved issues. Geography compass, 1(3), 695–712. Kemp, R. L., & Trotta, M. (2008). Museums, libraries and urban vitality: A handbook. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. AM11.M74 2008. Kevane, M., & Sundstrom, W. A. (2014). The development of public libraries in the united states, 1870–1930: A quantitative assessment. Information & Culture: A Journal of History, 49(2), 117–144. https://doi.org/10.1353/lac.2014.0009. Manfredini, M. (2017). The augmented meta-public space: interpreting emerging transductive territories in enhanced centres of consumption. Journal of Public Space, 2(3), 111–199. https://doi. org/10.5204/jps.v2i3.120. Manjarrez, C. A. (2007). Making cities stronger: Public library contributions to local economic development. The Urban Libraries Council. Retrieved Jun 20, 2019 from http://webarchive.urban. org/uploadedpdf/1001075_stronger_cities.pdf. Marcus, L. (2015). The library in film: Order and mystery. In The meaning of the library: A cultural history (pp. 199–222). Princeton University Press.

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Mersand, S., Udoh, E., Gasco-Hernández, M. & Gil-García, J. R. (2019). Public libraries as anchor institutions in smart communities: Current Practices and future development. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii. https://doi.org/10.24251/ hicss.2019.399. Nevárez, J. (2018). Neoliberalism: Globalization and the urban paradox in climate change governance. In Governing disaster in urban environments: Climate change preparation and adaption after Hurricane Sandy (pp. 37–66). Rowman and Littlefield. Parkerson, B., & Saunders, J. (2005). City branding: Can goods and services branding models be used to brand cities? Place branding, 1(3), 242–264. Pettegree, A. (2015). The renaissance library and the challenge of the print. In The meaning of the library: A cultural history (pp. 72–90). Princeton University Press. Rantisi, N. M., & Leslie, D. (2006). Branding the design metropole: The case of Montréal, Canada. Area, 38(4), 364–376. Sharpe, K. B., & Stierman, J. K. (2007). Libraries and community economic development: A survey of best practices. Retrieved June 9, 2019, from https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/ scholar?q=cache:3oFQqmsGXSEJ:scholar.google.com/+sharpe+k.+b.+%26+stierman,+j.+k.+ 2007&hl=en&as_sdt=0,33. Varnelis, K., & Friedberg, A. (2012). Place: The networking of public space. In Networked Publics (Ed.), Kazys varnelis (pp. 15–42). Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press. Vivant, E. (2013). Creatives in the city: Urban contradictions of the creative city. City, Culture and Society, 4(2), 57–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2013.02.003. Warner, M. (2015). The Library in Fiction. In The meaning of the library: a cultural history (pp. 153– 175). Princeton University Press. Wilkin, J. P. (2015). Meanings of the library today. In The meaning of the library: a cultural history (pp. 236–253). Princeton University Press.

Chapter 2

Libraries and Urban Development: Branding and Revitalization

Abstract This chapter will focus on the urban development initiatives that cities implement including Marshallian industrial districts, hub and spoke, satellite platforms, state anchored, cluster development, and will focus on the most recent creative city model and branding. A general framework will be provided that considers neoliberal policies of austerity and the retrenchment of the government to contextualize how cities become more autonomous in seeking capital expansion and enable capital projects and improvements in partnerships with the private sector. Among these urban development initiatives, the creative city perspective and branding of anchor institutions such as public libraries help locate libraries within the initiatives that work along other cultural institutions to strengthen the image that specific cities seek to brand in a collective effort to attract members of the creative class, tourists, and investors. Keywords Creative city · Branding cities · Public libraries · Anchor institution Globalization revolutionized the movement of ideas, goods, and people largely based on transportation technologies and the development of the internet that provides global connectivity. The manner in which cities develop under globalization follows global trends based on competition among cities to attract and retain a global professional class for the knowledge economy largely based on workers in creative industries and finance. Cities have been adopting strategies that are generally grouped under the creative city model where quality of life issues such as entertainment, education, physical and virtual mobility are highlighted as contributors to the desirability of cities as settlements for the global professional class, tourists, and investors. Neoliberalism has shifted state priorities to be market-based and privatization has substituted the delivery of many social services originally led by centralized governmental bodies (Bröckling 2015; Harvey 2005; Nevárez 2018). Cities have become largely autonomous machines from the state and/or other forms of centralized government turning more entrepreneurial in their strategies to attract capital. Even public libraries in the United States are some of the first hybrids that even today function as part of state and private partnerships and anchor urban development in that function with other cultural institutions. This public–private dynamic forges a tension in the provision of services that public libraries offer, since they still rely on public funding © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_2

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but also coordinate private support and the commercialization of services such as cafes and library shops and of the image of the city along other cultural institutions. At a more conceptual level, the boundary between public and private shifts in the public library between global access to resource and public space in the form of a platform enacting democratic values of participation as well as spectacle for direct and indirect profit making in both the physical and virtual spheres. Spatially and technologically, the public–private boundaries blur in the context of the public library in a similar way as it does in the realms between home and work, for instance.

2.1 Urban Development Models Increasingly the city functions as a semi-autonomous political entity with a large degree of flexibility to implement urban policy and urban planning (Bröckling 2015; Harvey 2005; Slaughter 2004). The retrenchment of the nation state and privatization has positioned cities to devise strategies and policies to affect urban development. Cities competition among each other to attract capital has translated into variegated urban development approaches that, since the 2000s, function as an almost autonomous entity seeking an integrated urban renewal process. I would argue that this integrated approach is highly fragmented and mostly discursive in that the narrative managed by different sectors of governance, from the major and governor offices and cultural institutions coincide in similar approaches to make the city attractive in a persuasive manner to different stakeholders. As such, cities compete among each other to attract capital, residents, and tourists along development on specific industries, more recently finance and information technology as well as related industries. The urban development models that cities implement to sharpen their competitive edge in a largely profit-seeking model directly alters the urban landscapes through urban regeneration and renewal programs based on the development of unused postindustrial areas and the up-scaling of neighborhoods. One generalized urban development strategy is city branding, creating spectacular iconic architecture designed by architects who have global prestige. The creative city model best describes the kinds of urban development policies implemented to a larger or lesser extent in the different cities where the libraries showcased in this book are located, namely, Seattle, Salt Lake City, New York City in the United States, Medellín in Colombia, Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada, and Alexandria in Egypt. Urban development models are abundant, change with times, and respond to specific characteristics of main industries, and the kind of skilled professional labor base that cities seek to attract fall within the (1) Marshallian industrial districts: agglomeration of a relatively specialized set of services that are tailored to the unique products and industries of the district (i.e. Silicon Valley, Orange County) (Bellandi 1996), (2) hub and spoke: dominant resource sector company largely based on transportation hubs (i.e. Boeing: dominant industrial employer Microsoft: leading services firm, Hutchinson Cancer Center: progenitor of a series of biotechnical firms, Port of Seattle) (Cârlan et al. 2014), (3) satellite platforms : externally based multi-plants,

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research triangle park, research centers of major multinationals corporations (i.e. South Korea: low-end textile and electronics platform) (Markusen 1996), (4) state anchored: public or non-for-profit entity, key anchor tenant in the district (i.e. military bases, military academies, weapons labs, post-war growth of US cities: Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Diego, Colorado Springs, Ann Arbor, Austin) (Markusen 1996), (5) cluster development: coordinates different industries to cooperate and collaborate in the innovation sectors of the economy (i.e. some of the alliances are established between research centers in universities, hospitals, computer businesses, etc.) (Boja 2011; Cumbers and Mackinnon 2004), (6) branding: a hybrid between marketing and urban development (i.e. seeks to invest on the development of a place identity with unique values that represents a locale, being a city, a county, an area, a town) (Kavaratzis et al. 2014; Dinnie 2010), and (7) the creative city: a combination of previous models advanced to include creative industries and its workers (Evans 2009; Ferreri and Sanyal 2018; Florida 2006, 2002; Vivant 2013). The creative city model focuses on the industries related to creativity such as entertainment, spectacular events, and the creative workers (artists, advertisement agencies) employed in the cultural sector (Florida 2006). Florida refers to creatives as bohemians, artists, dwellers of the night economy, people who enjoy difference, who seek the experience of that which is foreign, a sort of urban uncanny, that strangely familiar reference produced by an urban heterogeneity of many sorts. Creativity here is a label and an analytical tool rather than an exploration of how−in Marxian terms−we are to develop our humanity and the structures to sustain it, for all. Critics of Florida point to a seeming celebratory tone about creativity that tends to overlook the tiers of creative work and service in urban development where differential incomes distinguish those who earn less for work as taxi drivers, waitressing, and hospitality jobs from those who, according to Florida, the city seeks to attract, namely higher income lawyers, advertisers, and finance employees who expect cities to be vibrant, diverse, and to provide engaging and intelligent cultural events. Urban regeneration therefore is anchored on development models that portends to advance and cultivate an edge on competition to attract residents and tourists of the latter stature, economically speaking. The knowledge economy on which the development of cities that cater to the service sector rather than manufacturing during the heyday of industrialization and the origin in classical terms of what a modern city constitutes, intersects with the creative city that Florida analyzes, the network society of Castells (2000), and the network publics of Varnelis and Friedberg (2012). Conceptual overlaps point at: (1) cities whose main industry is knowledge and service work, (2) technology as a catalyst to both urban development and urban life, and (3) social life laced with technology in both its physical urban and virtual contexts. More recent urban development paradigms include the smart city where data-based decisions direct development to include multiple urban aspects from sustainable goals, climate mitigation and adaption, as well as quality of life policies. Confronted by skepticism by some for its heavy-handed expert lead quality and unanticipated outcomes where communities are entrusted and possibly disenfranchised with a blind acceptance of data as a source of important decisions. The normative model of creative city and

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branding planning affected the creation of the public libraries sampled in this book and will be the focus of the contextual analysis to follow.

2.2 The Creative City and Branding the City Cultural entrepreneurship in the United States addresses the cultural and creative economy on urban economic development. As exemplified on the importance of the arts and cultural production in regional or urban economic development, in the general economic context, it has been a driving force of job growth in the United States (Qian and Liu 2018; Scott 2006). This involves cultural goods production, cultural goods distribution, intellectual property production and distribution, and the support of educational services where quality of life factors are of predominant importance among population, density, industry agglomeration, (design) knowledge, creativity, and urban amenities demonstrates “positive associations with cultural entrepreneurship and business establishment size presents a negative association, overall creative industries provide social benefits to the city” (Qian and Liu 2018, p. 3). On the supply side, the growth of the creative economy in cities is a self-reinforcing process after the initial stage of cluster development and formation. The agglomeration of cultural products businesses offers a specialized and diverse labor pool, networks and knowledge spillovers, shared suppliers and supportive services, institutional infrastructures, and branding/place identity for the creative economic growth components required for the multiplier effect which translates into profit-making initiatives that lead urban development in contemporary cities (Qian and Liu 2018). Entrepreneurialism as a mode of the cultural logic of neoliberalism can be understood within the creative city model as interventions that rely on creative ways to entice investors, residents, and visitors to spend time, money, and energy in the cities to which they travel, visit, or reside. The cluster effect of urban policy is easily identifiable in the new firm formation throughout the cultural sector and the higher level of social cultural diversity that it seeks to entail.1 Arts and cultural activities that the creative class prefers, and have a higher demand for, are usually located in urban centers with more amenities, openness to new opportunities, diversity where a higher concentration of creative industries thrive generating vibrant cities (Qian and Liu 2018). It is in city centers where market opportunities tend to be discovered and exploited by a diverse background of urban entrepreneurs. Business or industrial clustering relies on the perception of market opportunities easily identifiable in cluster, and grouping of businesses that have customer bases that are stable and where supporting services for start-ups are readily available. In their empirical study on cultural entrepreneurship, specifically new firm formation in cultural industries, Qian and Liu identified educational services in fine arts schools, museums, and parks in their multiple United States city study and the spatial patterns of cultural entrepreneurship (2018). They failed to account for public libraries as part of cultural institutions that provide services that certainly 1 For Evans industry, sector, and cluster refer to various groupings in policy statements and strategies

(2009).

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influence the educational standards of a city. The literature on public libraries lacks an analysis of cultural entrepreneurship in the understanding of creative cities in the cultural goods production, educational services, and broader and narrow applications of the creative economy. Public libraries as a quality of life issue can be considered an urban amenity that serve the large urban populations of cities. Qian and Liu found that population density, Hispanic population, cultural industry agglomeration, design patents, creative class, and urban amenities are positively associated with cultural entrepreneurship (2018). They also found that cultural agglomeration, creative class, and urban amenities are intertwined with art or culture-based economic development strategies and a place-based economic development strategy that address amenities impacting regional economic development output and adding to urban amenities (Qian and Liu 2018). In the creative city model, emphasis has been placed on the growth imperative to drive policy interventions and sectoral prioritization of the cultural-creativeknowledge economy (Evans 2009). Evans points to the “hope value” (land and labor markets, innovation and skills) in which most public interventions and subsidy in the new creative, knowledge economy is based, where “cluster” and “growth” theories and models are implemented without evidence on their relevance nor the scale at which these interventions are sustainable (2009). City growth is measured based on absolute job and wealth creation and is compared with the economy as a whole in relation to other industrial sectors. Overall, the creative economy is a self-fulfilling prophecy with little supportive evidence to maintain its growth through cluster development claims. The new nomenclature to designate contemporary economic and cultural urban arrangements based on the “new” post-Fordist economy, new growth theory, and post-industrial landscapes, argues Evans, signals a break from the past based on employment characteristics, production process and outputs, and spatial arrangements (2009). Creative industries produce goods in mostly urban areas that center on performing visual arts, festivals, crafts and design making, associative live work, industrial and institutional agglomeration in film and media, higher education, and manufacturing (design, furniture, fashion, and textiles) sectors. As indicated earlier, it is the workers in the creative and knowledge industries that urban development initiatives seek to target. Development aid, supports enterprise, workspace and intermediary development agencies, education and training programs, and grant administration are part of the economic clusters of the creative industries (Evans 2009). Cities interested in improving their city ranking in competition with others rely on the creative city model and “space”/place promotion. There is little evidence of a strong link between creative class clusters and higher productivity and how they correlate with inequality and gentrification. Regional competitive advantage is secured by implementing policy instruments and intervention programs for their perceived social and environmental benefits and externalities, trickle down effects and improved quality of life at the local level, despite these been global urban development trends (Andersson 2007). This set of circumstances produces urban regeneration, business improvement districts, heritage and conservation, and zoning strategies (Evans 2009). They derive a tangible “value-added” component to deprived communities (exemplified in the improvement of Medellín’s, Seattle, and Salt Lake City urban areas where new public libraries were built).

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Most of the public libraries included in the book, especially Seattle and Salt Lake City in the United States, Medellín in Colombia, and Alexandria in Egypt, were redesigned and opened to the public in the early 2000s. At that point, the creative city discourse influenced city planning, especially in the inner city areas that were still recovering from suburban white flight and fiscal crises that made uneven development clearly situated in a spotty development that characterized many American cities at that time as well as Latin American cities, and Alexandria, even if under different circumstances. The New York Public Library was also influenced by this approach to urban planning, and as a cultural institution embedded in the character of the city, it also accommodated its programming to continue to support the progressive era goals of easing the assimilation of immigrants to the city while also attracting newcomers to the service sector as well as tourists. The tourist presence at the New York City Public Library main branch on 42nd street was identified by librarians as a new development at the time in 2010, something they needed to get used to and develop resources to cater to them in newly developed programming in the form of tours in the library. The Halifax Public Library is a more recent product of such creative city and branding strategies. Cities act as an almost autonomous entity from the retrenching state, thereby implementing urban development policies based on growth and profit-making within an entrepreneurial city framework. Within the context of the creative city and branding, urban regeneration focused on functionalism and representation that considered, under a multiplier effect approach, the city as a growth machine to which limits of growth have been a consideration in the literature (Kirkpatrick and Smith 2011). In other words, the experience of the city, its cultural events, and institutions that constituted the urban experience became commodities sought after in an effort to make of those experiences, a profitable enterprise. Community economic development under this and more recent urban development approaches still faces the challenge to situate community interests within a framework of democratic and shared decision-making where the differentials of expert knowledge have always been existent. The city, now as a unit to facilitate profit-making, is the most indicative aspect of this planning and urban policy trend. According to Lloyd and Peel (2008) the functional alignment of economic growth, investment, housing and population patterns along the interaction of diverse flows contribute to agglomeration efficiencies. Place-branding relies on functional linkages and relations in factor markets (Andersson 2007; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2007; Lucarelli and Olof 2011). According to Stern and Serfert (2008) there is a generalized agreement among urban policy makers that regional economic development and job growth are the solutions to urban poverty and its accompanying problems. In this regard, there is a similarity to the Chicago School of Sociology guided by possible interventions to urban problems. The creative economy stems from the sum of economic activity arising from a highly educated segment of creative individuals like artists, architects, computer programmers, university professors, and writers from a diverse group of industries such as technology, entertainment, journalism, finance, high-end manufacturing, and the arts. Therefore, attracting the creative class has become a priority to generate jobs and tax revenue in urban areas. For Stern and Serfert (2008) the

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creative city model can be considered the latest trend in a post-industrial urban revitalization strategy. A social policy paradigm for the creative sector has the potential to address urban poverty to thrive in urban vitality that trickles down to benefit all citizens. However, the trend toward creative city building, according to Stern and Serfert (2008), is also intensifying inequality and exclusion. Policy makers have come to realize that the spatial proximity of specific interventions that involve major cultural facilities like museums, performing art centers, and, I might add, public libraries, magnify economic impacts and become catalysts for downtown revival. The multiplier effect of organizational and audience expenditures adds profit to the regional economy based on the development of non-profit cultural sector activities. The global competitive advantage of cities is understood to fuel the creative city model as applied to urban revitalization among cities around the world. Gentrification remains one of the most common problems of culture-based revitalization when artists and other creatives spark population turnover in the specific neighborhoods impacted by creative city policy. These interventions also counterbalance the negative aspects by stabilizing ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods. The economic inequality visible in many US cities has been attributed to globalization, decline of unions, and deindustrialization as these structural changes have altered the social and economic composition of cities to which the service sector and the creative class have followed. The winner-take-all dynamic of attracting the most talented in the creative occupations with high educational requirements can be identified as one of the elements that triggers economic inequality in cities. Therefore, those with modest educational qualifications would likely have less opportunities to be hired in the high-paying jobs of the creative industries sector (Stern and Serfert 2008). The culture-based revitalization supported by the creative city model tends to focus on large-scale projects and districts to make downtown areas more attractive and enlivened with significant investments designed to attract tourists, conventioneers, high-income downtown residents, suburbanites, and luxury/rich residents to satisfy the post-industrial and middle-class consumption cultures (Evans 2009). Moreover, there is a tendency to generalize the “downtown” to all areas of the city, even those away from traditional urban centers. As such the creative industries labor sector expands as part of the initiatives designed by the creative city to attract this sector to work and live in the city. Specifically, the workers in the creative industries in NYC from 2003 to 2013 have witnessed an increase in publishing (newspaper, periodical, book, and other publishers), film and television (motion picture and video production, motion picture and video distribution, post-production services, and other motion picture and video industries), music production (record production, integrated record production/distribution, music publishers, sound recording studios, other sound recording industries), broadcasting (radio and television broadcasting, cable and other subscription programming, and news syndicates), architecture (architectural services, landscape architectural, interior design, industrial, and graphic and other design services, photography studios-portrait, commercial photography, advertising agencies, outdoor advertising, direct mail advertising, and other services related to

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advertising), performing arts (theater companies and dinner theaters, dance companies, musical groups and artists, and other performing arts companies), visual arts (art dealers, museums, and fine arts schools), and other independent artists, writers, and performers for a total of 262,365 in 2013 (Forman 2015). According to Forman (2015) the independent creative workers included architects, curators, art directors, craft artists, fine artists, painters, sculptors, and illustrators, multimedia artists and animators, artists and related workers, commercial and industrial designers, fashion, graphic, interior, set and exhibit designers, actors, producers and directors, choreographers, music directors and composers, musicians and singers, editors, writers and authors, photographers, film and video editors, makeup artists, theatrical and performance. There is still a category of “Other” that in 2013 included 21,300 workers (Forman 2015). The policies implemented for the creative industries in New York City correspond to a global trend in city-making. According to the most recent definition of the city that seeks to attract the global professional class and expand the service sector, focuses on the creative knowledge industries of globalization rather than the manufacturing industries that characterized industrialization. The recommendations of the Creative New York Report identify the creative sector as one of New York City’s most important economic assets (Forman 2015). Accordingly, the Center for an Urban Future recommends real estate affordability, government funding and support, economic and community development, and diversity and inclusivity as the anchors for a vibrant urban life that seeks to attract the creative sector workers which coincidentally extends the classical definition of the city as the center for ethnic, cultural, and lifestyle heterogeneity from industrial times to globalization and the neoliberal city. In this approach, the changing role of the state to redivert initiatives that shift from the public to public–private partnerships and even to use state real estate assets, in the case of New York City, includes old psychiatric centers and hospitals, to address workspace affordability challenges for the creative industry workers (Forman 2015). Under the similar creative industries approach, each localized intervention showcases the differences of the urban context in which they emerge and are implemented in specific cities. For instance, urban renewal policies in The Netherlands involves both public and market partners and residents (Musterd and Ostendorf 2010). The aim of these interventions rests on urban restructuring policies that brand the policy itself under the assumption that stronger urban economy trickles down to help disadvantaged neighborhoods, and help social cohesion in mixed and integrated neighborhoods. The Big Cities Policies III that they studied showed that the idea of attracting better-off residents to settle in disadvantaged neighborhoods did not appear to work in developing social cohesion (Musterd and Ostendorf 2010). The increasing gap between the poor neighborhoods and other more affluent areas was feared to increase the divide and disconnection between the poor and mainstream society. Gentrification and role of universities remains to be explored more fully as it relates to the knowledge economy and urban development (Moos et al. 2018; Reades et al. 2018). Creating favorable environments for business involves making provisions in the physical development of cities that improve the quality and access to housing, the workplace, and the general living environment. These measures translate into

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“revitalizing and restructuring the supply of housing, renovating and opening industrial areas, fine-tuning open space planning and other physical measures for ensuring and improving safety in traffic, the physical environment and society” (Musterd and Ostendorf 2010, p. 84). The aims of these policies are to deploy an urban living ecosystem of access and quality that manifest itself in pleasant housing, safe neighborhoods, availability of employment, proximity to shopping areas and educational facilities, care, assistance, youth policy, quality of life, social involvement and participation for both, immigrants and the native population based on respect and the reduction of criminality. Overall, this is what a vibrant city seeks to provide. Comparisons and competition among cities to attract the global professional class, investors, and tourists have produced tools to measure the degree of competitiveness among cities. City ranking has evolved as a tool to compare cities along quality of life indicators. City ranking is an emerging tool that allows interested parties to measure cities against each other, comparatively in terms of the qualities of places to live, for instance, based on quality of life indicators. In the United States context “Niche” Table 2.1 Highest quality of life Indicator for New York City, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Medellín, Halifax, and Alexandria City

Highest Indicator Ranking

Source

New York City

Most Diverse Cities in America (5/228) Best Cities for Young Professionals in America (10/228) Healthiest Cities in America (31/228) Outdoors (4/228)

Niche

Seattle

Best Cities for Outdoor Activities (2/228) Best Cities for Young Professionals in America (3/228) Most Diverse Cities in America (149/228)

Niche

Salt Lake City

Best Cities for Outdoor Activities in America (17/228) Healthiest Cities in America (39/228) Best Cities for Young Professionals (43/228) Most Diverse Cities in America (161/228)

Niche

Medellín

Tolerance (10/266) Cost of Living (19/248) Housing (25/265) Outdoors (202/266) Startups (111/264) Business Freedom (181/264)

Teleport

Halifax

Business Freedom (48/264) Tolerance (79/266) Housing (124/265) Startups (167/264) Outdoors (186/266) Cost of Living (188/248)

Teleport

Alexandria

Quality of Life 3/10

Kemajou et al. (2020)

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ranking offers such measures along multiple indicators for a total of 228 cities, indicated in Table 2.1: Highest Quality of Life Indicators for New York City, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Medellín, Halifax, and Alexandria. For Medellín and Halifax, “Teleport” offers such measurements for a ratio between 248 and 266 cities, and for Alexandria, Jerome Chenal for the Communaute d’Etudes pour l’Amenagement du Territoire (Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland) offered a similar ranking for the African region including 100 cities (Kemajou et al. 2020; Egypt Independent 2017). These measurements are not calibrated globally yet, and there are multiple sources for city ranking according to regions rather than a unified global city ranking measure (Giffinger et al. 2010). Table 2.1. Highest Quality of Life Indicator for New York City, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Medellín, Halifax, and Alexandria, where the libraries studied in this collection are located, shows that some of the highest ranks among these cities include indicators such as diversity, best cities for young professionals, healthiest cities, best cities for outdoors, tolerance, cost of living, housing, startups, business freedom, and quality of life. The highest indicator for New York City is “The Most Diverse City in America.” For Seattle and Salt Lake City the highest indicator is “The Best Cities for Outdoor Activities.” Medellín highest ranking is for “Tolerance.” Halifax’s highest ranking is for “Business Freedom,” and “Quality of Life” is the highest indicator for Alexandria, Egypt. Competitive city and place-making strategies brand cities to attract the creative class of the knowledge economy (Evans 2009).

2.3 Branding: Consuming Places The entrepreneurial characteristic of city branding is a management of the construction of the city-region based on place branding (Lloyd and Peel 2008). This form of statecraft constitutes the vocabulary of place branding. Within this set of interscalar relations of place, city, region, and nation, identities are constituted through branding as a communicative logic. As a sort of place promotion, a new politics of urban development emerges. The new city-region construct relies on “a strategic realignment of established identities, goals, processes, and practices” (Loyd and Peel 2008, p. 38). In the public sector, place branding is increasingly prevalent in the new ways to promote change as it is defined in local and regional economies. Utilizing the “mercantilism of image” the image of the city is repositioned or transformed for economic development purposes (Peel and Lloyd 2008) based on the strategic image management (Parkerson and Saunders 2005) and the relationship of the brand to different audiences (Gertner and Kotler 2004) such as residents, tourists, and inward investors. Traditional approaches such as fiscal incentives and hard infrastructure have been increasingly substituted by a reliance on branding as a softer form of intervention (Rantisi and Leslie 2006). Logos and badges, marketing activities such as public relations, advertising, and sales promotion conform emergent communication thinking within a strategic and managed approach to brand activities within the context of the governance milieu of the city (Anholt 2005). According to Kavaratzis (2007) city-marketing and corporate branding propose a model of city

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image communication based on primary, secondary, and tertiary modes of communication. It is at the secondary form of communication in city branding that intentional and formal marketing activities of city authorities and city marketers use simple visual iconography and techniques in advertising and public relations (Anholt 2005). Public diplomacy is the form of city government interventions to engage intentional acts of communication to attract tourists, visitors, and inward investors. Landscape improvements, public art strategies, infrastructure projects, waterfront regeneration, and transport investment communicate a visual and visible message about the city and its priorities that serve to communicate practical, symbolic, and semiotic imaginaries through public policy interventions. According to Kavaratzis (2007) public diplomacy is a form of metropolitan leadership and presentation in an organizational restructuring based on the use of partnerships to promote a holistic view of the city. Tertiary communication refers to word of mouth and media reports. The use of softer modes of branding interventions relies on the use of festivals and events where the experience of the city emulates a vibrant atmosphere in a set display of activities over a longer period of time. Brands then are crafted in such a way to allow for change and reinvention in a short period of time, three years for instance. Branding is used to differentiate cities from their competitors; cities are competitors to attract through different cultural activities residents, investors, and tourists by aligning themselves where they might wish to be positioned based on the selling of place, the experience of place as a commodity with sensitivity to image, identity, and differentiation through advanced conceptual understanding of branding and a greater awareness of city communication thinking that involves an understanding of receptivity, identification, and differentiated interpretation and response (Anholt 2005). The creation of a brand involves a personality and image value that articulates an emotional potential in the ability to develop a statement that is reciprocal between the product and the consumer. A positive and clear image articulates an explicit value (Clarke 2000). Functionality according to Clarke refers to the ways in which consumers identify with the performance of a particular brand (Clarke 2000). In this regard public libraries, within the creative city model that has led urban development for the past decades, focus on developing a brand that highlights aspects of the city to attract, as a cultural institution, residents while also catering to the communities they serve. Public libraries are considered an important component of urban development as evidenced by the now widely known Bilbao effect (Hvenegaard and Jochumsen 2012). According to Klingmann (2007) a brand rather than an actual product is a representation, “an aura of meaning” (p. 55) for both “substance and surface” (p. 56). Within the context of globalization characterized by constant change and flux of social, economic, and political value systems, argues Klingmann, individuals are “forced to create their own identities and find ways of signaling their place in the world” (p. 57). Even though slightly deterministic, Klingmann makes a convincing case to highlight the importance of brands and identity; for her, social values and lifestyles that used to be predominantly influenced by religion and nationhood are increasingly carried by product branding, where brands play out as

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universal signifiers (2007). Betsky defines a brand as an icon and objects that represent the unpresentable (1997). Awareness and image are important components to the ability to recognize a particular brand among others and the scenario associated with a specific brand respectively identified by consumers. As objects of consumption represented in a brand, its adaptability corresponds to the cultural context based on specific user preferences, lifestyle scenarios, and communities. The brand’s message is also in constant flux. By doing so, brands build relationships among certain meaningful structures by revealing suggestive nuances, subtexts, and significations and tap into aspirational drives. Brand recognition relies on the trust on the specific company and its commitment to meet and/or exceed consumers expectations by appealing to their values, origins, ambitions, and desires within the challenges of a complex marketplace of competing brands. Branding relies on communicating values in a consistent feedback loop where a personal dialogue is established among the brand representations and consumers’ set of values and lifestyle by establishing a myth or by relating to a particular context (Klingmann 2007). In regards to architecture, successful architecture brands rely on a set of conscious and unconscious set of associations where symbolic values surface, intentionally and unintentionally, transcending its material value in dialogue with its audience. By exceeding their use value, architecture-shared values become catalysts and transformational experiences, creating an emblematic architecture by enhancing the value of spatial experience. The added value of architectural branding integrates multiple meaning structures that include symbolic and experiential significance, aesthetic appeal, and elevation of social prestige and status. Like Klingmann (2007), Bourdieu would consider architecture material culture and as such cultural capital that expresses class distinctions (2013). As architecture purposes surpass sheltering and technical efficiency, symbolic and experiential qualities also define architecture’s impact that is reflected in its brand image status conveyed as a distinguishing reputation. Other’s recognition and acknowledgment−tacit, implicit, or metaphorical−are at play in architecture’s brand added value. Klingmann mentions the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris as an example of how its iconic architecture surpasses the explicit storage of books function of the library to “outshined by its representational function (to serve as an iconic building that revived a Paris neighborhood)” (2007, p. 67). Architecture, therefore, has the power to change the social, political, cultural, economic status of its beneficiary: a single client, a corporation, or a city by bestowing a sense of social belonging and cultural identity (Klingmann 2007). According to El-Ghazali, the branding of architectural products and the promotion of iconic buildings−to which the public libraries selected are examples−is designed by “Starchitects”2 by combining quality, distinction (landmarks), and “timeless” character (2019). Excellence and distinction are part of the brand promoted by the iconic architecture designed by starchitects around the world seeking to attract in the creative city fashion, tourism, investment capital, and respectful recognition, representing quality and a distinctive trademark (El-Ghazali 2019). Branding in this 2 “Starchitects”

refers to architects or architect firms globally renown, who design iconic buildings around the world.

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context seeks to fill in complex identities in the minds of consumers with spatial and visionary attributes by providing an architectural product with a clear and unique identity. Usually attached to the branding of cities, iconic architecture as a brand helps define the brand of the city as a name, term, sign, symbol, design, or a combination of these elements with an intended identity for services and/or goods that differentiates itself from competitors (El-Ghazali 2019). Within the context of place and city branding, argues El-Ghazali, branding and destination image are conflated in the process of highlighting unique qualities for the goods or services offered (2019). In this ubiquitous branding urge, cities are emphatically shaped and thematized to attract the attention of mobile and less location-dependent companies, inhabitants, and visitors. Branding images, destination images, and travel in the symbolic constellation all that as metaphors represent desired qualities or goods in the minds of consumers. Within the context of city branding, the experience of place is consumed by building a relationship between people and the image of the city and establish city recognition. Rather than static, contemporary city branding within the global competition among cities attracts investment, visitors, and creative residents, and the city brand is in constant re-definition. Marketing and advertisement focus on generating a constant flow of images attached to the specific brand of the location to be highlighted to create a positive impact in the minds of the visitors. Among the strategies designed to support city branding efforts and the promotion of cities involve designation and revitalization of heritage and historic areas, cultural festivals and events, and the construction of mega-structures and iconic buildings. This last strategy relevant to understand the libraries is included in this book. Iconic architectures, in this regard, are buildings designed by recognized architects with a special and significant symbolic aesthetic that uniquely represents the city in the global stage (El-Ghazali 2019). In the marketing of globalized cities, iconic architecture connects the transnational capitalist class and capitalist globalization (Sklair 2005). Muratovski argues that an architectural brand can contribute to an overall sense of well-being, a source of civic pride, a sense of community, a feeling, an emotional connection, vision, direction, and development of the city to its people (Muratovski 2012).

2.4 Public Libraries as Anchor Institutions Libraries are then vehicles for economic growth by indirectly−like parks−improving quality of life in urban areas (Skot-Hansen et al. 2013). It is at this intersection that libraries become part of urban development initiatives that support the creative city and branding. Public libraries are cultural institutions that provide access to reading, research, a beautifully designed and welcoming space for all, and exposure to diverse others in both face-to-face as well as virtual connectivity. According to Frederiksen (2015) libraries contribute to social reproduction in that they add to the cultural institutions that offer services in lieu of a retrenched government that has shifted priorities from the public sector to facilitate private and market policies, instead. Accordingly, public libraries are “uniquely political spaces intricately embedded in

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changes to social reproduction extending from the household to the global scale” and social reproduction in this context is defined as the knowledge required to perform “the work of reproducing social relations and sustaining people over the life course” (Frederiksen 2015, p. 142). Frederiksen points out that neoliberal social policies have privatized social reproduction, including libraries, by shifting capital and resources away from the spaces of the marginalized to reinvest in places of consumption for more wealthy people. Frederiksen identifies the constant outcry to allocate funds to public libraries from budget cuts in Toronto, but this is a similar outcry in public libraries around the world and the precariousness of public funding, including New York City, Medellín, Seattle, Alexandria, and Halifax at various degrees. Salt Lake City embedded a determination in the construction of the library that includes provisions for a constant budget allocation that ensure access despite cyclical budget changes from the state. The selective social policy that Frederiksen identifies and critically examines in the context of Toronto points at a clear shift in the allocation of resources from marginalized communities, basically immigrants, in lieu of investment to areas for the consumption of wealthy elites (2014). The design of new libraries considers implications to local businesses, the economic and cultural vitality of their location, and the iconic power these new buildings designed by star architects bring to the city as contributors to a sense of pride and identity. They are tourist attractions, amplifiers of downtown vitality, and icons (Kemp and Trota 2008). Sharpe and Stierman (2007) identify libraries impact on economic development towards more sustainable and progressive development strategies as an “economic gardening” for the cultivation of local entrepreneurship where the growth of existing businesses is fostered by improving local workers skills and by facilitating a nurturing and information-rich environment for new entrepreneurs. This can be accomplished by libraries creating greater visibility and stature among the business community and local government, strengthening public– private partnerships, enhance business resources in the library collection, and library to library cooperation among other suggestions. Likewise, to facilitate budding of entrepreneurs, libraries could compile demographic data about the expected marketplace, lists of possible suppliers and/or buyers, marketing avenues for products, patent and trademark processes, legal information, and economic indicators among other important data sources about specific markets and business strategies. Sharpe and Stierman (2007) also consider the importance of library staff to work with the business community. According to Horrigan (2016) libraries are active community entities that facilitate job searches for its community constituents. Job training and business development are increasingly figuring among the services that contemporary libraries provide to their communities in looking for work, improving job skills, or support to start a business. In his White Paper commissioned by the Urban Libraries Council, Horrigan found that 52% or half of the American adults consider that libraries should offer programs to support businesses and entrepreneurs, a perspective not widely shared by local officials (2017). Horrigan contextualizes this urge for job preparedness and new skill acquisition within the contemporary urban conditions where automation, globalization, gigification, and other circumstances that require a flexible and

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adaptable labor force with the necessary skills, smarts, and creativity (2017). Public libraries, therefore, are institutions that can adapt quickly to the changing demands of society and provide programming to fulfill those community needs. According to Manjarrez (2007) public libraries support local economic development by establishing productive relationships with businesses in their communities and by offering programming that trains the labor force in the skills required by the economy. Public library programming in the areas of literacy, employment services, and small business development support the local economy (Manjarrez 2007). Future trends in urban development point to the now more generalized smart cities approach where more efficient, sustainable, and highly interconnected development needs to be implemented in cities to become smart (Mersand et al. 2019; Coe et al. 2001; Goodman 2013). They argue that communities of data scientists, technologists, and civic leaders should harness the growing data revolution, low-cost sensors, and research partnerships for new solutions to benefit society. For Mersand et al. public libraries can act as catalysts in the development of smart, data-driven, connected communities where technology can be used to face the challenges of governance (2019). There has been an emerging critical perspective on the smart city phenomenon for its heavy expertise-laden approach that challenges community participation if the same level of knowledge and technological dexterity impinges their participation in decision-making processes. As ambitious as the smart city approach is in integrating technological innovation, sustainability, quality of life, and economic concerns, public libraries could facilitate this transition. According to Mersand et al., public libraries could be a catalyst for community participation in this urban development model as an anchor institution that is already rooted in the community (2019). Anchor institutions potentially strengthen the relationship between cities and educational institutions for city development, social purpose missions, and partnerships between these institutions and the city3 (Cantor et al. 2013; Harris and Holley 2016; Mersand et al. 2019). According to Harris and Holley (2016) the concept of anchor institutions largely focusing on universities is useful to “describe the potential benefits of universities for city-regions… generate jobs, attract industry, provide cultural opportunities, and work to improve the conditions of the community” (pp. 399–400). Anchor institutions usually are non-governmental public sector cultural or other civic organizations and typically possess a mission oriented toward community engagement and social service not only advancing economic development but also the social conditions of the cities where they are located and to help strengthen democratic and equitable cities. They can benefit the region in terms of real estate developer, purchaser, employer, workforce developer, cluster anchor, core service/product provider, and a community culture builder. Empirical studies that analyze the function and actual efficacy of the anchor institution model are lacking and the model is based on potential approximations. In this regard, the anchor institution literature is similar to the creative city model literature in that 3 Most

of the literature on anchor institutions tends to focus on universities. Consideration towards public libraries as anchor institutions within the creative city model and branding of the city is emerging.

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both are limited in their analysis of quantifiable effects to examine their efficacy to directly show their impact. The lack of analysis on the impact of the creative city model and the notion of anchor institutions in cities points at a more paradigmatic rather than empirical measurements of how they are applied. Nonetheless, approximate approaches such as population size, tourist population, revenues in cultural industries, institutions annual reports and budgets, and city ranking can provide a general idea of the impacts that the creative city model and anchor institutions can have in specific locales, including the narratives that push development in specific directions. All the libraries studied highlight the issues of quality of life, the public library as a tourist attraction, serving the community, and a strong connection with the city as part of their mission statement (Initiative for a Competitive Inner City 2011). The concept of anchor institution emerged, according to Goodman (2014), from the urban renewal movements of 1960s and 1970s in the United States as fixed assets of a community. Overall, the creative city model and anchor institutions can be applied to public libraries in the support of a discourse to attract the global professional class to cities, the bridges that they establish with other organizations and institutions in the city, and the branding of the specific image of the city for the consumption of the unique urban experience developed. Contemporary libraries are becoming new kinds of public spaces in which the delivery of resources is complementary to the development of infrastructure that provides a myriad of events. Functioning increasingly as a community resource−broadly understood−contemporary libraries tend to re-define the outdated conceptions of the archive and the delivery of services to an increasingly urban population. Some libraries function mostly as research libraries like the New York City Public Library main branch at 42nd street, while others mostly offer current information, like Seattle and Salt Lake which are best known as circulating libraries, originally created for profit to provide access to different kinds of books to the emerging middle class in Britain and the United States during the 1900s. They all function within a net of branch libraries that cater in more specific ways to the needs and particularities of the communities they serve and where they are located. They include green buildings like in Seattle and Salt Lake City or develop as library centers such as the Bronx Branch in New York City. They cater to the community and constituents’ interests and offer numerous community resources. The challenges of libraries rest in balancing increasing developments in technology and media while also providing books and places for encounters with others along with cultural activities which still constitute the necessary skills to be developed by community members (Rasmussen et al. 2012). Public libraries find themselves at the crossroads between providing objects that contain information in both the physical and virtual worlds. They are in competition to attract new users, face budget cuts, and struggle with the uncertainty and challenges about their future role. As key institutions embedded in cities global competition for similar audiences, public libraries seek to cater to creatives, residents and tourists, and investors looking for tax abatements. As cities also lay in the transition from industrial to post-industrial knowledge, they constantly re-define themselves and their institutions to find ways

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to stimulate creativity, innovation, and cohesion among its audiences to attract and retain businesses, taxpayers, and tourists (Jochumsen et al. 2012). The public library, therefore, is an active part of urban planning and a place maker whose mission as part of the “public domain” contributes to urban diversity and where new stages of experience are crafted. As place makers, libraries help establish new attractive city spaces or revitalize former industrial districts like in the case of Seattle and Salt Lake City Public Libraries. The library as an urban icon provides a different and unique symbolic and aesthetic quality to the urban fabric. According to Jochumsen et al. (2012), public libraries constituted an appealing icon of the city that can be an important component of urban branding and underpin the credibility of the city to investors, residents, and visitors. Public libraries also contribute to urban everyday life livability by boosting local identity and cohesion, addressing social and economic challenges and initiating local innovation in their programming (Jochumsen et al. 2012). Moreover, they are a catalyst in the development of socially and economically challenged neighborhoods. Even though the classic library focused on storage and learning, contemporary public libraries offer a more complex set of services to the communities they serve from circulation of contemporary book volumes, access to computers, events, and programming for their different community and constituencies’ interests. They also provide a meeting place that as part of the public domain is vibrant, a space with no grid structure, no large scale and no rigid division of functions, where people are the main attraction. The actual design of the library contributes to its attraction as an iconic urban space. They blur the functionality division and offer different possibilities by providing different zones that focus on exchange rather than strictly meeting. They contribute to an urban geography that blurs borders between public and private, creating unexpected experiences, and connect to different areas of the city. Hvenegaard (2016) identifies strategies for creating a public domain. These include locating the library on a social borderline of the city, to make a trans-zone urban space between the library and the city, and they facilitate a mixed and multi-functional library space. All the libraries considered in this volume provide extended public space in adjacent areas in the form of plazas. The next chapter will address the role of library design as a public space that belongs to all from the perspective of library staff, architects, and designers about the libraries studied. To a large extent, the notion of the public domain is exemplified in the design of the public libraries selected, and the next chapter will address the meaning of the public library as a public space and its iconic design.

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Goodman, E. P. (2014). Smart cities meet anchor institutions: The case of broadband and the public library. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 1665, (41) 5/6. https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol41/ iss5/6. Harris, M. & Holley, K. (2016). Universities as anchor institutions: economic and social potential for urban development. In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, (pp. 393–439). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26829-3_8. Harvey, D. (2005). The new imperialism. OUP Oxford. Horrigan, J. B. (2016). Libraries 2016. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/ 2016/Libraries-2016/. Hvenegaard Rasmussen, C. (2016). The participatory public library: the nordic experience. New Library World, 117(9/10), 546–556. https://doi.org/10.1108/nlw-04-2016-0031. Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. (2011). Anchor institutions and urban economic development: From community benefit to shared value. Inner City Insight Findings, 1(2), 1–9. Jochumsen, H., Hvenegaard Rasmussen, C., & Skot-Hansen, D. (2012). The four spaces−a new model for the public library. New Library World, 113(11/12), 586–597. https://doi.org/10.1108/ 03074801211282948. Kavaratzis, M. (2007). City-marketing: The past, the present and some unresolved issues. Geography compass, 1(3), 695–712. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00034.x. Kavaratzis, M., & Ashworth, G. J. (2007). Beyond the logo: Brand management for cities. Journal of Brand Management, 16(8), 520–531. Kavaratzis, M., Warnaby, G., & Ashworth, G. J. (Eds.). (2014). Rethinking place branding: Comprehensive brand development for cities and regions. Springer. Kemajou, A., Konou, A. A., Jaligot, R., & Chenal, J. (2020). Analyzing four decades of literature on urban planning studies in Africa (1980–2020). African Geographical Review, 1–19. Kemp, R. L., & Trotta, M. (2008). Museums, libraries and urban vitality: A handbook. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. AM11.M74 2008. Kirkpatrick, L. Owen, & Smith, M. P. (2011). The infrastructural limits to growth: Rethinking the urban growth machine in times of fiscal crisis. International Journal or Urban and Regional Research, 35(3), 477–503. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01058.x. Klingmann, A. (2007). Brandscapes: Architecture in the experience economy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lloyd, G., & Peel, D. (2008). Functionalism and representationalism in contemporary urban agendas: a Scottish perspective on city-region branding. Urban Research & Practice, 1(1), 36–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535060701795348. Lucarelli, A., & Olof Berg, P. (2011). City branding: a state-of-the-art review of the research domain. Journal of place management and development, 4(1), 9–27. https://doi.org/10.1108/175 38331111117133. Manjarrez, C. A. (2007). Making cities stronger: Public library contributions to local economic development. The Urban Libraries Council. Retrieved Jun 20, 2019 from http://webarchive.urban. org/uploadedpdf/1001075_stronger_cities.pdf. Markusen, A. (1996) Sticky places in slippery space: A typology of industrial districts, Economic Geography, 72(3), 293–313. https://doi.org/10.2307/144402. Mersand, S., Udoh, E., Gasco-Hernández, M., & Gil-García, J. R. (2019). Public libraries as anchor institutions in smart communities: Current practices and future development. Paper Presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii. https://doi.org/10.24251/ hicss.2019.399. Moos, M., Nick R., Tristan W., & Jean A. (2018). The knowledge economy city: Gentrification, studentification and youthification, and their connections to Universities. Urban Studies, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017745235. Muratovski, G. (2012). The role of architecture and integrated design in city branding. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 8(3), 195–207. https://doi.org/10.1057/pb.2012.12. Musterd, S., & Ostendorf, W. (2010). Integrated Urban Renewal in the Netherlands: A Critical Appraisal. Urban Research and Practice, 1(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535060701795389.

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Nevárez, J. (2018). Governing disaster in urban environments: Climate change preparation and adaption after hurricane sandy. Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield. Peel, D., & Lloyd, G. (2008). New communicative challenges: Dundee, place branding and the reconstruction of a city image. Town Planning Review, 79(5), 507–532. https://doi.org/10.3828/ tpr.79.5.4. Parkerson, B., & Saunders, J. (2005). City branding: can goods and services branding models be used to brand cities? Place branding, 1(3), 242–264. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.pb.5990026. Qian, H., & Liu, S. (2018). Cultural entrepreneurship in US cities. Journal of Urban Affairs, 40(8), 1043-1065. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2018.1468223. Rantisi, N. M., & Leslie, D. (2006). Branding the design metropole: the case of Montréal, Canada. Area, 38(4), 364–376. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2006.00705. Rasmussen, C. H., & Henrik, J. (2012). Libraries and urban development. Royal school of library and information science. Reades, J., Jordan De, S., & Phil, H. (2018). Understanding Urban Gentrification through Machine Learning. Urban Studies. 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018789054. Scott, A. (2006). Creative cities: Conceptual issues and policy questions. Journal of Urban Affairs. 28(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0735-2166.2006.00256.x. Sharpe, K. B., & Stierman, J. K. (2007). Libraries and community economic development: A survey of best practices. Retrieved June 9, 2019. https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar? q=cache:3oFQqmsGXSEJ:scholar.google.com/+sharpe+k.+b.+%26+stierman,+j.+k.+2007& hl=en&as_sdt=0,33. Skot-Hansen, D., Hvenegaard, R., & C., Jochumsen, H., (2013). The role of public libraries in culture-led urban regeneration. New library world, 114(1/2), 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1108/030 74801311291929. Sklair, L. (2005).The Transnational Capitalist Class and Contemporary Architecture in Globalizing Cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 29(3), 485–500. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00601.x. Slaughter, A. M. (2004). A new world order. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stern, M. J., & Seifert S. C. (2008). From creative economy to creative society. Culture and community revitalization: A collaboration. The Culture and Revitalization Project. University of Pennsylvania Scholarly Commons. Retrieved March 20, 2019 from https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=siap_revitalization. Varnelis, K., & Friedberg, A. (2012). Conclusion: The meaning of networked publics. In Varnelis, K. Networked publics. The MIT Press. Vivant, E. (2013). Creatives in the city: Urban contradictions of the creative city. City, Culture and Society, 4(2), 57–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccs.2013.02.003.

Chapter 3

Library Design for the Commons

Abstract The creative city urban development model seeks to attract visitors and residents from the creative class to experience the city in unique ways through the branding of the city anchored in the services provided by specific cultural institutions. As an anchor institution, the public library is also branded in an effort to contribute to the revitalization of urban areas where the services and the architecture of the public library are elements that highlight a specific image of the city. In the selection of libraries for this book, public libraries contribute to and are part of branding efforts to make these cities unique by utilizing iconic architecture to complement efforts that can score a higher ranking along with different indicators which has increasingly emerged as a tool to qualify and quantify comparatively, different cities around the world. The competition among cities to attract different groups from the service and knowledge economy as well as investors and tourists to enticing public spaces and cultural services highlights public libraries significance in their role as added value to an attractive image of the city. The main square and the plazas connect the libraries to their respective cities in productive ways by setting themselves as meaningful stages for democratic practices of global access, skills development, and bridges to supportive learning services to the communities they serve. This chapter will address issues of public space in the city to highlight the meaning of the library, the relationship between the public library and the city, and unique aspects of the library design that seek to enhance the urban experience from the perspective of staff who work, architects who designed, and users to the public libraries in Seattle, Salt Lake City, New York City, Medellín, Alexandria, and Halifax as a public domain or commons. Keywords Creative city · Branding · Iconic architecture · City ranking · Anchor institution · Public space · Commons

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3.1 The City and Public Space: Public Libraries as the Commons Public libraries are public spaces. Public space supports freedom of expression, assembly, information, and movement in its physicality (Smithsimon 2015). Public space facilitates and to a certain extent precludes the enactment of these democratic freedoms. Arendt’s agonistic perspective places public space as the center of democratic display of a multiplicity of contrasting opinions. The loss of public space as res publica, based on the republican notion of civic virtue by participation in the public sphere, hints at the disappearance of the universal under conditions of modernity. The critique of a universal public space to which all have access to has been highly questioned. According to Benhabib reading of Arendt, the transformation of the public space of politics (inherited from the Greek polis) into a pseudo-space of interaction and participation is such that individuals do not act but instead merely “behave” as economic producers, consumers, and urban city dwellers. This negative view of public space, even though considered a relevant and appropriate critique for post-Fordist consumer societies, based on Benhabib’s reading, does not account for the recent counter-hegemonical disruptions and/or alternative scenarios produced by unrest displayed in public space (1992). For others such as Habermas (Buschman, 2010), rational communication in the public sphere is based on communicative practices that shed rational consensus under the best of circumstances, or Chantal Mouffe, an agonistic pluralism is an alternative to consensus-based elucidation that allows for conflict, is the driving force in vital democracy with abundance of opinions, reference systems, ideologies, norms, values, and beliefs that supersede what can be grasped by liberal consensus (Hansson 2010). Rather than the Habermasian universalism of reason, Mouffe’s agonistic perspective constitutes public engagement in democratic practices based on the proliferation of different opinions. Arendt also reminds us that public space does not necessarily need to be limited to a specific area or space per se (Benhabib 1992). The relevance of public space for Smithsimon is …why, beyond protecting speech in malls and quasi-public plazas, we should protect public space itself. Zoning regulations should reasonably require that every community have meaningful public space—a space central enough so that people actually gather, engage in commerce, work, travel, socialize, and speak out. A government that claims to guarantee rights to speech, expression, assembly, and association but provides no space in which to do so makes a hollow promise to its citizens” (2015, p. 1).

Sidewalks and streets have historically carried the role of a public space par excellence by offering the setting for demonstrations and other expressions of freedom of movement, speech, and gathering to highlight protests against the status quo. The public space of the street in contemporary societies are bastions for political unrest led by people’s protests in Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Haiti, India among many countries that keep on adding on the list. More recently, the death of George Floyd has triggered civil unrest throughout cities in the United States in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. The basic engagement with different others in the urban

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environment is somehow a taken for granted quality of public space and one that has become signified by communication-mediated technologies that extend and to a large extent complements those who reach opportunities. Cities provide proximity, density, and closeness, and their success depends on the demand for physical connection. The real city is made out of flesh, not concrete. Even during the coronavirus pandemic, crowds have taken to the streets in US cities, generally practicing recommendations for face coverings but challenging alerts against crowded situations to voice their concerns and show solidarity against racism, largely practicing social distance and an abundant use of hand sanitizer. Dialogical engagement might be compromised with technologies of self under current neoliberal tendencies that tend to be atomistic and individualistic, but they still emerge in fractured and disruptive moments, both at the individual and social levels. As ephemeral as they might be, they indicate the directions of important conversations about how we live in urban societies and how we communicate our differences to develop a way of living that is tolerant and equitable. Public space, however, cannot be understood outside the urban context, that of the city to which it is ingrained, conceptually and physically. Democracy rests on the assumption of active participation of citizens in modes of engagement that are allowed by spaces where civil conversations can take place. Public space in this regard provides the forum that as “commons” exerts a sense of ownership by the open accessibility to all by which it is defined. In the last few decades, however, increased surveillance has been placed in the streets and sidewalks and other urban arteries. Video camera surveillance is ubiquitous, programming by public–private partnerships under enterprise zones welcome digital urbanites who inhabit double space, that of the physicality of the city and the virtual mode of communication-mediated technologies. The presence of the police, national guard, and even the threat of the military are additional factors that show the volatility of agreed arrangements in a democratic society on both ends, that of the demonstrators and the state. The additional layer of access to the virtual public sphere also shows competing perspectives and differences in opinion regarding current matters. The public library, as a public space, supports both platforms which sustain propinquity and face-to-face interactions, as well as the virtual engagement through digital technologies. The networked publics by which Varnelis and Friedberg describe contemporary city dwellers from the creative industries and urban citizens in general are also those in the city who seeks to attract to settle in urban areas (2012). According to Varnelis and Friedberg the networked subject is an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others, and a switching machine. The network culture, economy, and subject are aided by the digerati or the class of professionals in digital media, content marketing, computer industry, and online communities. Accordingly, the network culture is the superstructural effect of the most recent wave of capital expansion around the globe and its dominant organizational paradigm. The networked publics are extensions of our mobilized self where customization and flexibility are intrinsic conditions for operation of the key technological devices that shape our lives mastering a calculated co-presence by being able to inhabit physical space while being connected to the digital world (Varnelis and Friedberg 2012). Varnelis and Friedberg indicate that participation in the network changes our perception and

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concept of place in the always on, always accessible network by linking specific locales to a global continuum, transforming our sense of proximity, distance and, I might add, privacy and intimacy. Ito argues that “pervasive network connectivity involves the politics of objects and infrastructure as well as interpersonal social negotiations” (2012, p. 6). More recently, notions of prosumption and transduction address the multiple character of urban space engagement that denotes a participatory and betrothed involvement in content production via social media to virtual and urban spaces simultaneously and the experience of place shifting among different virtual and physical locales in everyday life and urban public space (Manfredini 2017). Transduction refers to this simultaneous process of inhabiting and participating while shifting between contents through the use of mediated technologies and platforms that embed these social negotiations (Manfredini 2017). The contemporary public square, public space as the commons, is then a complicated environment among familiar strangers, not only because of the shifting places we inhabit and the shifting contents but also the increasingly class and racially polarized societies in which we live. The public library as “commons” is a cultural resource accessible to all members of society.1 The opportunity for propinquity that public space in general, and public libraries in particular, offers should not be, in my view and that of others, underestimated. For Jacobs, the vital sense of civitas rests on an architectural infrastructure that allows and encourages frequent and random face-to-face interactions within the urban milieu (1961). Nor should the services provided in public libraries, left by the absentee welfare state should be minimized, especially when those efforts provide access for all, including generally ostracized immigrant and minority communities, within the US context. Public libraries also offer a specific site where services are allocated based on the dissemination of information and acquisition of skills that fulfill community needs. According to Aabø and Audunson (2012) the library as a public sphere conveys an arena where varied ideas and opinions are presented to the public and the public’s civic engagement is based on making informed opinions on public issues after considering different viewpoints. Neoliberalism increased privatization of social services and spaces has compromised democratic practices and public space availability. Within the neoliberal framework of privatization and shifting priorities of the dissipating welfare state, less support is galvanized toward public space accessibility, and more public–private initiatives are set instead. The role of public libraries in their capacity of filling the void of a retrenching state that has shifted its priorities to market logics has become crucial to connect people and resources as part of the necessary social redundancy (Nevárez 2018) and soft social infrastructure (Klinenberg 2018). Public libraries fill in the gap left by a shifting welfare state which under neoliberalism has prioritized privatization and increasingly diminished budgets for the public, broadly understood. 1 The notion of “the commons” is used in this context of public libraries more as a cultural resource

rather than the traditional one originally based on property rights and more recently expanded to include sustainable issues regarding ecology (Wall 2014).

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The importance and relevance of public space and the role of public libraries to provide for the right of assembly, services, knowledge, and information has been overlooked in the literature for quite some time. The public library also operates as this inclusive physical and virtual space where urbanites not only seek to access books and other resources but also participate in events that cater to community needs, aspirations, and taste. The library as an institutional anchor to cultural events on which the creative city model thrives is in direct relation to the ways in which cities brand themselves to attract the creative class. The connection between the city and the library in New York City, Salt Lake City, and Seattle in the United States and internationally in Medellín, Colombia, Alexandria in Egypt and more recently Halifax, Nova Scotia, point to this interconnectedness between the city and the public library. This chapter highlights library staff, architects, and users’ views about the relationship between the public library and the city, the meaning of the library, and aspects of the library design that while unique contribute to a better experience for the users of the library.

3.2 The Library and the City: Bringing People to the Library For the starchitects who designed the main public libraries of Seattle, Salt Lake City, Halifax, Medellín, and Alexandria, the relationship between the library and the city is extremely important exemplified in the striking execution of the library design. They sought to spatially relate the library to the downtown areas where they are located and highlight in a fluid manner, how the library becomes a point of transition from and to the city. For instance, in the New York Public Library, the city is also an important component in the vision and mission of the library that through programming has extended the use to the adjacent plaza-like areas including Bryant Park. The New York Public Library displays bookshelves for patrons to read in Bryan Park during the summertime. According to Snøhetta, the design of the Alexandria Public Library is a “building dedicated to urban renewal.” The library was designed to re-appropriate its impressive history as the first western library from antiquity in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean city of Alexandria, Egypt. Reflecting a truly cosmopolitan goal in the design anchored on a strong historical legacy, the library of Alexandria was a building designed as an institution seeking to connect Greece, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to Egypt. People responded positively to the building because it created a new sense of urban identity in contemporary times. The library design sought to return to the city a sense of pride about its connection to the rest of the world and similarly the world was welcomed as part of the design through open areas between the buildings, the library collections itself, and the programming of events. Discussion about the library design involved international representatives who envisioned a strong connection to the Alexandria library’s historical roots and ancient western civilization. For Snøhetta,

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3 Library Design for the Commons The [Alexandria library] building [complex] is a bridge between our past, our present and our future, and because it is a fairly simple [circular] shape, one that is recognizable and identifiable, people can remember and talk about it. It is more psychological than physical, you can call that a public space, not in the traditional sense, like you do in making the square and the plaza that connects pedestrians, it is more psychological.

Also, considering a strong connection between the city and the public library, the challenging aspects of the Salt Lake City Main Library design were to create an urban room and an urban plaza to connect and enhance public life downtown. The urban design sought to create a center block plaza in a city without much street life at the time of its construction in 2003. For a Salt Lake City library assistant director, the area where the library is located was considered to be at an unpopular edge of downtown Salt Lake City. The library, among other developments, has changed such that it brings who visit the library to that part of the downtown area. The creation of light-rail also helped bring people to that downtown area and to the library where one of the station stops is located. Currently the location of the Salt Lake City Public Library is booming with visitors and other established retail and residential zones that make the area inviting. The programmed space requested by the librarians who participated in the design conversations has an urban component, the city’s living room: “it is a great transitional space and it invites the neighborhood and welcomes the downtown large masses and brings them together in one spot,” to cater to diverse communities through art festivals and cultural events such as the Chinese New Year, the Diwali Festival, the Indian Festival of Lights, and the Utah Arts Fair, according to the Salt Lake City community affairs liaison staff. Libraries connect people and businesses in the areas where they are located. All the libraries included in this book have meeting areas, especially in the lower floors, that are widely used by patrons and community businesses for different purposes. In the Salt Lake City Public Library, the assistant director mentioned that, “downtown businesses people meet [in the library], they feel welcomed and that has increased the number of events in which they have partners with other organizations in the area, in the downtown area.” As an anchor institution, the library has also helped increase the number of people who visit the area where the library is located, contributing to the downtown economy. According to the community liaison, “[the library] brings people here to events and the events are also ways in which the downtown is been revitalized.” In terms of the neighborhood, the library interacts in significant ways with the surroundings and the thriving culture of Salt Lake City through its programming. The Seattle Public Library was meant to become a vibrant anchor for residential and retail development that, as part of a network of Seattle attractions, sought to make Washington in general, and Seattle more specifically, a more attractive destination. The library seeks to help attract members of the creative class, branding Seattle as a city where culture and public amenities are valued. Knowledge workers and the business sector contribute to Seattle’s sense of pride and identity, according to the Seattle Public Library staff. The library is considered a community asset with multiple benefits as a tourist attraction and an amplifier of downtown vitality as well as an icon to Seattle’s urban life. The staff at the Seattle Public Library are also proud of the library’s interior spaces; they also consider that in “our beautiful auditorium,

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we have many programs almost every day of the year. It is useful whether it is a panel discussion, an author coming in, there is just a lot of really neat things we have been able to do, to bring people into the library.” The library’s connection to the city also extends around its periphery; it “kind of runs over into the commercial plaza” (Seattle Public Library Director). In Seattle, according to an assistant director, the immediate downtown area around the library “is becoming more residential and so for many people this is their branch, so I think there is much more a sense of community ownership of this space. It has become a focal point. The downtown library.” The importance of the library rests on being a community experience. The library is “what people are looking for, is that opportunity to be in the same place together, to learn something, to share with others in their community and we see such a variety of people here” (Seattle Public Library Assistant Director). The Halifax Public Library in Nova Scotia sought to explicitly incorporate the city grid into the actual library design. Accordingly, the intersecting lines between Halifax citadel and the harbor cross through the library location where the top floor of the library contains the library’s “living room.” The space provides a unique view of the downtown area while also incorporating in the design, the city’s historical heritage. The design follows the contiguous city streets grid to support that part of the downtown area as a cultural hub (https://www.dezeen.com/2014/12/15/halifax-central-library-schmidt-hammerlassen-architects-fowler-bauld-mitchell-stacked-glass-boxes/). In Medellín, the Spain Library Park sought to explicitly intervene in the urban fabric by bringing a library to a neighborhood that faced challenges in terms of violence and social instability. The library park concept was part of a government plan to address social problems in the area. According to Mazzanti, the building was designed to decontextualize the visitor from the poverty-stricken surrounding neighborhood with small windows to let warm light in, but only at the top of the building (2008).

3.3 The Meaning of the Library For the libraries of Alexandria, Seattle, and Salt Lake City, a deep sense of pride is attached to the library by its communities, reflective of the participatory approach to the design developed. The sense of belonging is identified by staff in the Salt Lake City Public Library: “Everybody has a place in the library.” The design of the Alexandria library sought to: re-appropriate from its origins, to become a centerpiece for world learning as a truly cosmopolitan institution connecting to a wide range of people. The idea of collaboration, of talk, of interaction between people, not only housing a resource for written information, but also a place where you can gather and debate, was central to the project. It would be a place to collect yourself, to cool it, and continue. You are almost entering another world which is not the world of everyday, [it is] open, inviting, not trying to cut you off. It offers a feeling of

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3 Library Design for the Commons expansion, of transforming your mental state, making you aware of how there is a threshold between you and knowledge just like there is a threshold between you and the performer on the stage (Snøhetta).

In Salt Lake City, the library was designed to explicitly attract people. They “wanted to create a place where people wanted to meet, in a nutshell.” Whether indoors or outdoors, “We wanted it to be a magnet, we wanted it to be a welcoming magnet. Not just be there but there for a purpose. And it could be a pragmatic purpose if you go there for a book or it could be a personal purpose where you went to find yourself” (Salt Lake City Library Staff). In the design process, different groups in the community were consulted. For the library director at the time of the interview, the strong community participation in the library design was a significant contribution to the process, to ensure that the library responded to the community needs. The director considers that there is tremendous sense of ownership for the library by the users and attributes it to efforts to translate community desires into the final design outcome. According to a community affairs staff, “the community showed a sense of ownership and pride for the library and [are] protective of what the library means for them.” For an assistant director to the Salt Lake City Library, the purpose of the library is to “bring people together, people of all backgrounds and political interests and persuasions can come here and discuss issues, as a place where you know intellectual freedom is at and ideas are recognized and everybody has an equal voice.” For the assistant director, the library is a neutral place where everyone can participate. For the community affairs liaison, the library “becomes an inspiration and encourages everyone to come here for any purpose.” To this staff member, “the library is a benchmark, there is community involvement and everyone’s opinion is valued.” The wish to design a library for a tolerant community was carried out by the exploration and openness to new ideas and for the library to be a community building institution that provides a space for face-to-face interaction, to connect people to each other, and to develop a sense of community. The progressive view of libraries to protect public access is highlighted in the meaning of the library to the city as “A university in its own right [that] provides basic literacies, [and] a connection to major things that are going on in the city” (Salt Lake City Public Library Community Affairs Liaison). Programming in the library also joined forces with the Major’s Office in complementary ways such as the Immigrant Week events. Likewise, the New York Public Library also highlights community building. According to staff at the library, The New York Public Library is a research institution, “the biggest most comprehensive library for free, mostly catering to New York residents and in the business of building human capital, focusing on community development in the broadest sense, through investment in human capital—taking care of the residents.” The library seeks to bring together disparate groups to work with more fluidity and to promote the assets of the organization and the collections, across different sectors of users (New York Public Library Staff). Accordingly, “The library as a public space is always going to be a community space, free public spaces that offer knowledge space and people always need face to face interaction,

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people like to be collective.” The notion of the library as a service is echoed in from the director and assistant director perspective in the Seattle Public Library “to enhance and provide a good library experience for users of the city. [The] Library as a service, [has to be] responsive to community users, to remain relevant to the future.” By providing and enhancing content, the library creates community space where all people, regardless of their background come and meet with others in a place that is comfortable and upcoming. In the Seattle Public Library, community and the public are listened and responded to, for instance, focusing on helping new citizens by developing programming on citizenship classes, conversational English, and computer classes in different languages. In most public libraries selected, within the context of the United States, this kind of programming is common. According to the Seattle Assistant Director, the Seattle Public Library continues to be an essential part of a community, and it is a notion of community that can transcend the physicality of the building to the virtual. The strong relationship between community and iconic architecture distinguishes the recent trends in library design for urban areas.

3.4 Iconic Architecture and Library Design The design of the libraries selected is iconic: Seattle, Salt Lake City, Alexandria, Medellín, and Halifax as newer libraries. The New York Public Library—the oldest library in the selection—maintained its uniqueness as the first marble building in the United States with a design that is magnificent. The libraries selected were designed to make a statement, to be noticed, and to support efforts to explicitly highlight the city in which they were built to strengthen the urban fabric as anchor institutions. In all the cities—Seattle, Salt Lake City, Halifax, Medellín, Alexandria, and New York City—the public libraries selected became sources of pride and ownership by the patrons because of the distinct characteristics that made each unique. Likewise, these distinct characteristics inspire staff to offer quality programming and services. The iconic architecture of the library design for the Community Affairs Liaison at the Salt Lake City Public Library “is what makes this library unique….having such a great architecture really pushes them [the staff] to offer amazing services.” The Seattle Public Library Director considers that: the unique thing about this building, right, is that it has also become an icon for the city and it really is a tourist attraction and that newness—although is wearing off a little bit—has not worn off very much at all….it is a bold architectural statement. The visitors come because of the architecture, the users come because they either want the space to be in and experience or they come for library purposes. An incredible modern building and incredible library service.

The Assistant Director to Seattle Public Library added that: there was great interest in the building because of the architecture and because the unique welcome feel of the place…this new impressive place downtown.

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3 Library Design for the Commons People coming from all over the world just to see the building because of their interest in architecture, their interest in libraries, they were interested, they heard about it in the news, it was in the tourist map. It is really a showpiece, a tourist attraction, we had to learn to serve that public that was coming and be a tourist attraction, to make services fully available.

According to Seattle staff, the building was designed by a premier architect, and the building is a sculptural piece and a place that delivers services to thousands on a daily basis. The staff is finding ways to improve and make the experience better for people. From the staff’s point of view, the Seattle Public Library triggers more appreciation for architecture, creativity, and functionality. The New York Public Library is an iconic building in NYC. It has a rich history; the place has power and a strong presence. The building is majestic and challenging (New York Public Library Staff). The design of the Spain Library Park in Medellín, Colombia, seeks to draw inspiration from the surrounding mountain landscape of the Andes, in the valley where Medellín is located. The building resembles large rock formations and was designed to be iconic, unique, and a landmark sitting atop a hill in the Santo Domingo de Savio neighborhood. A folded building cut like the mountains that surround it gave shape to this library park. The design sought to encourage the ambiguous line between the building that resembles and fits within the surrounding landscape, as such architecture is understood as landscape, as an interpretation and continuity of the surrounding landscape (Mazzanti 2008). The texture of the building itself brings the city in built form into this mountainous landscape and becomes visibly iconic from many parts of the city. Some of the unique aspects of the Salt Lake City Public Library, according to the Community Affairs Liaison, are the spiraling staircase that looks peaceful and gorgeous in the “urban room,” a broad path in the main first floor entrance to the library populated with different stores, cafes, and spaces. This design detail has become a new way to look at a library and make it see more public, providing the patrons with a different idea of what the library is “not only a place where you can find books but a place where you can also enjoy as a public space, as a space that you come for other events and for other activities.” The Community Affairs Liaison highlights the library’s atrium designed to be a “city-street, kind of European style with shops and tables, where friends and family can come and it gives energy to the building because it is right at the entrance. It is a massive community space, a large space enclosed by glass.” The design also frames the surrounding Rocky Mountains with a slopping wall called “the lens,” in the valley where Salt Lake City is located. There is a straight line, the front door, and the wall that is “curving, and twisted, elevated, straight forward in a slope” (Architect Designer, Salt Lake City Public Library). For the Assistant Manager of Community Affairs in the Salt Lake City Public Library “the mountains literally hug the site, the designers took that into account and the building makes a wonderful job at taking that and staging nature.” The triangle was used by the architects to design the space of the plaza and the public library in Salt Lake City. The main part of the library design is a triangle, and it has the wall that curves out to the plaza and then is a rectangle element. According to architect designer, Salt Lake City Public Library describes the plaza outside the

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library as “A small scale plaza to open up a corner as a sort of invitation, a front yard and then you go to that urban room, which is huge, like a street alley with stores, cafes, and other amenities, like a broad street sidewalk within the building. The entry plaza, the urban room, and the piazza, those are the three main public spaces” that conform the figure of the triangle in which the design is based. There is a flow from and to the city from those spaces that is similar to the design of the Alexandria Library. The Library of Alexandria is not just one building but a collection of buildings. There is a large outdoor space, unwalled, that “one can just walk through” (Snøhetta). There is a science museum, a calligraphy museum, also a kind of quiet, calm area, just inside the doorway where you could sit and talk. In terms of more traditional definition of public space “we were very focused on creating the plaza outside the building without the walls and barriers, a place where people could just easily collect, so there is a series of steps where you can sit and look across the ocean. There is a pool of water that contains pollutions. The water mediates dust in the air while it provides a cooler ambiance around the building” (Snøhetta). The lunar shape of the circle was considered in the Library of Alexandria design as a shape to which all humans can relate and identify, a symbol of common understanding. As such, the library’s circular design “opens a window to the world and allows a window into the world of Alexandria, a physical connection between thoughts and ideas from different regions.” The design team sought to learn about what connects between people, interpreting those connections, and then also bringing forward different historical understandings on the site: The library supports a variety of human conditions and people from around the world, whether from China, or Puerto Rico or the Netherlands, so we were trying to find what kinds of geometry people around the world connect to. General platonic geometries are the simplest form of geometry. But we did not create a direct interpretation of that geometry so while the building is circular it is not a circle per se, it is tilting and it is slightly hard to understand what shape it is, so that is the way we began to meet that challenge (Snøhetta).

For Snøhetta, the Library of Alexandria buildings complex trigger, An immediate sense of the sacred that allows you to connect to something beyond your everyday life yet at the same time they are very transparent, very open, you can move through them easily. You can see everything, you can see everywhere you need to go very quickly, so the sense of orientation is really important. So for example the roof system, which is gridded, is a direct representation of the column system below which is designed from the shape and measurements of a standard book, because the bookshelves create the column system that creates the roof.

The Library of Alexandria functions as a theater, a transformational space where “the main room is amphitheater-like and is terraced like a theater. It has a front of house and back of house just like the theater does” (Snøhetta). Taking into consideration the environmental conditions where the libraries are situated also became part of design. In Alexandria, there is the Mediterranean dry hot air coming in from the Sahara, and the electrical infrastructure in Egypt was not stable. The building was designed to function without any electrical power while also been able to protect the fragile book contents inside.

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3 Library Design for the Commons The main reading room and book storage collection invites natural air movement and much of the collection is below ground with a steady temperature of 68°. The foundation is 25 m below the surface of the ground which is about 18 m below the water table. Nowadays, this might be a source of concern with sea-level rise. But the foundation system was designed to not allow for water to come in, 25 m below. The reading hall is in such a shape that when power goes down cool air is drawn out of the closed access storage rooms and move into a natural convection current that keeps you comfortable when you are inside. There is also constant indirect natural light, where you can read a book without artificial light, taking advantage of its prominent sunshine (Snøhetta).

In Salt Lake City, freeze/thaw had to be considered in the design. There are fireplaces located inside the library. For one of the architect designers of the Salt Lake City Public Library, the design wanted to generate a sense of place with the crescent wall that transforms from active to passive use through a trajectory of different spaces. The reading garden in the roof and the transparency of the building, the different spaces, the light and the micro-climate that works for all seasons are some of the best features in the design. In the Seattle Public Library, the books are organized in a spiral to accommodate the constant growth characteristic of library collections and a challenge for library design. According to Seattle Public Library Director the spiral concept “is very unique and very good in many ways as far as getting collections out on the floor.” There is also a shocking floor to ceiling red floor where meetings rooms are located. According to the designers, the space offers functionality, exploration, and playfulness with the shapes and colors used. The rugs in the first floor bring the outside in with the palm leaves motifs. The ceiling of the top floor is made out of acoustic pillows. All the libraries are designed in such a way that white noise is allowed in the first floors and the design prevents noise to travel to the upper floors. The traditional “Silence” signs so ubiquitous in libraries of the past are absent, and instead incorporated into the design to provide quieter areas in the upper floors of the buildings.

3.5 Community Programming Contemporary library design embeds libraries in the urban fabric as anchor institutions highlighting uniqueness of the locales, parading its history and establishing strong connections with the surrounding areas and seek to develop robust communities through programming. At the Salt Lake City Public Library, programming for community include arts festivals and cultural events such as Chinese New Year, Diwali Festival, and the Indian Festival of Light. The Utah Art Fair at the Library Square in the Salt Lake City Public Library as well as collaborations with outside institutions such as the Salt Lake Community College, bookstores in partnership with the library offer a writing center or a book launch, for instance (Community Affairs Liaison).

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In the Seattle Public Library, the Assistant Director sees programming as a way to focus on services to immigrants and disability communities based on outreach to communities “to hear from our customers and quickly translate that into service adjustments or improvements, customer experience, to activate the community and activating the collection.” The design of the public libraries selected was based on community and staff participation and in most instances a direct request is made through a vote to place a bond to build the library. The connection between the library and the city was made explicit in the design of adjacent plazas to the libraries or used adjacent public space, as in the case of Bryant Park next to the New York City Public Library. These public space extensions enhance the library’s location and increase visits. The iconic architecture of the public library design also highlights its location and attract visitors to the library and to that part of the city where the libraries are located, significantly increasing pedestrian traffic. The meaning of the library, therefore, is strongly linked to that part of the city and it is significantly related to the image of the city with specific brand contents for each library. The following chapters will present the specific characteristics of each public library selected. The library’s mission in relation to the population they serve and other relevant indicators of the library’s impact and relationship to their city as well as peculiar characteristics of each library will provide a general sense of their functioning in the subsequent chapters.

References Aabø, S., & Audunson, R. (2012). Use of library space and the library as place. Library & Information Science Research, 34(2), 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2011.06.002. Benhabib, S. (1992). Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition and Jurgen Habermas. In Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. pp 89–120. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Buschman, J. E. (2010). The Social as Fundamental and a Source of the Critical: Jürgen Habermas. Critical Theory in Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from Across the Disciplines, Library Unlimited, Santa Barbara, CA, 161–172. Hansson, J. (2010). Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism and its relevance for library and information science research. Critical Theory in Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from Across the Disciplines, Library Unlimited, Santa Barbara, CA, 249–57. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American Cities. New York: Random House. Klinenberg, E. (2018). Palaces for the people: How social infrastructure can help fight inequality, polarization and the Decline of Civic Life. NY: Crown. Manfredini, M. (2017). The augmented meta-public space: Interpreting emerging transductive territories in enhanced centres of consumption. Journal of Public Space, 2(3), 111–199. https://doi. org/10.5204/jps.v2i3.120. Mazzanti, G. (2008). España Library. ArchDaily, Retrieved June 2019 https://www.archdaily.com/ 2565/espana-library-giancarlo-mazzanti. Nevárez, J. (2018). Governing disaster in urban environments: Climate change preparation and adaption after hurricane sandy. Washington: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield. Smithsimon, G. (2015). The Right to Public Space. Metropolitics. March 10, 2015. https://www.metropolitiques.eu/The-Right-to-Public-Space.html.

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Varnelis, K., & Friedberg, A. (2012). Place: The networking of public space. In N. Publics (Ed.), Kazys varnelis (pp. 15–42). Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press. Varnelis, K. (2012). Conclusion: The meaning of networked publics. In N. Publics (Ed.), Kazys varnelis (pp. 145–163). Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press. Wall, D. (2014). The commons in history: Culture, conflict, and ecology. MIT Press.

Chapter 4

Seattle’s Public Library, Libraries for All: “To Bring People, Information, and Ideas Together to Enrich Lives and Build Community”

Abstract Designed by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus from OMA and LMN architecture firm, the Seattle Central Library is the main branch of Seattle’s public library system. Their mission established the goal “to bring people, information, and ideas together to enrich the lives and build community.” This chapter will provide the history of the Seattle Public Library and offer background information on the circumstances that lead to its re-design and construction such as the design considerations and its function. The chapter will focus on what kind of image the city of Seattle wanted to produce through the concept of public library developed in its main branch. A general overview of Seattle’s Public Library influential design, management, programs, and services will be provided. The way in which the area where the library is located will also be analyzed within the context of urban development initiatives set in motion to develop the area. Keywords Seattle public library · Branding · Sustainability · Inclusivity

4.1 Seattle Public Library: Libraries for All The Seattle Public Library was built in 2004 and designed by Rem Koolhaas with the Seattle-based LMN architects. The library is located in 1000 Fourth Avenue, a block flanked by Fourth and Fifth Avenues and Madison and Spring Streets, and this is the third and most recent Seattle Central Library installment in the same location. The Seattle Public Library system follows the strong legacy of Carnegie libraries. The Seattle Central Library is composed of 27 branches and serves the population of Seattle that was 724,745 in 2017. The library collection is composed of a circulation size of 11,622,522 items. In 2017, 39.9 million tourists visited Seattle with a 10.7 economic impact (Robinson and Lusebrink 2018). Tourism is one of the main goals of urban revitalization in the creative city model and the library has helped brand the city as an attractive destination for tourists with the distinctive design of the central public library (see Fig. 4.1: Outside View of the Seattle Central Public Library J. Nevárez). The Seattle Central Library has absolutely cutting-edge design and is embraced by residents and users as something they feel immensely proud of according to © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_4

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Fig. 4.1 Outside view of the Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

observations of the site in 2009 and informal interviews with the users. The design brings the outside/inside, and the spiral offers open access to books in an innovative open stack design. Special consideration was placed in providing a way to allow the collection to grow seamlessly without altering the cataloguing format (see Fig. 4.2: Book Spiral-1. Seattle Central Library. Nevárez 2009 and Fig. 4.3: Main Escalator through Book Spiral. Seattle Central Public Library. Nevárez 2009). The Seattle Public Library has an area called the “Living Room” at the entrance on the first floor, and in the upper floors there are quiet study areas (see Fig. 4.4: The Living Room. Seattle Central Public Library. Nevárez 2009, Fig. 4.5: The Living Room-2. Seattle Central Public Library. Nevárez 2009, and Fig. 4.6: The Living Room-3. Seattle Central Public Library. Nevárez 2009). In 1998, the “Libraries for All” bond issue approved the improvement of all 22 branches of the Seattle Public Library, especially the main branch in downtown Seattle at a time in which the notion of the inner city characterized many downtown areas in the United States. The inner city was a neglected and abandoned area, preys of fiscal crises, and the subsequent social problems that those conditions carry. The newly designed Seattle Central Library main branch was opened in 2004 in the same city block where its predecessor was located. The library provided a home not only to its circulation collection but also computers for public use and wireless internet

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Fig. 4.2 Book Spiral-1. Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

access. A high-tech book handling system was also implemented to facilitate the cataloguing and movement from borrowers and back to the shelves. The glass and steel cover of the library houses five platforms with specific programming with four open spaces among the platforms designed to allow patrons to meet, read, or use the internet. The building also includes a children’s section, an auditorium, and parking. At the entrance of the library there is a space called the living room which is a transitional space between the street, sidewalk, and the library (see Fig. 4.3: The Living Room-1. Seattle Central Public Library Nevárez 2009, Fig. 4.4: The Living Room-2. Seattle Central Public Library Nevárez 2009, and Fig. 4.5: The Living Room-3. Seattle Central Public Library Nevárez 2009). In that area, segments from different literary authors and languages around the world are engraved on the wooden floor. This is a playful design detail that provides a welcoming effect to a diverse audience. Many contemporary libraries are designed this way, where white noise is allowed in the first floor and the design deters noise from traveling vertically (see Fig. 4.7: Study Area-1 Seattle Central Public Library. Nevárez 2009 and Fig. 4.8: Study Area2. Seattle Central Public Library Nevárez 2009). According to Kubo and Pratt (2005) in their coverage of the design process for the Seattle Public Library, unambiguous flexibility was the main goal that the design

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Fig. 4.3 Main escalator through book spiral. Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

team took into consideration. Programs were organized into spatial compartments with specific equipment and duties, avoiding any section encroaching on another. Organized on a specific set of five programmatic, five clusters were guided by the concept of stability and four on instability. Two of the main contributions to library design were the Book Spiral and the Mixing Chamber in the Seattle Public Library. The Book Spiral was a design solution to the increasing accumulation of books in a library, easing the management of growth (see Fig. 4.2: Seattle Central Library, Spiral Nevárez 2009). The Mixing Chamber was a space created to accommodate human and technological intelligence where the guests were surrounded by information sources. Seeking to set an international standard in design, the library competition was guided by the library’s role as one of society’s few remaining meeting places for rich and poor. By turning architectural conventions upside down, the selection of Koolhaas from OMA architecture provides a sense of joy and exuberance, and a range of expression was sought after (Goldsmith 2005). Goldsmith also characterized Rem Koolhaas design for the Seattle Public Library as “explosively experimental” pressing to turn the library into a symbol of city seeking to become a global leader in trade and technology (2005). Niessen, on the other hand, saw the design of the library as a desperate attempt for the city to change its provincial status to become a world-class city by a celebrity-icon architect (2005). The glass floor in the library

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Fig. 4.4 The Living Room-1. Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

was interpreted by Niessen as symbolizing the “blurred ephemerality of the urban context” and a “receptacle for irony and data” (2005). The city is described as one that loves books and is obsessed with technology (Kaiman 2005). In relation to the city, Bennett states that one of the main objectives of the library’s Design Commission was to consider the design implications of the building and how it serves the nine-block area, since libraries are not just about books (Bennett 2005). The ability to access information everywhere makes of a new library a challenging proposition in “the simultaneity of all media, the professionalism of their presentation and interaction” while enhancing the view of Mount Rainier at a distance (Bennett 2005). The Seattle’s Public Library programming supports early learning for children and youth through the resources and collections in the library as well as services, programs, and partnerships with outside institutions. Technology access is designed to increase access to materials, information, and services via the internet. Community engagement is one of the main components of the library’s mission through outreach that allows a meaningful connection with the library’s constituents. The library also seeks to cultivate and record the history of Seattle and making its unique heritage available to the community. The library also seeks to cater to the changing needs of the library patrons’ interests through services and programming.

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Fig. 4.5 The Living Room-2. Seattle Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

Fig. 4.6 The “Living Room,” Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

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Fig. 4.7 Reading Area Upper Floor-1, Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez, 2009)

The connection between the city and the library is exemplified in the branding of the library’s vision for Seattle: “A city where imagination and opportunity thrive.” The mission of the library itself showcases itself as a place to bring people, information, and ideas together to enrich lives and build community where the role of the library focuses on exalting the branding of the city where imagination and opportunity thrive. According to their website, the library seeks to support intellectual freedom by supporting the right to access constitutionally protected information, supporting that every patron becomes a lifelong reader, protects confidentiality of patrons, celebrates diversity by ensuring that all people feel welcome in the library, and engages in active support to combat prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. By fostering a healthy democracy, the library is committed to strengthen an informed community where participation in civic life is open to all, supports children and youth to raise thoughtful readers and citizens, and prioritizes its efforts to help reduce the educational achievement gap. The library also seeks to build strong partnerships with individuals, public and non-profit agencies, community groups, educators, and businesses. These guiding principles are embedded in a constant process of adaptation to the changing needs and interests of the community seeking to improve service as a learning organization to invest in staff, technology, and infrastructure (https://www. spl.org).

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Fig. 4.8 Study Area-2, Seattle Central Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

The Seattle Public Library offers similar community-oriented programming to its constituency, from what can be expected in contemporary libraries nowadays. A wide array of programs and events includes resources, classes, and special exhibits. These activities revolve around kids and families, teens, arts and culture, authors and books, business, civic and social services, fun and games, learning, and outreach. One of the highlights of the Seattle Central Public Library programming that stands out is events on what they titled social justice. In those, they offer talks, panel discussions, and community listening on current social justice issues, such as civil rights, intellectual freedom, and the criminal justice system. Within the current entrepreneurial approach to economic development, the library also offers within business programming free access to market research, business resources, and networking events for beginning and experienced entrepreneurs. According to the Seattle Central Public Library website, 270 one-on-one meetings with local entrepreneurs took place in 2018 where 57% started a business. Ninety-eight workshops or events were offered where 1,800 people learned how to start a business. The library’s business program has 47 community partners and in the first Startup Weekend, 110 people explored ideas to improve education and entrepreneurship (https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/socialjustice). The strong relationship with the city is not only evident in the business community reach efforts. The Seattle Comprehensive Plan, Vision 2040 developed

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by the city, focuses on environmental stewardship, economic opportunity and security, race and social equity based on inclusivity are at par with the Seattle Public Library mission of access to all (http://www.seattle.gov/opcd/ongoing-initiatives/ comprehensive-plan). Accordingly, the Seattle Central Public Library and its neighborhood branches have received 17, 223, 417 in-person and online visits, up 1% from 2017. The total operating budget is $74,977,000. During 2018, 304,290 people attended 10,060 events (Seattle Public Library Impact Report 2018). Zook et al. (2012) argue that the space syntax of the Seattle Public Library main branch building does offer users the opportunity of social staging and reflective engagement through imagination in the use of the space. Likewise, Fisher et al. (2016) consider the notion of informational place to emphasize the role of libraries as providing information finding and seeking, reading, lifelong learning, learning resources, and a learning environment in their study of the Seattle Public Library main branch, which concluded that the library effectively engages its users through the designed spaces that sustains exploration and imagination. The next chapter will provide a detailed overview of the Salt Lake City Public Library based on its mission, architectural design, and programming as it relates to Salt Lake City.

References Bennett, S. (2005). Koolhaas cathedral is taking shape. Monday, March 3. In Kubo, M. & Prat, R., Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Seattle Public Library OMA/LMN 62–64. Fisher, K., Saxton, M., & Edwards, P. M. (2016). Seattle Central Library as place: Reconceptualizing space, community, and information at the Central Library. In Take One Building: Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives of the Seattle Central Library (pp. 129–150). Routledge. Goldsmith, S. (2005). City books Dutch architect for library unorthodox design full of ‘exuberance,’ ‘joy’ cited trustees. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Thursday, May 27, 1990. In Kubo, M. & Prat, R., Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Seattle Public Library OMA/LMN 49–50. Kaiman, B. (2005). Novel look, but still for books. The Seattle Times, Sunday, July 9, 2000. In Kubo, M. & Prat, R., Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Seattle Public Library OMA/LMN 60–61. Kubo, M., & Prat, R. (2005). Seattle public library, OMA/LMN. Niessen, S. (2005). Shhhhh, my little parakeets, the library has no clothes. The Seattle Times, Editorials and Opinion, Thursday, December 23rd , 1999. In Kubo, M. & Prat, R., Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Seattle Public Library OMA/LMN 53–54. Robinson, K., & Lusebrink, C. (2018). Seattle sees eighth consecutive year record tourism. Visit Seattle, April 2018. Retrieved July 11, 2019 at https://www.visitseattle.org/press/press-releases/ seattle-sees-eighth-consecutive-year-of-record-tourism/. Seattle Public Library Impact Report. (2018). Impact on Local Business. Retrieved July 29, 2019 at https://www.spl.org/about-us/library-impact/2018-impact-report/2018-impact-on-localbusiness. Zook, J. B. & Bafna, S. (2012). Imaginative content and building form in the Seattle Central Public Library. Proceedings: Eighth International Space Syntax Symposium, In Green, M., Reyes, J., and Castro, A (Eds.). Santiago de Chile.

Chapter 5

Salt Lake City Public Library, the City Library: “To Advance Knowledge, Foster Creativity, Encourage Exchange of Ideas, Build Community, and Enhance Quality of Life” Abstract This chapter will describe the Salt Lake City Library main branch. “The City Library” is represented as “a dynamic civic resource that promotes free and open access to information, materials and services to all members of the community to advance knowledge, foster creativity, encourage the exchange of ideas, build community and enhance the quality of life” (The City Library website, https://about. slcpl.org/mission). The library was designed by Moshe Safdie with VCBO Architecture as the local firm and opened to the public in 2003. Its modern architecture has received great reception from the public and is a source of pride to the urban identity of Salt Lake City. This chapter will focus on a description of the Salt Lake City Public Library design and mission that contributes to a better understanding of the library’s role within Salt Lake City and its community-oriented programming. Keywords Salt lake city public library · Community-oriented programming · Quality of life · Revitalization

5.1 Salt Lake City Public Library: The City Library The City Library, as it is referred in its mission, highlights the connection to the urban area where it is located as an anchor institution, attracting new residents, tourists, and retail to an area originally underused. The Salt Lake City Public Library, “The City Library,” is located in 210 East, 400 South, across from the Salt Lake City and County Building and Washington Square. The City Library seeks to be a dynamic civic resource that promotes free and open access to information, materials and services to all members of the community to advance knowledge, foster creativity, encourage exchange of ideas, build community, and enhance quality of life (Salt Lake City Approved Budget 2018). The Salt Lake City population was 192,672 in 2015 and visitors to the city had an economic impact of 7.98 billion. There were approximately 6.2 visitors per resident in Salt Lake City in 2018 (OmniTrak Group Inc 2019). Salt Lake City is a strong outdoor recreation hub. In 2017, the Library Block, the Library Square offered 31 special events (Leaver 2017). The Salt Lake City library system has nine branches and the main library’s circulation consists of 713,020 items in the collection (The © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_5

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City Library 2018). The Salt Lake City Public Library main branch received a total of 796,806 visitors in 2017 (The City Library 2018). The budget priorities largely focus on operation costs, facilities maintenance, technology replacements and upgrades, safety and cleanliness, increase in pay for staff, and promote access and high use of library materials and services for a budget of 19,710,650 for the 2018 fiscal year (The City Library 2018). The Salt Lake City Public Library emerged as the constituents of Salt Lake City voted on a bond to build the library. The design competition was won by Moshe Safdie who also designed the Vancouver Library and as a star architect brought recognition to Salt Lake City to brand the city with this iconic building. According to the library’s website, the design sought to engage the city’s imagination and aspirations in addition to offer a repository for books and computers. The newly designed city library was opened to the public in 2003. The Salt Lake City Public Library offers a unique experience of place by merging the building with the city through the design of an atrium that works like a broad city sidewalk or street in the first floor of the library, appropriately named the Urban Room (see Fig. 5.1). The building frames the Rocky Mountains with a curved 360° wall embracing the public plaza, showcasing the majestic Salt Lake Valley in a space where a walkable roof garden sits atop (see Figs. 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5). The embeddedness of the Salt Lake City Public Library in relation to the city is best highlighted by its nickname: “The City Library.” Their programming supports resources and events for adults, teens, and kids. The library also offers events, art exhibits for the artistic community, and room rentals for events (https://services.slc pl.org). Hawaiian, Navajo Indigenous language series as well as programming for teens, preschoolers, teenagers, and adults are included in the events supported by the library, among many other events. Professional skills are also covered in their programming, such as Microsoft Workshops, Creative Lab, and additional programming includes movies such as The Utah Film Center Presents Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, which relates to conversations about how humans are responsible for climate change (https://services.slcpl.org/slcpl/events). The variety in the events is significant and all encompassing, catering to the needs of the community at large. The building has six stories, with shops, galleries, radio station, and a 300-seat auditorium at the ground level. The building maximizes the use of sunlight in its design, with UV rating, energy-efficient glass. As in other libraries, the design allows for quieter, reference and study-oriented spaces located in the higher floors, while noisier areas lay at the ground floor. The dynamic design facilitates the use of the library to a wide group of constituents. The library seeks to offer the public the opportunity to explore new ideas in a context of conversation, discussion, and dialogue based on curiosity, engagement, and the belief on lifelong learning. The library’s mission also highlights creativity and inspiration within a design and programming that invites exploration to convey a symbol of a city that is smart, active, and creative (The Salt Lake City Library https://www. slcpl.org/). The Salt Lake City Public Library refers to itself as the community’s urban living room to convey a strong link between urban living and the library as a civic resource,

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Fig. 5.1 Salt Lake City Public Library. Inside study areas and the urban room (Nevárez 2009)

as an anchor institution for cultural life. The many functions and uses of the library as a public space dovetail with those of a community center, a museum, an art gallery, school, job training and preparedness, among many additional roles that evolve from the continuous relationship to its community, broadly understood. The City Library encourages engagement anchored in the belief that reading at an early age helps children develop reasoning skills, community engagement or engagement with others, and promote creativity. The library also foments community through virtual connectivity which the library also makes available in the digital services and programming that it offers. Providing a hub for technology access, the library understands the important function of computer and technological literacy for contemporary urban living as it changes and evolves, is a must for users’ skills (The Salt Lake City Library https://www.slcpl.org/).

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Fig. 5.2 Salt Lake City Public Library Public Plaza-1 (Nevárez 2009)

Fig. 5.3 Salt Lake City Library Plaza-2 (Nevárez 2009)

The library’s role to improve quality of life in the city fits within the creative city model to attract urban dwellers of the creative economy. Quality of life is a major contributor to different constituents’ degree of satisfaction with urban locales. This effort is considered within the context of community development and engagement, which according to the Salt Lake City Public Library mission seeks to address the challenges and generate innovative solutions “to create and sustain the best place to

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Fig. 5.4 Salt Lake City Public Library Plaza-3 (Nevárez 2009)

live” (The Salt Lake City Library https://www.slcpl.org/). To create local solutions and bridge divides through community involvement and participation guides the efforts of the Salt Lake City Public Library’s mission. Community building is understood within the context of the city library mission, as providing the framework for a sustainable way of living along with finding ways to bridge east/west racial, cultural, and socio-economic divides. Diversity, in this context one of the most qualifying aspects of urban living, is also considered in the city library’s mission. The 84 million dollar-bond that was overwhelmingly approved in 1998 secured the construction of the public library, which was open to the public in 2003, and a peaceful urban green space was preserved adjacent to the library. In 2006, when the Salt Lake City Public Library system won the award for Library of the Year, the award described the library as “the place where democracy happens” (The Salt Lake City Library https://www.slcpl.org/). The library is decorated with a plaque on one of its walls that shows librarian Nancy Tessman’s idea that a library should provide connection between different people in a moment of commonality by wanting to explore, understand, and learn (see Fig. 5.6). Efforts to establish relationships between businesses in the downtown Salt Lake City area and the public library are explicitly stated in the Downtown Salt Lake City Alliance downtown efforts report (2018). Accordingly, the alliance held a Technical

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Fig. 5.5 The Rooftop Garden, Salt Lake City Public Library (Nevárez 2009)

Assistance Panel in partnership with the city and Urban Land Institute of Salt Lake City to produce a final report addressing initiatives to placemaking, arts, and creative space and recommend cultural offerings and increase activities and programming on the [Library] “block” (Downtown Salt Lake City Alliance Report 2018). This initiative is named the Library Square + Civic Campus. To better understand urban dynamics that could enhance programming in the library block to attract visitors, they accounted for the number of employees, office square footage, retail square footage, annual spending by convention attendees, vacant and underutilized acres, hotel occupancy, wages paid downtown, downtown office vacancy, downtown retail sales, citywide convention delegates, total downtown property value, and the number of parking spaces (The Downtown Salt Lake City Alliance 2018). All these indicators are in resonance with employment, real estate for office and retail, and convention size events for the downtown area where the library is located. Overall, the branding of the Salt Lake City Library in strongly connected to urban development in the city and is explicitly integrated in the library’s mission and to the urban development initiatives where businesses in the area are fully incorporated. The next chapter will provide a similar account for the New York City Public Library’s main branch in the Stephen A. Schwarzmann building on the 42nd street and Fifth Avenue, New York City.

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Fig. 5.6 Nancy Tessman Plaque (Nevárez 2009)

References Downtown Sal Lake City Alliance. (2018). 2017–2018 Downtown Economic Benchmark Report. Leaver, J. (2017). The State of Utah’s Travel and Tourism Industry, Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, The University of Utah. Retrieved July 12, 2019, from https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/upl oads/TravelandTourismRepFinal2017.pdf. Omnitrak Group Inc. (2019). Calendar Year 2018, Utah Travel America Visitor Profile Report and Insights. Retrieved August 2019 from https://travel.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018_U tah-Report_FINAL.pdf. The City Library, The Salt Lake City Library. (2018). Approved Budget Fiscal Year 2018. Retrieved July 2, 2019, from https://www.slcpl.org/files/17-18budgetbook.pdf.

Chapter 6

New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building: “To Inspire Lifelong Learning, Advance Knowledge, and Strengthen Our Communities”

Abstract As an older and still functioning institution, The New York Public Library main branch in New York City will be discussed in this chapter by examining its design, function, and transformation to become one of the favorite sites for residents and tourists in the city. Completed in 1911 and designed by John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings, the New York Public Library is a research institution and has rare books and map collections that are unique. The library’s mission “to inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities” is evident in their constant addition of new services and programs. For instance, recently the library began their “Library after Hours” program where they open the library at night that under different themes provided live shows, installations, and programs using the library collection (maps and films). The event also provided food, beverages, music, and the opportunity to enjoy the Beaux-Arts architecture of the building. This chapter will provide background on the New York Public Library main branch, the design as well as current functions and programming. The chapter will focus on the kind of New York City image produced through the concept of public library developed in its main branch for residents and tourists. Keywords New York Public Library · Livability · Community-centered · Knowledge · Power

6.1 New York Public Library: “Knowledge is Power” The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, located in 42nd street and Fifth Avenue in New York City is the main branch of the New York City Public Libraries system. It opened in 1911 as the “People’s Palace,” built on the grounds of what was a water reservoir. Designed with input from the librarian Dr. John Shaw Billings, the library is solemn (see Figs. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4). Carrère and Hastings architects were selected to design and construct the new library. The result, regarded as the apogee of Beaux-Arts design that incorporated French neoclassicism, gothic and renaissance elements as well as modern materials such as iron and glass, was the largest marble structure in the United States at the

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Fig. 6.1 New York Public Library main branch, entrance (Nevárez 2019)

time. Once inside through the labyrinthic spaces, glimpses at the art in the ceiling frames the space as one of grandeur and respect. The New York Public Library is being designated a National Historical Landmark in 1965 and is well known for the two lion sculptures at its entrance: patience and fortitude (see Fig. 6.5). Today the New York Public Library serves a population of almost eight-and-a-half million in its four research centers and 88 neighborhood branch libraries throughout public library system in the five city boroughs. At the main branch, the collection size is composed of 10 million books, 45.2 million research items. The density and magnitude of the New York Public Library collection is overwhelming – like most things in this lovely city. The New York City population in 2017 was 8.6 million. In 2017, New York City received a record 62.8 million visitors with an economic impact of 44 billion. The New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzmann building is a landmark and a wave of tourists compete for space with library users in its narrow hallways. The library is located next to Bryant Park which under its hollow underground space, books are stored (see Fig. 6.6). The library has reading rooms, including the Rose Main Reading Room and a library store (see Figs. 6.7, 6.8, 6.9 and 6.10). As in most densely populated areas where space is minimal and maximized, this is comparatively speaking, a smaller library. The library, like most contemporary

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Fig. 6.2 New York Public Library entrance lobby (Nevárez 2019)

main libraries, offers rental space for many public and private events. Throughout the inside of the library there are different posts where patrons can buy coffee and food, as well as library merchandise in the library store. The mission of the library seeks to “inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities” (https://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman). For Kazin (1996) the library is an American metaphor of dreamers and doers. The flaneur of the mind, as Kazin calls New York Public Library patrons, considers Room 315, the Rose Main Reading Room, a work of art and an iconic monument in the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd street. Mostly a research library with exquisite collections of rare books and maps, The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building mission rests on core values to inspire lifelong learning by creating more able learners and researchers. The library’s mission seeks to bring people together to generate creative collaborations and to support learning from each other. Access to materials and information is free and open and reflects New York’s global perspective. By promoting full citizenship and participation in society, bringing diverse communities together where patrons can enjoy, honor, and engage with different communities is central to the library’s mission. The library also offers unique and authoritative materials of historical importance. The library seeks to introduce new worlds, provide opportunities,

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Fig. 6.3 New York Public Library first floor hallway (Nevárez 2019)

help patrons save money, and share new ways of having fun in their programs, services, classes, and materials available. A couple of years ago the library introduced the Library Open Hours where many rooms in the library were opened to the public under specific themes that used the library resources to engage patrons with different activities, including music, poetry readings, films, food, and drinks. Their recently launched “Knowledge is Power” initiative in 2019 sought to entice patrons to have their library card issued. Among the services showcased in this initiative patrons could borrow e-books or any book with a library reader application, learn a language, gain career skills, get informed from newspapers or magazines, and have free access to museums and other cultural institutions in the city. The library also provides English classes and citizenship resources (https://www.nypl.org/locations/ schwarzman). The programming of the library seeks to maintain its core values of accountability, excellence, expertise, freedom, innovation, passion, and teamwork. The 2018 Annual Report of the New York Public Library is based on the launching of the “Knowledge is Power: Libraries Make Us Stronger” initiative (The New York Public Library Annual Report 2018). According to the report, access is power, and it states that “At a time when misinformation is rampant and inequality is one the rise, the Library aims to provide even more New Yorkers with open access to knowledge and opportunity. This allows them to discover new skills, stay civically engaged,

6.1 New York Public Library: “Knowledge is Power” Fig. 6.4 New York Public Library stairs and ceiling fresco (Nevárez 2019)

Fig. 6.5 New York Public Library entrance lion (Nevárez 2019)

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Fig. 6.6 New York City Public Library side entrance leading to Bryant Park (Nevárez 2019)

Fig. 6.7 New York Public Library Rose main reading room (Nevárez 2019)

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Fig. 6.8 New York Public Library Rose Reading Room ceiling (Nevárez 2019)

and become more involved with their communities” (The New York Public Library Annual Report 2018, p. 4). Great centers of urban culture must have a great library, and it is a symbol of a cultured society. The New York Public Library is a vital part of the city and among its early beneficiaries were recently arrived immigrants. The library provided them contact with the literature and history of their new country. In contemporary New York City as a sanctuary city that protects the rights of immigrants, the public library remains a source of respectful treatment to its diverse constituency and provider of valuable resources for its community at large. The library serves some 18 million patrons who come through its doors annually; in addition, the library’s website receives 32 million visits annually from more than 200 countries (https://www.nypl. org/locations/schwarzman). The New York Public Library is included in the policy map of New York City that highlights important institutions and services throughout the five boroughs and across the United States. The New York City Public Library’s main branch is located next to Bryant Park. In the 1990s Bryant Park was a place, like many parks in the city, to be avoided. It was derelict and unsafe mainly known for drug dealings and as a dangerous public space like many other public parks during the fiscal crises were neglected. After Rudolph Giuliani’s aesthetics of order were implemented, where public space

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Fig. 6.9 New York Public Library store entrance sign (Nevárez 2019)

was “hyhienized” from drugs, homelessness, quality of life issues such as beauty, cleanliness, and surveillance transformed public spaces in the city (Nevárez 2007). Bryant Park became what it is known for today along with Times Square, part of a family entertainment district. The New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd street relationship to Bryant Park is not only of physical proximity but extended to programming through the shared public space. In the front plaza of the New York Public Library’s main branch, an art cart provides leisure activities in nearby tables sponsored by Bryant Park (see Fig. 6.11). Bryant Park, therefore, mediates as a transitional space between the library and the city as both The New York Public Library and Bryant Park seat along the pedestrian traffic of 42nd street (Reed and Morrone 2011). The Mayor’s Office, New York City Planning (2019) launched the initiative PLACES: Planning for Livability, Affordability, Community, Economic Opportunity and Sustainability which reinforces community development alongside the mission of the New York Public Library. Addressing quality of life issues and economic development PLACES seeks to develop a comprehensive zoning based on community needs along affordable housing preservation and development, economic development, and priority investments in infrastructure and community supportive service across the five boroughs.

6.1 New York Public Library: “Knowledge is Power” Fig. 6.10 Tourists leaving designated area for picture taking in the Rose Reading Room, New York Public Library (Nevárez 2019)

Fig. 6.11 Bryant Park art cart on front plaza New York Public Library (Nevárez 2019)

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Fig. 6.12 Dictionary in the Rose Reading room, New York Public Library (Nevárez 2019)

The resources available at the New York Public Library detail the size of the collection as a research institution mainly (see Fig. 6.12). The New York Public Library offers access to its large collection, is an important cultural institution in New York City, and exemplifies the values of democratic free access to all by building and strengthening community in its public space. The next chapter will focus on Spain Library Park in Medellín, Colombia. This library is the only one from those selected, which is currently closed due to structural problems with the building. It was originally thought to be an explicit intervention to bring services to a neighborhood that faced many challenging social problems.

References Kazin, A. (1996). New York Jew. Syracuse University Press. Nevárez, J. (2007). Central Park, the aesthetics of order and the appearance of looseness. In Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life (pp. 154–170). Routledge. New York City Planning. (2019). PLACES: Planning for livability, affordability, community, economic opportunity and sustainability. Retrieved May 26, 2019, from https://www1.nyc.gov/ site/planning/plans/places.page. Reed, H., & Morrone, F. (2011). The New York Public Library: The architecture and decoration of the Stephen A. WW Norton and Company: Schwarzman Building. The New York Public Library. (2018). The New York Public Library Annual Report. Retrieved August 2, 2019, from https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/18600_annual_report_ 2018v19_web.pdf.

Chapter 7

Biblioteca España (Spain Library Park), Medellín, Colombia: “Actions with My Neighborhood”

Abstract The Parque Biblioteca España (Spain Library Park) in Medellín, Colombia opened in 2007 and it was designed by Colombian Architect Giancarlo Mazzanti. This library is a clear example of how the insertion of the library in the urban fabric was intentionally designed to exert a positive effect in the criminality-ridden contiguous neighborhood where it is located. The government built a cable car to connect this neighborhood to the city by public transportation and build the library to create a positive intervention in the social dynamics of the area. This has proven to be a successful story of urban revitalization in the international context of Colombia. The library’s mission to provide “a space of social inclusion, encounters, coexistence and access to information in a territory that has untiringly fought to banish violence from its social environment,” signals to the social importance of this intervention. This chapter will examine the conditions under which the Spain Library Park (Biblioteca España) was built and designed as well as the considerations by which such an intervention was developed. The chapter will also address the development boom in Medellín and the urban discourse based on social urbanism within the context of urban development initiatives. Keywords Spain library park · Urban interventions · Innovative · Entrepreneurial · Social urbanism

7.1 Urban Temples for the Neighborhood’s Education The Spain Library (Biblioteca España) was an explicit intervention into the urban fabric as part of an initiative that was first developed in Bogotá through Bibliored as a network of public libraries designated a library park, an urban complex that combined a library building with ample green space for public use to “address the need for more cultural and education space and public services in less affluent neighborhoods” (Caballero 2003, p. 3). Understood as “urban temples,” Bibliored network of libraries in Medellín has 10 library parks located at the periphery of the city including the Spain Library. The library is located in what was considered a dangerous neighborhood of informal settlements of farm immigrants from the countryside who became incoming residents at the slopes of Medellín’s mountains that surround the valley around the © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_7

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Fig. 7.1 Spain Library Park, Medellín, library against Andes Mountains. (Iwan Baan, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019)

city (see Fig. 7.1: Spain Library Park, Medellín, library against Andes Mountains. Iwan Baan Equipo Mazzanti 2019). Medellín population in 2017 was 2.5 million and it had 550,000 visitors in 2018 (Colombia Reports, 2019). The Spain Library Park was a main tourist attraction and for a while galvanized the efforts to provide a successful public space for residents and a tourist attraction to the area. An additional 10 library parks have been constructed in Medellín by 2011. This is the area where the figure of Pablo Escobar emerged. The city of Medellín designed an urban intervention where they built a cable car (Metrocable) from the city center to the Santo Domingo Savio in the 1st Comuna neighborhood where the library was built. The library’s name is due to the Spanish government help with the funding of the project through the Spanish Agency for International Development Corporation. The library opened its doors in 2007. The Spain Library was designed by Giancarlo Mazzanti, a Colombian architect who also designed another library in the La Ladera neighborhood in Medellín. In 2008, the library park won the IberoAmerican Architecture and Urban Design Biennial Award in Lisbon, Portugal (see Fig. 7.2: Spain Library Park, Medellín, library and the neighborhood Iwan Baan, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019). The three buildings that composed Spain Library Park with back stone tiles that cover the outside skin of the buildings, look like large black rocks joined at the bottom by a platform that functions as an open public space. Each building was designed for a different program: one for the library itself, a second for training rooms, and a third an auditorium donated by the Spanish government (see Fig. 7.3: Spain Library Park, Medellín, library and the city, Sergio Gomez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019). From visits to the library in 2009, children and adults were extremely enthusiastic about the library. A photo exhibit about immigrants around the world, computers available for the patrons, and a vibrant use of the outside public space pointed at a positive change in the neighborhood where children, mostly, were taking advantage of the library and its contiguous public space (Fig. 7.4 Spain Library Park, Medellín. Outside public space Sergio Gomez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019).

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Fig. 7.2 Spain Library Park, Medellín, library and the neighborhood (Iwan Baan, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019)

Fig. 7.3 Spain Library Park, Medellín, library and the city (Sergio Gomez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019)

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Fig. 7.4 Spain Library Park, Medellín. Outside public space (Sergio Gómez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019)

Inside, the library offers opportunities for study, computer access which was very successful among children using the computers for video games, and an auditorium for different events (Fig. 7.5: Spain Library Park, Medellín. Inside with windows and Fig. 7.6: Spain Library Park, Inside 2). The Northeast Integral Urban Project (Proyecto Urbano Integral Nororiental centered on an urban initiative to improve the infrastructure in the 1st Comuna where the library was built (among other poor areas in the Medellín). The Santo Domingo Savia 1 (Comuna 1) emerged from individuals displaced from rural areas where violence and lack of opportunities limited possibilities to its residents (Alcaldía Medellín, 2007). At the beginning of the 1950s, working class families and immigrants from the countryside “invaded” the slopes that surround Medellín’s valley. The areas where they informally settled lacked state planning, service provisions, and public space, and the infrastructure was deficient. One of the main components of The Northeast Integral Urban Project was to build the metro-cable (cable car) and

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Fig. 7.5 Spain Library Park, Medellín. Inside with windows (Sergio Gómez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019)

Fig. 7.6 Spain Library Park, Medellín, Inside 2 (Sergio Gómez, El Equipo Mazzanti 2019)

that way connect these poor areas to the formal city center (http://arquitecturapan americana.com/proyecto-urbano-integral-pui-nororiental-comunas-1-y-2-areas-deinfluencia-sistema-metrocable-medellin/). The city of Medellín sought to develop the Library Parks in different neighborhoods in the city as community centers where cultural, social, and economic activities of the zone can be strengthened

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to generate processes of co-existence and social development (Alcaldía Medellín 2007). The construction of the library in the Santo Domingo de Savia, Comuna 1 was also designed to provide the much-needed public space to the neighborhood. This was along similar interventions in different parts of the city of Medellín that also included library parks. They are inviting, interestingly, designed spaces that sought to bring services and engaging public space to the neighborhoods selected for the improvements designed in the Northeastern Urban Project intervention. In 2013, the National University of Colombia conducted a study to better assess the problems with the façade of the library that provoked its closure. Since 2015, the library has remained closed due to structural problems in its design. Among the many factors that have been identified for the closure of the library, some blame the architect Mazzanti, while others the engineering firm for not following the design specifications, and others blame the Mayor at the time, Sergio Fajardo for pushing the project to be finished quickly. The community, according to residents and library staff, benefitted immensely from the programming and the public space provided by the library (Harindranath 2018). Even though closed, the Spain Library website is still active, and the library collection has been dispersed to other neighborhood library parks. The main objective of the Spain Library Park was that of libraries connecting territories. The Northeast Integral Urban Project “Acciones in mi Barrio” (Actions in my neighborhood) was designed to offer a socially inclusive space for gatherings, everyday life co-existence, and access to information in a social environment that has been characterized as violent, mainly due to the drug traffic network that operates in the city of Medellín. The Spain Library was designed with the idea of extending symbolically the mountainous Andes range that surrounds the valley where the city of Medellín is located. The building resembles large rock formations and was designed to be iconic, unique, and a landmark sitting atop a hill in the Santo Domingo de Savio neighborhood. The library design resembles a folded building cut like the mountains that surround it, encouraging the ambiguity building-landscape, understanding architecture as landscape (Mazzanti 2005). The design seeks to integrate itself into the broken mountain range of Los Andes where Medellín is located, and the design becomes an interpretation of the landscape (Mazzanti 2005). The texture of the building itself brings the built environment of the city into this mountainous landscape and becomes iconic as it is visible from many parts of the city. According to Mazzanti, the building was designed to decontextualize the visitor from the poverty-stricken surrounding neighborhood with small windows to let warm light in, only at the top of the building (Mazzanti 2005). Within the context of urban development in Medellín, the city sought to rebrand itself with a social urbanism motif to urban renewal by implementing structural educational, cultural, and entrepreneurial programs to address serious problems with inequality and segregation. The city planned and developed initiatives as tools to integrate physically and socially excluded areas through architecture and urbanism (Castro and Echeverri 2011). The efforts that the city undertook focused on constructing the best possible buildings in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods

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using architecture as an instrument of change toward public policies for education and culture. These new buildings and places were meant to serve as urban landmarks and community gathering places (Castro and Echeverri 2011). In a way, the goal was to brand the city with social urbanism through urban renewal in areas marginalized and known for violence. In this way, the intention of these policies was to develop in the city a network of quality public spaces to increase pedestrian mobility. Accordingly, the network concept of public library provision in Colombia is the coordination of public libraries at the national, departmental, district, and municipal levels with an organizational structure that provides the resources to operate in an institutional framework for these organizations (Network for Information and Digital Access 2011). Today, Medellín is considered a model city that attracts tourists, leaving behind the stigma of a dangerous city for an innovative city and a laboratory of urban sustainable development initiatives as an inclusive, vibrant, and competitive city (Ijjasz-Vasquez 2017). The following chapter will provide an analysis of the Halifax Central Library in Nova Scotia, that even though a smaller size city, it also shows a strong relationship between a new community-driven library as an urban institution in the city.

References Alcaldía Medellín. (2007). Proyectos Estrátegicos 2004–2007. Retrieved June 4, 2019 at https:// www.medellin.gov.co/irj/go/km/docs/wpccontent/Sites/Subportal%20del%20Ciudadano/Plan% 20de%20Desarrollo/Secciones/Rendici%C3%B3n%20P%C3%BAblica%20de%20Cuentas/ Documentos/2004-2007/Rendici%C3%B3n%20de%20Cuentas%20al%20Concejo%20de% 20Medell%C3%ADn%20-%20Marzo%20de%202006/07_Estrategicos.pdf. Caballero, M. C. (2003). Bibliored, Colombia’s Innovative Library Network, Council on Library and Information Resources, 1755 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC, 20036. Castro, L., & Echeverri, A. (2011). Bogota and Medellin: architecture and politics. Architectural Design, 81(3), 96–103. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.1246. Harindranath, A. (2018). Medellin’s doomed library: The indefinite closure of Biblioteca. The Bogota Post. Retrieved, May 21, 2019 at https://thebogotapost.com/medellins-doomed-librarythe-indefinite-closure-of-biblioteca-espana/32435/. Ijjasz-Vasquez, E. (2017). Medellín, laboratorio mundial sobre Desarrollo urbano. Banco Mundial, Junio 9, 2017. Retrieved March 15, 2019 at https://www.bancomundial.org/es/news/feature/2017/ 06/09/medellin-laboratorio-mundial-sobre-desarrollo-urbano-colombia. Mazzanti, G. (2005). España Library, ArchDaily. Retrieved May 11, 2019 at https://www.archda ily.com/2565/espana-library-giancarlo-mazzanti/. Network for Information & Digital Access (NIDA) (2011). Supporting Societies’ Needs: A model framework for developing a policy for libraries, Understanding public libraries in Colombia. Retrieved May 15, 2019 at https://nida-net.org/documents/2/colombia_final_.pdf. Proyecto Urbano Integral (PUI) Nororiental, Comunas 1 y 2–Areas de Influencia Sistema Metrocable-Medellin. BAQ2008. Retrieved May 22, 2019 at http://arquitecturapanamericana. com/proyecto-urbano-integral-pui-nororiental-comunas-1-y-2-areas-de-influencia-sistema-met rocable-medellin/.

Chapter 8

Halifax Central Library, Nova Scotia, Canada: “A Vital Centre for Learning and Culture in the Heart of the Community”

Abstract The Halifax Central Library was designed by Lead Architect: Fowler, Bauld & Mitchell (FBM) and Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects (International Partners) and opened in 2014. The library seeks to become “a vital centre for learning and culture in the heart of the community” to reach further, push boundaries, and be brave (Halifax Public Libraries Strategic Plan 2017–2021). This is one of the most recently built libraries included in this book. It has garnered attention by its design and the way in which it seeks “to attract more people as it becomes a regional resource, an active information place, and a reflection of the communities in Halifax.” This chapter will examine the placing of Halifax Central Library within the main urban development objectives of the city. The design and function of the library will also be included to provide a broad understanding of the library’s role that highlights a strong emphasis on community service. Keywords Halifax central library · Community-led programming

8.1 World-Class Public Library The Halifax Central Library is located in Halifax, Nova Scotia; it was opened to the public in 2014 and was designed by Fowler, Bauld, and Mitchell (FBM) as lead architects and Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects from Denmark, as international partners who also designed the main library in Copenhagen (see Fig. 8.1: Halifax Public Library, outside, Adam Mørk 2019). Halifax population in 2017 was 431,479, comparatively speaking, a small city. It received 2.43 million tourists in 2017 (Halifax Partnership 2018). The library circulating collection is composed of almost one million items, and the 14 branches in the Halifax library system are located throughout the city serving different neighborhoods. According to Schmidt, Hammer, and Lassen Architects, the Halifax Central Library, located in the downtown area, is one of the most recent public buildings to be built in a long period of time. The Halifax Central Library has received 2016 Governor’s General’s Medal in Architecture for its excellent civic building design. The library was built in what was a parking lot but prominent downtown location. The © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_8

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Fig. 8.1 Halifax Public Library, outside (Adam Mørk 2019)

library includes cafes, an auditorium, and community rooms in a five-floor building. The building has a fifth-floor cantilever over the entrance plaza and a central atrium with crisscross staircases. The library’s design allows for views of the surrounding outside environment, enhancing its relationship to the urban context. The library was built with the aid of the Building Canada Fund, with a contribution from the federal government, the municipality, and the provincial government for a total cost of $57.6 million Canadian dollars. The Halifax Central Library opened its doors in 2014. The library was designed to accommodate a large book collection. Some distinct aspects of the design are a skylighted atrium, crisscrossed stairs, and walkways within the interior height of the building (see Fig. 8.2 : Halifax Public Library. Inside stairs (Adam Mørk 2019) and Fig. 8.3: Halifax Public Library. Inside study areas (Adam Mørk 2019)). The main lobby and the children’s room are located in the first floor and higher floors are designated as quiet areas. The building also has a roof terrace on the fifth floor named “the living room,” a patio area overlooking downtown and the harbor. Among many accolades the library has obtained for its design that seeks to resemble a

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Fig. 8.2 Halifax Public Library. Inside stairs (Adam Mørk 2019)

stack of books. The Nova Scotia Association of Architects assigned a merit award for its design in 2015 as an outstanding civic building and community gathering place. Many events and festivals are also accommodated in the library programming in addition to more traditional library events. Artwork was commissioned to be shown at the library, and the signature public artwork was made of library cards by Cliff Eyland. The “Halifax Living Room” is housed in the cantilevered fifth floor (see Fig. 8.4 Halifax Public Library. Outside street, Adam Mørk 2019). The Halifax Central Library seeks to be a regional resource for active information, reflective of the communities in Halifax. In its objective to attract people, the library intends to cater its services to fulfill the community’s needs and interests. The library’s mission is to be an engaging space to support lifelong learning and to be a place where people can connect to each other through the exposure to Halifax’s rich cultural, educational, and civic resources. The design of the library sought from the beginning, to become a civic landmark and a source of pride and inspiration for all residents as well as a welcome addition to the streetscape. The library’s guiding principles for its mission also sought to make of the library a centerpiece of the capital district by explicitly emphasizing the economic revitalization of the downtown area (https://www.dezeen.com/2014/12/15/halifax-central-library-schmidthammer-lassen-architects-fowler-bauld-mitchell-stacked-glass-boxes/). The design

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Fig. 8.3 Halifax Public Library. Inside study areas (Adam Mørk 2019)

of the adjacent plaza contributes to the library’s extension into the city (Fig. 8.5 Halifax Public Library and Plaza, Adam Mørk 2019). The design of the Halifax Public Library rests on the axis of two historical landmarks: the citadel and the harbor, at the point where they meet crosses right through the library site. The Halifax Living Room is reflected in the orientation of the top floor of the library combining a great view with the historical heritage of the city (https://www.dezeen.com/2014/12/15/halifax-central-library-schmidt-hammerlassen-architects-fowler-bauld-mitchell-stacked-glass-boxes/). Following the grid of adjacent city streets, the library is set to become a cultural hub and center of activity. The transparent wall of glass in the first floor offers a permeable visual membrane into the city sidewalks (see Fig. 8.6: Halifax Public Library. Inside overlooking sidewalk, Adam Mørk 2019). According to Halifax’s Economic Growth Plan 2016–2021, the city seeks to continue to brand itself as an international, vibrant, sustainable, and diverse community. Specifically, the plan intends to provide the city with an atmosphere where people learn and grow and can easily start a business. The framework for the economic growth plan includes a vision for the patrons and the budget, the value proposition of ocean advantage, educEconomic Growth Plaation and innovative community, and an excellent rural/urban lifestyle. The five-year strategic role for the library strives to promote and maximize growth, attract and retain talent, make Halifax a better place

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Fig. 8.4 Halifax Public Library. Outside street (Adam Mørk 2019)

to live and work in correspondence with economic development (Halifax Partnership 2016). Aligned with the economic growth plan is the Halifax Index (Halifax Partnership 2018) that explicitly lists one of its objectives is to increase library programming attendance. Likewise, the library proposes to blend the best of traditional library services with new spaces “making it a vital centre for learning and culture in the heart of the community” (Halifax Central Library 2008). According to May and Black (2010), the Halifax Public Library was built in a lower income neighborhood with high level of unemployment. The Community-Led Service Planning Model of library programming, that is community-centered, was developed by Working Together Community Development Librarians in different cities in Canada, including Halifax. They sought to work with community members in traditionally marginalized or socially excluded communities to develop library programming that focuses on the needs of the community (Williment 2019). This participatory service

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Fig. 8.5 Halifax Public Library and Plaza (Adam Mørk 2019)

Fig. 8.6 Halifax Public Library. Inside overlooking sidewalk (Adam Mørk 2019)

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development process is designed to facilitate community involvement throughout all the stages of library programming including needs assessment and evaluation (Williment 2019). The next chapter will focus on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt located in the site where the original library of Alexandria existed in Antiquity. The library follows the historical legacy of the original library to provide a center for multiple ventures, including library, museums, and a convention space highlighting the rich historical legacy of its original library.

References Halifax Public Libraries Strategic Plan. (2017–2021). Retrieved June 5, 2020 from https://www.hal ifaxpubliclibraries.ca/about/strategic-plan-2017-2021/. Halifax Central Library. (2008). Building Program and Space Requirements. Retrieved March 22, 2019 from https://halifaxcentrallibrary.ca/assets/central-library/pdfs/2008-Central-LibraryBuilding-Program-Space-Requirments.pdf. Halifax Partnership. (2016). Halifax Economic Growth Plan 2016–21, Action Plan: Years 1 and 2. Retrieved Monday, March 26, 2019 from https://www.halifaxpartnership.com/site/media/Parent/ 11x8,5_HP_GrowthPlan_PRINT.pdf. Halifax Partnership, The Chronicle Herald. (2018). Halifax Index 2018. Retrieved March 22, 2019 from https://halifaxpartnership.com/sites/default/uploads/pages/downloads/HP_HalifaxIn dex_June-06-2018_WEB2.pdf. May, F., & Black, F. (2010). The life of the space: Evidence from Nova Scotia public libraries. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 5.2, 5–34. https://hdl.handle.net/11205/106. Schmidt, Hammer, Lassen Architects. (2019). Halifax Central Library, Halifax. Retrieved May 1, 2019 from https://www.shl.dk/halifax-central-library/. Williment, K. (2019). It takes a community to create a library. Public Library Quarterly, 1–11. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2019.1590757.

Chapter 9

Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt: “A Place for Open Discussion, Dialogue, and Understanding”

Abstract The Alexandria Library opened to the public in 2002, and it was designed by the Norwegian Architecture Firm Snøhetta, which also designed the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavillion in New York City. The new library sought to emulate the first well-known library from ancient Greece located in Alexandria, Egypt. The building design is symbolic of many natural elements to accommodate not only the library itself but arts, history, philosophy, and science into a large complex. The mission of the library seeks to made of the library a place “for open discussion, dialogue, and understanding.” Some of the main criticisms for the new Library of Alexandria rested on the fact that communities felt the scale of the project was unnecessary and the lack of funds for books made it seem ill-suited. However, the library is iconic in its design and has bounced back from those previous criticism by increasing the number of books available through donations. This chapter will examine the design of the Library of Alexandria within its contemporary urban context. The intended role of the new library in 2002 and its current role within the Egyptian urban culture of the city of Alexandria will also be examined. Keywords Bibliotheca Alexandrina · Research · Hidden heritage

9.1 The World’s Window on Egypt and Egypt’s Window on the World Alexandria’s population in 2018 was 5.2 million and there were 8.3 million visitors in Egypt in 2017 as a whole (Reda 2018). Even though not itemized for Alexandria, most of its visitors are attracted to the city as a summer beach resort and specific figures about tourists who visit Alexandria specifically are not collected as such, rather a general figure is provided for tourists who visit Egypt. The recently designed Bibliotheca Alexandrina opened to the public in 2002 after the inaugural event originally intended for 2001 had to be postponed due to the 9/11 attacks. The international initiative that envisioned the rebirth of the library based on its important legacy was led by the Alexandria University in 1974 and later joined by the President of Egypt Hosni Mubarak, UNESCO, and the National Library of France (Bibliotheque National de France). The site chosen was close to where the © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_9

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original library of Alexandria stood, between the university and the oceanfront. The library was created as an icon to bring back the rich history of the original library of Alexandria that was located at the royal palace near the harbor, part of a larger research institution called the “Mouseion” approximately 283 B.C. Based on that rich historical heritage the current Library of Alexandria was designed to be also a vast complex where arts, history, philosophy, and science are housed together. Within many different activities as part of its programming, the library seeks to promote open discussion, dialogue, and understanding and to endow the Mediterranean region as a center of cultural and scientific excellence (see Fig. 9.1: Bibliotheca Alexandrina outside (Google images, 2019) and Fig. 9.2: Bibliotheca Alexandrina outside against the Mediterranean Sea (Google images, 2019). The Bibliotheca Alexandrina contains volumes in Arabic, French, and English. A total of 500,000 books were donated by the Bibliotheque National de France. The collection contains four million books and would be expanded to eight million. The monumental task to house the library’s collection is evident in the different areas of specialization included in the main library (Francophone, Depository and Maps libraries). Six additional specialized libraries include The Arts and Multimedia, The Taha Hussein Library for the visually impaired, The Children’s Library, The Microforms Library, The Young People’ s Library, and The Rare Books and the Special Collections Library. The Nobel Section includes book collections by Nobel Prize Laureates. In addition, the complex also houses four museums: the Antiquities Museum located inside the library retelling Egyptian history through archeological artifacts. The Manuscript Museum houses rare manuscripts and books. The Sadat Museum, History of Science, Permanent Exhibitions, Digital Collections are also part of the Bibliotheque Alexandrina complex. There are also other exhibitions based on personal collections from a film director and lithographs, maps, engraving of

Fig. 9.1 Bibliotheca Alexandrina outside against the Mediterranean Sea (Google images, 2019)

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Fig. 9.2 Bibliotheca Alexandrina outside (Google images, 2019)

Alexandria by travelers as well as photography (see Fig. 9.3: Bibliotheca Alexandrina inside (Google images, 2019) and Fig. 9.4: Bibliotheca Alexandrina inside-2 (Google images, 2019). There are also computer-enhanced visualizations of the library itself. Some of the criticisms voiced against the construction of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was the vanity to advanced what was considered by some, an unsustainable project within the hard realities of the city of Alexandria where unemployment and informal settlements are abundant. Another criticism is that too much money was used on the architecture rather than in the library’s collection (El-Ghazali 2019).

Fig. 9.3 Bibliotheca Alexandrina inside (Google images, 2019)

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Fig. 9.4 Bibliotheca Alexandrina inside-2 (Google images, 2019)

Alexandria’s library design was won by the then young Norwegian firm Snøhetta based on an international competition back in 1980s. The competition and the completion of the project attracted worldwide attention and helped the architecture firm Snøhetta gain recognition worldwide. The design was deliberatively iconic and help constitute the library as a public institution landmark by heightening the historical meaning of a new library of Alexandria and the regeneration of an old icon. The Alexandria library is located in the Mediterranean Sea, next to Alexandria University. The concept under which the library was designed referred to the glorious past of Alexandria as the center of Greek knowledge in antiquity during the times of Alexander the Great. The library’s design metaphorically represents the Bibliotheca as an emerging mass arising on the city of Alexandria, like the sun and the moon. The iconic addition of the library helped brand the city of Alexandria positively. Particularly, the library seemed to have enhanced the connection to the university, to the regeneration of the city, and the main coastal boulevard leading to the library. It has attracted major events worldwide and in the Middle East (El-Ghazali 2019). The city is named after Alexander the Great and is also known as “the pearl of the Mediterranean,” built in 331 B.C. and was the capital city for almost a thousand years and today is the second largest city in Egypt with a population of 5.1 million (Sirry 2018). In 2000, the central government and the city began a revitalization program for Alexandria coinciding with the opening of the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina. According to Sirry, neoliberal tendencies privatized ocean front property, developed luxury hotels while demolishing heritage architecture (2018). The most recent development plan for the city of Alexandria is the 2032 participatory Strategic Urban Plan (SUP) that seeks to ensure an urban management strategy based on sustainable longterm city development. The priority areas are a medical city, airport, and informal areas and to strengthen the connection between Alexandria proper and the industrial city nearby, as well the establishment of an Olympic City with the aid of a geographical information system to monitor development for support in decision making (Sirry

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2018). The 2015 Sustainable Development Vision for 2030 prioritized mostly transportation, desert land development, social housing, road and mining infrastructure. Sirry considers that these new developments will be negative for Alexandria competitively taking away citizens and tourist, and it seems that development of the city of Alexandria proper is not a priority for the Egyptian government (2018). Sea-level rise is also a challenge to Alexandria along with informal settlements where 40% of its inhabitants live, unemployment, vacant spaces, and crumbling buildings. Despite the lack of Alexandria being a priority of urban development, Sirry considers that the new library still plays an “enormous role” in the revitalization of Alexandria, both at the national and international levels (2018). The Alexandria and Mediterranean Research Center (Alex Med) is located in the library, designed to conduct research on Alexandria’s heritage and hold conferences and exhibits. The Alexandria Heritage Catalogue has created digital maps and databases of the buildings, streets, districts, and art works helping to survey the city’s infrastructure (Sirry 2018). The City Prosperity Index (CPI) helps measure different aspects of the city, including productivity, infrastructure development, quality of life, equity, and social inclusion, as well as environmental sustainability (Sirry 2018). According to the 2008 Alexandria City Development Strategy the reconstruction of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina “attracts alone one million visitors every year, is positioning the city as a regional hub for knowledge, science and dialogue among cultures and civilizations” (2007, p. 6). According to Zahran (2007) the future of the new Alexandria library rests upon how far it manages to become a well-known institution as its predecessor and how it matures into the iconic institution it was designed to be under very different historical circumstances. Zahran (2007) bases his premonition of what the library of Alexandria might accomplish for the city based on the strategies developed in the urban plans for the city as an anchor institution helping brand the city to attract residents and tourists. Zahran highlights the design of the library plaza as an innovative design component in Egypt per se. Diversity, cooperation, and dialogue are voiced in the expectations that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina can provide in shifting social, economic, and cultural contexts of today’s society. Regarding the library collection, Kurzman and Martin point out that one of the challenges Arab libraries face is regarding the “hidden heritage” or collections that do not have online public access catalogs (2018). Similar to the digital divide that jeopardizes equal access to the internet, Kurzman and Martin argue that the “hidden heritage” implies inequality in the production and distribution of library material based on the large amounts of library materials that still remains to be catalogued, archived, and searchable digitally. Most libraries have materials only available through paper indexes, only 15% of Arab libraries have online catalogs (2018). The particular challenges of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s development are specific to its cultural, social, economic, historical, and environmental contexts. The next chapter will offer concluding remarks on the similarities and differences in approaches regarding the different public libraries and their relationship to the city within the creative city model, community building, and programming. Future trends in public library design will also be considered.

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References El-Ghazali Kesseiba, K. (2019). Branding Architecture: the logic behind brand promotion of architectural product and iconic buildings in the 21st century. Paper presented at the Building the Future “Now:” Rights for Better Living, Architecture and Contexts, Department of Architecture and Engineering, April 8–10, 2019. Cairo, Egypt. Governorate of Alexandria. (2007). The Alexandria City Development Strategy, Documentation of the Process and Results 2004–2007. Retrieved August 1, 2019 at http://siteresources.worldbank. org/INTEGYPT/Resources/Documentation_Alexandria_CDS_June1_2007.pdf. Kurzman, C., & Martin, J. D., III. (2018). The hidden heritage of Arab libraries: Online catalogs and institutional barriers to discoverability. IFLA Journal, 44(4), 300–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0340035218785189. Reda, L. (2018). 2018 Accomplishment: Egypt’s Tourism Ministry revives industry. Egypt Today, Saturday, December 29, 2018. Retrieved June 30, 2019 at https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/ 9/62742/2018-Accomplishment-Egypt%E2%80%99s-Tourism-Ministry-revives-industry. Sirry, A. (2018). Alexandria: Development challenges of a coastal second city. Wise Cities” in the Mediterranean? Challenges of Urban Sustainability, 145–158. Zahran, M. (2007). The new bibliotheca Alexandrina: reflections on a journey of achievements. Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Chapter 10

Conclusions: The Urban Library: Archiving the Future

Abstract This concluding chapter will summarize the similarities and differences between the different public libraries in terms of distinct features, common approaches, and future trends. The chapter will highlight the evolution of libraries to address how the libraries selected establish connections with the cities in which they are located by both providing physical space as plazas and community-centered programming while maintaining the democratic values of universal access. Contemporary libraries are defined today as enclaves that support democratic practices of universal access and face-to-face interaction in iconic buildings. Libraries are heterotopic public spaces in that they remain an alternative to fully privatized tendencies within the neoliberal city. Some of the best practices in contemporary public library design include a careful correspondence to the surrounding landscape and sustainable practices that libraries can provide to city efforts as anchor institutions and cultural resources. Public libraries also contribute to an image of the cities that is enticing to the creative class of global professionals but mostly protects skill development for the communities they serve. Keywords Creative city · Branding · Iconic architecture · Programming · Public library design · Anchor institutions Throughout time, libraries and books epitomized the greater values of society and how societies desired to be recognized as imperial powers based on either knowledge (The original Alexandria Library), populist hedonism (Roman Empire), sacred and religious institutions (Monasteries), or a democratic, community-focused metropolis (industrialization and globalization). The contemporary library is based on the archontic principle of consignation as a gathering together of collections and records to include the provision of a public space where diverse people also enjoy face-to-face interactions and have full access to library services including programming within the context of what the city and urbanity offer as sociability among different others. The urban library is emblematic of democratic ideals. All the libraries selected in this book are committed to provide universal access in an ongoing expansion of collections and reach to communities in places as diverse as the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Egypt. It is difficult to address public libraries in any other light than © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4_10

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positive, after all they still capture a modern progressive impetus of growth and accumulation of knowledge through the different definitions that knowledge has acquired. The added virtual platform engages with networked publics to also include access to digital collections and applications. Referred by some as the people’s palaces, public libraries are one of the few remaining public institutions devoted to democratic values of access to all and active community participation explicitly stated in their mission. All the public libraries studied are committed to protect the historic legacy of free access for all. Within the neoliberal political and economic context of today’s society tendency toward privatization, public libraries are a fundamental component for the social resiliency of cities. City branding relies on generating a vibrant urban identity for cities where the urban experience is commodified in the overall experience of public spaces and cultural institutions. The mission statements of the public libraries included in this volume and their respective city reports seek to accomplish and maintain those aspects of urbanity in their own distinctive ways, to a lesser or larger extent in what is referred to as the creative city urban development model. A rather appropriate metaphor is that of alchemy during medieval times in which experimentation drove the search for knowledge. In contemporary cities, the drive for growth and profit is based on city branding and the creative city model to attract the global professional class of creatives as residents, tourists, and investors to the city along with knowledge transfer and a multiplier effect where different institutions and industries have an aggregate profit outcome.1 The public library as an anchor institution localizes cultural production to complement approaches that address quality of life issues in the public libraries’ mission. Likewise, city government reports and plans also focus on developing an inviting, vibrant, safe, sustainable, and thriving city. Overall, city plans in New York City, Seattle, and Salt Lake City (USA), Halifax (Canada), Medellín (Colombia), and Alexandria (Egypt) focus on sustainable development, economic opportunity, security, inclusivity, tolerance, and diversity as cannons of urbanity. Livability, affordability, community, and economic opportunity are identified as goals almost across the table on city plans and libraries’ missions, offering a glimpse into the discourse and narrative that guide contemporary urban development. The intentional acts of communication and the public diplomacy through which these messages are conveyed and replicated throughout different urban cultural institutions brands the city and are used to promote if not uniformly at least comprehensively, discursively speaking. There is a focus on softer branding with emphasis on festivals and events to showcase an experience of the city that emulates a vibrant atmosphere. Public libraries are increasingly offering the platform to provide these kinds of cultural events through their programming in the adjacent plazas that are almost a staple of contemporary public library design. In contemporary cities and the public libraries that anchor their development, the experience of place and for that matter, of the city, is commodified in the cumulative effect of branding broadly understood and the purchasing of supplementary and 1 Technology

transfer also characterizes contemporary urban development, especially within the somehow recent and emerging smart city model where big data informs policy, but that will be the focus of my next book.

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supportive services, specifically (taxi fare, museum entrance, public library store, to name a few). Pedestrian traffic, therefore, has received much attention and spaces have been designed to increase traffic flow to different areas of the city. The design of libraries and their location are good examples of these initiatives to bring people to areas that were not that popular and after at least 10 years, Seattle and Salt Lake City, to name a few, have seen a dramatic increase of visitors, residents, and retail to the areas where the public libraries have been built when originally that was not the case. The social construction of the city as a model that grows discursively through policies that guide development are difficult to pinpoint with direct empirical evidence to the correspondence between an anchor institution like the public library, creative city urban development strategies, and branding. However, the public libraries studied participate in a discursive branding of the city in specific ways beyond urban experts, to convey an innovative, sustainable, vibrant, and diverse representation of place that affords urban policy mobility of cities in competition among each other to be uniquely branded to attract tourists, creatives, and investors (Franco and Ortiz 2020). Changes triggered by the creative city and branding can be indirectly accounted for quantitatively in the form of number of tourists who visit the city versus the population size under the assumption that including their location in tourist maps – as most of the public libraries studied do – will attract an increasing number of visitors. All the public libraries studied (with the exception of the Spain Library Park in Medellín, Colombia, which is currently closed to the public due to structural damages) experience a dramatic increase in tourist visitors that exceeds population size two- or three-fold in small cities like Halifax, Seattle, and Salt Lake City and an insane impact in places like New York City where tourism broke the record to sixty plus million tourists in a city of eight million residents in 2017 (approximately 7,500 visitors per resident in the five boroughs). Another possible indicator of the creative city urban development model impact that is quantifiable is the city revenue. The creative city model and branding do populate the discursive branding of cities along with the iconic architecture that public libraries heighten, and they are models implemented in cities across the world that focus on quality of life issues. More pedestrians, bikes, proliferation of cultural events, and lower carbon emissions among many factors that affect sustainability are openly addressed by cities’ plans. Public libraries mission and budget reports, business alliances reports, mayor office and city reports, and city ranking by marketing firms are all part of the echo chamber of the creative city urban development model, which generally propagates similar contents and discourses around the world in an urban development global formula. Public libraries, governmental, and private organizations all have websites where they disperse their content and circulate their messages focusing on the tenets of the creative city and branding models.

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10.1 Explicit Connections to the City The libraries selected have differential access to materials in their collections, based on size and content characteristics. The New York Public Library is mainly a research institution as well as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and they have the largest collections mentioned in their mission highlights which could be considered bombastic if they did not happen to be true. Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Halifax are circulation libraries with different collection size. Likewise, the population size in each one of these cities varies dramatically. New York City has the largest population size and the largest number of tourists who visit the city and Halifax, Nova Scotia, has the smallest of both. Despite those differences the creative city model and the branding of iconic architecture through the library design as an anchor institution is replicated in each of these cities with great degrees of similarities. They all hired globally renown architects and they established a strong connection between the city and the library, physical and metaphorical. In their mission and the design, all public libraries selected highlight the uniqueness of their approach to learning and access as well as including plazas adjacent to the library building, activating adjacent spaces to the public library with programming, events, and festivals. The relationship to the city is evident and explicit in design and programming considerations in each one of the libraries selected. Seattle has the “Living Room” and Salt Lake City has “the Urban Room” (this is a sidewalk-like space that runs through the first floor located at the entrance where many stores, cafes, music studio, and community-led organizations are located) as explicit invitations and transitional space between the city and the library. The Salt Lake City Library also has a “Library Square,” an adjacent large plaza-like public space where different cultural events take place. The New York Public Library has esplanades in the front entrance that like the steps to the library are used as plazas, and Bryant Park is located at the back of the library to complete the block-size combination of public library and urban park. Halifax has a plaza adjacent to the main library and also has a “Living Room,” and Medellín also has public space around the three library buildings of the Spain Library Park. Medellín is the only public library that is currently closed because of structural damages. Even though their direct intervention into a criminally laden neighborhood was looked at with skepticism by some scholars who understood Medellín’s urban changes as a quick fix and as an entrepreneurial attempt, the positive impact of the library helped develop the city and reach global standards of safety and innovation. Notwithstanding the original criticisms, the Spain Library Park in Medellín was considered a great addition and enhancer of the quality of life of the residents in the nearby neighborhoods and overall orchestration of anchor institutions that have a combined positive effect that has elevated Medellín as one of the most innovative cities in Latin America. The Spain Library Park is missed now that it is closed to the public until it is fixed. In this regard, Medellín, following Bogota’s leadership in the Bibliored library park initiative to bring public space and cultural resources to impoverished and unsafe neighborhoods, is a unique approach to public library design and programming and urban intervention. Alexandria has the largest organizational

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structure and has the largest number of departments, museums, and facilities. In 2009, when many of the interviews took place emerging changes began altering the organizational structure of the public libraries studied. At that time Salt Lake City created a Community Liaison position, and today all the public libraries studied have marketing and public relations offices, as well as well-developed and easy-tonavigate websites with their mission, calendar of events, and programming. Annual and other kinds of reports are available in all the United States and Canadian public libraries studied in their websites. The shifting flows of capital and political interests seem to have strong implications for library performance and growth. Within the context of the United States, in Seattle, Salt Lake City, and New York City, the public libraries are thriving institutions. Alexandria has been able to also grow and adapt under different historical and social changes to absorb to a large extent the Spring Arising as part of their historical archive. But the social, economic, and building infrastructure in Alexandria has challenging issues. There is unemployment, informal housing, and deteriorated and decaying infrastructure as a city with a long historic legacy. In this regard, the branding of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is embraced as a promise to bring tourists and residents to make the city glorious once more. Competition with other developments, however, such as more recent exclusive suburban areas, the creation of industry city, as well as other areas along the port, challenges Alexandria’s desire as a destination with the exception of the summer visitors in its beach resorts by the Mediterranean Sea. Spain Library Park in Medellín is still waiting for the necessary funds to rectify the structural damages that keep it closed to its constituents. However, in 2013, Medellín received an award for being the most innovative city in the world. This is a major accomplishment after been considered the most violent city in the world in the 1990s. Programming had to accommodate, like in the case of the New York Public Library, spaces designated for tourists to be able to take pictures while patrons work and study in the library. Tourist traffic has increased exponentially once the library began marketing itself as a tourist destination and highlighting the unique architectural features of the 42nd street building in New York City. The programming of the library blends in with the programming of contiguous Bryant Park and as such extending into a continuous complex between a public library and a public park. In all the libraries selected, the city is branded through the library’s mission, and the connection between city and library is strongly highlighted.

10.2 Iconic Public Library Architecture The design of the public libraries main branches selected are composed of distinctive features that make each unique. Each one of the libraries selected are icons to their cities adding to the distinctiveness and uniqueness. Many received architectural awards (Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Halifax) or have been designated historical landmarks like the New York City Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

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The Salt Lake City Public Library has a curving wall that frames the Rocky Mountains at a distance, leading through its outside path to a rooftop garden that sits atop. This characteristic of Moshe Safdie public library design can also be found in the Vancouver Public Library he designed, although closed to the public.2 The Salt Lake City Public Library rooftop garden is open to the public. Inside the library there are also fireplaces, a distinct design characteristic that I have only found in the Salt Lake City Public Library. Unfortunately, people have fallen to their deaths in the Salt Lake City Public Library inside and from the rooftop. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a circular, tilted shape that makes it unusual, and the inside columns of the library itself are aligned like a book. The strong historical legacy of the original Library of Alexandria helped the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina galvanize international support for its construction, so did The Spain Library in Medellín with the generous support of the King of Spain, therefore its name. The Spain Library in Medellín sprouts from the neighborhood mountain-like mimicking its surrounding Andes Mountains landscape. Traveling in the area, I was able to count at least seven layers of mountains in the horizon since Medellín is a valley sitting high in the Andes. The New York City Public Library, Stephan A. Schwarzman Building is the first marble building constructed in the United States. It still shed an elegant and somber cast on the urban fabric surrounded by the midtown Manhattan skyscrapers. The New York City Public Library remains one of the most comprehensive research libraries accessible to the public for free. The building inside has many hidden areas. It is a closed stack library. I was able to receive a tour of the stacks when I was working at the Wertheim Study after I won a raffle in a Friday afternoon tea event for researchers and writers. That is when I also discovered that under Bryant Park the library has a large storage space for the books. The park sits atop the hollow space where books are kept. The Seattle Public Library introduced the innovative notion of the book spiral to its design as a way to overcome the challenge all libraries face, emblematic of a library by definition, the desire to always grow, and therefore running out of space for an always expanding library collection. The Halifax Public Library is the first publicly funded building in a generation in the city and it also draws from historical sites nearby, namely the citadel and the port to sit on the city grid strategically flanked by them. Contemporary library design, as implemented in all the public libraries studied, allows for background noise at the entrance and lower floors, and the structure itself is designed to eliminate sound in the top floors where the study rooms are usually located. The “shh” and “silence” signs have disappeared from contemporary library design. Natural light is also maximized in public library design by the use of glass and skylights.

2 The

Vancouver Public Library, also designed by Moshe Safdie furnishes a rooftop garden as well but it is closed to the public (even though I had the opportunity to see it as a researcher).

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10.3 Community Building Emphasis: Programming Most of the libraries selected have implemented a serious and robust participatory process in the design of the library with the communities that they serve. This participatory platform has created a precedent for community participation and strategies to consult with communities based on relationships of trust and competence. The participatory legacy that characterized the origin of the public library continues with the emphasis that all the libraries selected place on community-centered programming and making this component an intrinsic feature of contemporary public library design. The Halifax Public Library system has developed programs where the librarians work closely with the neighborhoods where their libraries are located in a participatory model to develop and assess library programming that responds to the communities’ interests. They make sure that the staff has open lines of communication with their patrons to develop programming fitting to the community needs. In the Salt Lake City Public Library, a new position of Community Liaison was created after the library opened to the public, and many of the public libraries studied currently have Public Relations offices that did not exist in 2009. The public libraries have also developed strong connections to businesses in the area in the form of business partnerships as well as strong connections with constituencies from varied creative industries (artists, authors, photographers, and filmmakers) to showcase their work in the art galleries in all the public libraries studied. The public library-city businesses connection brings about relevant programming as workshops for their communities. In Salt Lake City, for instance, they offer workshops on business start-ups. Riedler and Eryaman (2010) state that traditionally libraries in the modern era have been tasked with discovery, consultation, and dissemination of a knowledge that is “fixed, authoritative, discipline bound, and constructed for individual access” (p. 90). Alternatively, contemporary public libraries are seeking to implement community-based and transformative ways to know by creating opportunities for community empowerment through discovery and consultation. Library pedagogy is based on the development of critical knowledge and reflexivity that involves dialogic consciousness raising through learning communities. Civic engagement as praxis is therefore a key asset in public libraries as discursive spaces for empowering communities through knowledge building in a multi-cultural society (Riedler and Eryaman 2010).

10.4 Archiving the Future Today’s definition of the public library as an urban public space to learn, be creative, obtain knowledge, and be transformed with access to all is a strong asset in all the libraries studied. Increasingly shrunk through privatization, the public component that public spaces should provide is contrived by the private insertion in the now generalized public–private partnership management. The transformative capacity of

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public libraries to provide equal access to resources based on inclusion and participation within the context of disparities in the information structure and dissemination is part of a radical democracy participatory framework (Eryaman 2010). Public libraries could be the public space par excellence to begin conversations about pressing issues such as climate change preparation and adaption, alternatives to conceptualizations about human connections, and new considerations about relationships between organic and inorganic matter and among each other based on relationships of solidarity. Plans to recover from extreme climate among other important social considerations can be part of the agonistic public space necessary to face the challenges of contemporary city living. Public libraries can play a catalyst role in bringing about conversation, plans, and strategies to promote ecologically, economically, and socially resilient communities in challenging times where social equity and sustainability can be part of the creative problem-solving with community partnerships engaged in placemaking (Dudley 2013). The Brooklyn Public Library, for instance, hosts the “A day of Philosophy” that invites patrons to participate in talks about broad issues that are socially and economically diverse and relevant such as gender, politics of underrepresented groups, income inequality, climate issues, accomplishing extraordinary participation. The sustainable library according to Fedorowicz-Kruszewska (2019) emphasizes sustainable development to diminish the negative impact on the natural environment to develop social and intergenerative justice. Recently, sustainable library design seeks to minimize the negative impact on the natural environment and maximize indoor environmental quality by means of careful site selection, use of natural construction materials and biodegradable products, conservation of resources (water, energy, paper), and responsible waste disposal (recycling) (Reitz 2017). In Indonesia, Sefullah and Haryani advocate for political literacy to be offered in public libraries to develop well-informed and engaged voters (2018). Maceviciute adds that libraries add value to societies and communities by helping create equal and inclusive communities (2019). Library services for people with disabilities focuses on the visually impaired and autistic to expand inclusivity efforts and to face the challenges to provide free access to collections and spaces for all (Arndt and Schnitzer 2018). Overall, the possibilities for growth of public libraries is hardly exhausted. Public libraries have faced many challenges and it is admirable that they still exist with the commitment to provide free access and a platform for agonistic dialogic engagement that empowers global communities. Once more public libraries and cities face a re-emergence after the coronavirus pandemic and protests against racism in the United States. The creative city model and branding have included some of these contents in, for instance, the screens of Times Square that during the pandemic in its desolate and empty spaces showed messages of solidarity, “We are stronger together.” Issues of inequality and racism that the pandemic made manifest find a supportive platform in the role of public libraries in contemporary societies as emblematic of democratic practices.

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References Arndt, T. S., & Schnitzer, A. (2018). Guest Editorial: Library Services for People with Disabilities. Reference Services Review, 46(3), 321–324. https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/ RSR-08-2018-089. Dudley, M. Q. (Ed.). (2013). Public libraries and resilient cities. American Library Association. Eryaman, M. Y. (2010). The public library as a space for democratic empowerment: Henry Giroux, radical democracy, and border pedagogy. Critical theory for library and information science exploring the social from across the disciplines, 131–141. Franco, I. D., & Ortiz, C. (2020). Medellín in the headlines: The role of the media in the dissemination of urban models. Cities, 96, 102431. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102431. Fedorowicz-Kruszewska, M. (2019). Sustainable libraries—fashion or necessity? JLIS.it, 10(1)92– 101. Maceviciute, E. (2019). How libraries create value and help diminishing the digital divide. Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries, 7(3), 399–405. Riedler, M., & Eryaman, M. Y. (2010). Transformative library pedagogy and community based libraries: A Freirean perspective. Critical Theory For Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social From Across Disciplines, 89–99. Reitz, J. M. (2017). ODLIS-Online dictionary of library and information science. Retrieved July 12, 2019 from http://www.abcclio.com.ODLIS/odlis_e.aspx. Sefullah, R., & Haryani, T. (2018, August). 36. The Role of Regional Public Library to Support Political Literacy in Society. In 5th International Conference on Social and Political Sciences (IcoSaPS 2018). Atlantis Press.

Index

A Access, 1, 3–5, 7, 9, 11, 16, 22, 27, 28, 30, 31, 35–39, 42, 46, 50, 51, 53, 55–57, 59–61, 69, 70, 76, 77, 80, 82, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 106 Alexandria, 1, 3–5, 8, 10, 16, 20, 23, 24, 28, 35, 39, 41, 43, 45, 91, 93–97, 99, 100, 103, 104 Anchor institution, 1–3, 9, 11, 15, 27, 29, 30, 35, 40, 43, 46, 59, 61, 97, 99–102 Andrew Carnegie, 5 Antiquity, 3, 5, 39, 91, 96 Archive, 7, 9, 11, 30, 103 Arendt, 36

B Battles, 3–6 Benhabib, 36 Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 8, 10, 91, 93–97, 102–104 Bibliotheque Nationale de France, 93, 94 Book, 1–4, 7–10, 16, 18, 20, 21, 27, 31, 35, 40, 42, 45, 46, 50–52, 70, 85, 86, 94, 99, 104 Book production, 5 Bookshelves, 39, 45 Borges, 5–8 Branding, 1, 2, 5, 8–11, 15–18, 20, 24–27, 30, 31, 35, 40, 55, 64, 100–103, 106

C Canada, 1, 8, 16, 86, 89, 99, 100 Catalog, 97 China, 4, 45 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Nevárez, The Urban Library, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57965-4

Cities, 1–6, 8–11, 15–27, 29, 30, 35–37, 39, 43, 89, 99–103, 106 City ranking, 19, 23, 24, 30, 101 Climate change, 60, 106 Closed stacks, 104 Cluster development, 15, 17–19 Collaboration, 41, 46, 69 Collections, 1–6, 8, 10, 24, 28, 37, 39, 42, 45–47, 49, 50, 53, 59, 67–69, 76, 82, 85, 86, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 104, 106 Collective wisdom, 6 Colombia, 1, 8, 16, 20, 39, 44, 76–78, 82, 83, 100, 101 Commodity, 2, 4, 20, 25 Commons, 1, 4, 9–11, 21, 35, 37, 38, 43, 45, 99 Community, 1, 3–5, 7, 8, 10, 20, 22, 27–31, 36, 38–44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 73, 74, 76, 81–83, 85–89, 91, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106 Community-led programming, 89 Connectivity, 4, 9–11, 15, 27, 38, 61 Creative city, 1, 2, 5, 9–11, 15–21, 25–27, 29, 30, 35, 39, 49, 62, 97, 100–102, 106 Creative class, 15, 18–21, 24, 35, 39, 40, 99 Creative industries, 4, 15, 17–19, 21, 22, 37, 105 Creativity, 17, 18, 28, 30, 44, 59–61 Cultural agglomeration, 19 Cultural entrepreneurship, 18, 19 Cultural identity, 26 Cultural sector, 2, 17, 18, 21

D Democracy, 5, 36, 37, 55, 63, 106 109

110 Democratic, 1, 2, 6, 10, 16, 20, 29, 35–38, 76, 99, 106 Dialogical engagement, 37 Digerati, 37 Diversity, 5, 18, 22, 24, 30, 55, 63, 97, 100 Downtown Revival, 21

E Eco, 8 Economic development, 18–20, 24, 28, 29, 56, 74, 89 Economic gardening, 2, 28 Egypt, 1, 3, 8, 10, 16, 20, 24, 39, 45, 91, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100 Experience of the city, 10, 20, 25, 100

F Florida, 2, 17 Foucault, 10, 11 Frederiksen, 2, 27, 28

G Gathering place, 7, 11, 83, 87 Globalization, 4, 15, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 99 Global professional class, 1, 4, 15, 22, 23, 30, 100 Greek, 3, 36, 96

H Halifax, 1, 16, 23, 24, 28, 35, 39, 43, 83, 85, 87–89, 100–103 Halifax Public Library, 8, 10, 20, 41, 85–89, 104, 105 Heterotopia, 5, 10 Hidden heritage, 97

I Iconic architecture, 1, 8, 10, 16, 26, 27, 35, 43, 47, 101, 102 Imagination, 7, 8, 55, 57, 60 Inclusivity, 1, 3, 22, 57, 100, 106 Industrial cities, 5, 96 Industrialization, 4, 9, 17, 22, 99 Innovation, 17, 19, 29–31, 70, 102

K Klingsman, 25, 26

Index Knowledge, 1, 3–11, 17–20, 22, 27, 29, 30, 39, 40, 42, 59, 67, 69, 70, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105 Knowledge economy, 4, 15, 17, 19, 24, 35 Koolhaas, 49, 52

L Labyrinth, 5, 7, 8 Landscape, 6, 16, 19, 21, 25, 44, 82, 99, 104 Leisure, 4, 74 Library design, 1, 6, 8–11, 31, 35, 39–44, 46, 47, 52, 59, 82, 97, 99, 100, 102–106 Library park, 8, 41, 44, 77, 78, 81, 82, 102 Lifelong learning, 7, 60, 67, 69, 87 Living room, 40, 41, 50, 51, 53, 54, 60, 86–88, 102 Local economic development, 29

M Mass production, 5 Mazzanti, 41, 44, 77–82 Medellín, 1, 8, 10, 20, 24, 35, 76–83, 100– 104 Mobilized self, 37 Mouffe, 36 Multiplier effect, 18, 20, 21, 100

N Neoliberalism, 4, 15, 18, 38 Networking, 56 Network society, 17 Nevárez, 4, 15, 49, 51, 54–56, 64, 67–76 New York City, 1, 8–10, 16, 20, 22–24, 28, 30, 35, 39, 43, 47, 64, 67, 68, 72–74, 76, 93, 100–104 New York Public Library, 20, 39, 42–44, 67–76, 102, 103 Nova Scotia, 1, 8, 10, 16, 39, 41, 83, 85, 87, 102

O Open stacks, 50

P Participation, 2, 3, 16, 23, 29, 36, 37, 42, 47, 55, 63, 69, 100, 105, 106 Partnerships, 4, 15, 22, 25, 28, 29, 37, 46, 53, 55, 64, 89, 105, 106

Index Place, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17–19, 23–25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 36–38, 41–46, 52, 55–57, 60, 62, 63, 73, 74, 83, 85, 87, 88, 93, 100–103, 105 Population, 4, 9, 18, 20, 21, 23, 30, 47, 49, 59, 68, 78, 85, 93, 96, 101, 102 Poverty, 20, 21, 41, 82 Printing, 4 Progressive Era, 20 Propinquity, 9, 10, 37, 38 Proximity, 9, 21, 23, 37, 38, 74 Public diplomacy, 25, 100 Public domain, 30, 31, 35 Public library, 1, 2, 6, 8–11, 16, 29–31, 35, 37–40, 44, 47, 49, 63, 67, 68, 73, 83, 100–105 Public space, 1, 3, 5, 10, 11, 16, 30, 31, 35– 40, 42, 44, 45, 47, 61, 73, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 99, 100, 102, 105, 106 Q Qian and Liu, 18, 19 Quality of life, 11, 15, 17–19, 23, 24, 27, 29, 30, 59, 62, 74, 97, 100–102 R Revitalization, 9, 21, 27, 35, 49, 77, 87, 96, 97 S Safdie architects, 59 Safety, 23, 60, 102 Salt Lake City, 1, 8, 16, 20, 23, 24, 28, 30, 35, 39–44, 46, 57, 59, 60, 63, 100–103, 105

111 Salt Lake City Public Library, 10, 40–44, 46, 57, 59–64, 104, 105 Satellite platforms, 15, 16 Seattle, 1, 8, 16, 20, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 35, 39–41, 43, 44, 49, 50, 53, 55, 100–103 Seattle Public Library, 10, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 49–52, 54, 56, 57, 104 Smart city, 17, 29 Smithsimon, 36 Snøhetta, 39, 42, 45, 46, 93, 96 Spain Library, 8, 10, 41, 44, 76–82, 101–104 Spiral, 46, 50–52, 104 Sustainability, 10, 29, 74, 97, 101, 106

U Universe, 5–7 Urban, 1–3, 6, 8–11, 16–23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 35–41, 43, 46, 49, 53, 59, 61, 63, 64, 73, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 88, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102–105 Urban condition, 28 Urban development, 1, 2, 5, 9–11, 15–20, 24, 25, 27, 29, 35, 49, 64, 77, 82, 85, 97, 100, 101 Urban population, 19, 30 Urban room, 40, 44, 45, 60, 61, 102 Urban temple, 77

V Varnelis, 17, 37 Virtual access, 10, 11 Vitality, 3, 21, 28, 40