Professor Setha M. Low's book On The Plaza-The Politics of Public Space and Culture discusses the interrelationship of public space and culture. She primarily focuses on two plazas in San Jose, Costa Rica, the Parque Central and the Plaza de la Cultura, while also making references to other places such as Tenochtitlan in Mexico. Using ethnographic, ethnohistorical, microgeographical, and statistic sampling methods, Low argues that "these culturally and politically charged public spaces are essential to everyday civic life and the maintenance of a participatory democracy."Low describes the background of Costa Rica, going into its population, ethnic, religious, and urban proportion distribution. She explains the rise and fall of consecutive monocultural economies, such as cacao, tobacco, bananas, and coffee, its tradition of democracy, and the economic nadir in the 1980's. She then goes into the history of San Jose from colonial times to the present, including the devastating effects of the economic downtown and the trade vacuum created by NAFTA.
She then explores the history of the two plazas. Parque Central dates back to 1761, and is the larger and more densely populated of the two. It became a center for merchants, grocers, lottery ticket sellers, and sundry vendors, as well as shoppers and customers. Also, the trend of regulars sitting in the same benches over time gives Parque Central an ambience of traditional social life and hence less contested space between various social groups.
The Plaza de la Cultura, constructed between 1976 and 1982, was built as a contrast to the closed nature of Parque Central, as a more open space for the middle and lower classes. Central to the plaza was the National Theatre with a museum housing the country's Precolumbian gold. Despite its cultural stance, the new plaza became a haven for underage prostitutes, gangs, and drug users.
Plazas also contain social and spatial boundaries as factors that symbolize differences such as nationalities, race, class, and gender between plaza populations within a capitalist system. Low again contrasted the two plazas in San Jose in the framework of social boundaries:
Parque Central: mostly older men, closed space, clique-oriented, has professional prostitutes, lottery ticket, newspaper, food vendors, less foreigners, older.
Plaza de la Cultura: mostly women and children, open space, not clique-oriented, prostitutes who give services for clothes, nurturing relationships, balloon, popcorn, tourist item vendors, more foreigners, younger.
Another more important function of the plaza is for public protest. Low categorizes them in terms of the kinds of protest and their outcomes. Manifest protests such as strikes and demonstrations usually result in the temporary closure of the public space, followed by a reopening where the space is policed to discourage undesirables. An example of that involved the chasing out of shoeshine men from Parque Central. Latent protests involve conflicts that become apparent in terms of design and surrounding buildings and can result in discussions in various media or a plebiscite. Ritual protests, such as parades, normally involve the temporary takeover of space by a protesting group before it is relinquished to the forces nominally in charge of that space.
Taken in the context of protest, Low sees public space as symbolizing political objectives by those, particularly national leaders, who created them--e.g. the Plaza de la Democracia is a legacy to Oscar Arias Sanchez's Nobel Peace Prize-winning efforts for Central American peace. Plazas that don't fulfill the objectives of their creators or are not deemed valuable are either redesigned or denied access to the public.
Constituting twenty-five years of research spanning from 1972 to 1997, Setha Low's exhaustively researched book depicts the essence of the function of the plaza.
