A Spatial Politics of Public Space: Four Ethnographies in Havana

This capstone project analyzes how social behavior in and affiliations to historically-coded public spaces in Havana, Cuba reflect and fuel citizens’ shifting relationships to the Cuban Revolution and its concomitant spatial... [ view full abstract ]

This capstone project analyzes how social behavior in and affiliations to historically-coded public spaces in Havana, Cuba reflect and fuel citizens’ shifting relationships to the Cuban Revolution and its concomitant spatial ideologies. Through an ethnography of four public spaces—each designed in and presently understood through a distinct architectural-historical era—I will investigate not only how such spaces have been imagined and used by individuals and the state, but how their creative, personal or political reimaginations elucidate evolving engagements with the Revolution’s socio-spatial priorities. Drawing on urban studies scholarship that probes the political potential and socio-cultural meanings of Latin American public spaces, I present stories and images that exhibit habaneros’ spatial imaginations, expressions and resistances—inverting academic, official or professional representations of Havana’s public spaces and, in turn, levying commentaries on polemical issues in contemporary Cuban life such as religion, popular culture, revolutionary ideology and urban development. Through semi-structured interviews, direct and participant observation, architectural and urban analysis, and historical inquiry, I will illustrate how usages and reappropriations of Havana’s public spaces are not only implicit political statements, but also useful social texts that both constitute popular urban histories of Havana’s present-past and spatialize the most pressing ideological struggles in Cuban society today.