SKuOR Publication

Since the 1980s public spaces are challenged by manifest aesthetic changes. This book follows the assumption that institutional transformations are expressed by these aesthetic changes. Institutional transformations which point to changing roles of the state and of markets in public space production processes. By investigating 'design-related coalitions' between out-of-home media companies and state actors Sabine Knierbein proves evidence for a recent phenomenon of the production of the city: A post-fordist accumulation strategy is revealed, whose originators systematically manage human attention as a scarce resource in public spaces. Yet when coalitions between state and markets are able to transform attention into capital in the course of the emerging economy of attention, then statehood is facing fundamental diemmata as regards a definition of roles and positionality as keeper of the Grail of public interest or as instance that contributes to the commodification of the collective. Because the commodity attention - generated in local public spaces - is already dealt with on global financial markets. Knierbein, Sabine (2010) "The production of central public spaces and the economy of attention. Aesthetic, economic and medial restructuing by design-related coalitions in Berlin since 1980" (in German) Wiesbaden, Deutschland VS Verlag.

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