About
Hi, my name is Marianne Promberger. I’m currently a Ph.D. student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. I currently live in London (Hackney).
Living, and especially cycling and walking, in different countries raised my awareness for how we use public space. Take a look around you as you go about your everyday business, and pay attention to how much of your day is spent in “public space.” The street, the sidewalk, the park, the municipal parking lot, the train. Most people don’t think consciously about how we use this space, how we allocate it between the different people who make up “the public.”
In this blog, I’ll try to give examples of how we use public space, both of bold innovative ideas and of unimaginative ingrained stuctures that we’ve come to take for granted, almost as if they were a natural law. By comparing and contrasting these examples, I’ll try to make the point that none of these ingrained structures are as unchangeable as many think them to be. Changing them may take time and energy, but the cost of ill-conceived use of public space can be enormous, both to the individual and to society. All too often, we pay this cost daily without even noticing, because we fail to imagine a better solution.
I’m also a great fan of cycling, mainly because it’s just a lot of fun and it enables me to eat a lot and still fit in my clothes. But since cycling is also an extremely smart and efficient use of public space, I’ll use that rationale to plug a lot of cycling-related material.