TAKE PART

The city of San Francisco is a living form, constantly changing and evolving from its genesis as a leading gold rush 
destination to its contemporary status as the technology and information capital of the world. Public rights to space and how, and by who decisions are made in a time when communities are getting erased and dispersed by different dynamics are urgent questions.
        TAKE PART anchors expansive and performative dialogues about San Francisco—its past, present, and future—to the staging of a physical object from, allegedly, the only socialist moment in the history of the United States: a 1000-square-foot model (circa 15 x 15 meters) of the city built in 1938 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. The model was displayed in 1940–1941 in City Hall. Since then, the model has not been on public view in its entirety.
        TAKE PART re-imagines the city by way of its people. It involves the creative civic participation of a multitude 
of voices to infuse the model with their perspectives on and relationship to the city and to think aloud considering what makes a city. As a form of ›social media go analogue‹, TAKE PART is an exploration of the changing relationship between body, voice, and assembly, exactly what has disappeared from the public eye today. TAKE PART comes from »Taking Part«, community planning workshop processes created in the 1970s by urban planner Lawrence Halprin and dancer/choreographer Anna Halprin. These workshops encouraged creativity to work together to solve complex problems.
        TAKE PART took shape in stages. Clean your neighborhood: all six thousand blocks of the city model were cleaned and audited, neighborhood-by-neighborhood by SFMOMA staff and volunteers, while engaging in a process of dusting the model and having conversations about citizenship and the ways that cities change over time.
       Bringing the Neighborhood to Your Neighborhood: Seventy sections of the model were shown publicly at the twenty-nine different branches of the San Francisco Public Library. Each neighborhood was on display in its corresponding library. A program of more than 100 events took place, ranging from community forums, bike tours, mapmaking, site-specific storytelling, town hall discussions, and history nights.
        In Making Room for San Francisco the entire scale model would be brought together for the first time since 1942 at San Francisco City College, and function as a workspace, a building set, a laboratory for deliberation. To give the model a place, to bring communities together in designing and rethinking the city. This stage of the project came to a halt under the influence of the pandemic.

TAKE PART – Is There Room For San Francisco In San Francisco? 2018–2020 was commissioned by Public Knowledge at SFMOMA in 
partnership with San Francisco Public Library

Since 1995, the artists Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol work collaboratively as Bik Van der Pol. They work and live in Rotterdam (NL). Bik Van der Pol’s mode of working consists of setting up the conditions for encounter, where they develop a process of working that allows for continuous reconfigurations of places, histories and publics.