Zócalo Public Square

In an age when you can purchase a beach umbrella with solar panels to charge your smartphone, defining a public space—and differentiating it from the digital realm—is complicated. At a Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event at the Getty Museum, presented in conjunction with an exhibition of the Belgian artist James Ensor, futurist Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, architect Mia Lehrer, and Stanford University professor Robert McGinn talked with San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King about whether such technology is killing public spaces and changing our relationships to the world around us and to one another.