How Public Art Becomes Public: An Integrative Review of Participation, Spatial Governance, and Digital Mediation

The location of an artwork in an open setting does not, by itself, make the work public in a political or social sense. Studies in public art, urban geography, participatory practice, memory, and digital media describe a less direct relationship between visibility and public agency. This integrative review asks how participation, spatial governance, cultural memory, and digital mediation shape that relationship. Seven topic searches of Crossref metadata were conducted on 9 October 2026. After 689 deduplicated records had been screened by title, abstract, source, and relevance, 65 were retained in an evidence table and ten core texts were read in full. Across this literature, publicness appears as an outcome of negotiated relationships, not an inherent quality of a site or object. The review organizes these relationships into six areas: access, authorship, decision power, stewardship, memory, and the governance of media and data. The studies also show why visible interaction can be misleading. A project may invite contributions while leaving its agenda, resources, or digital infrastructure under institutional control. Disagreement can reveal neglected interests, although its democratic value depends on whether institutions provide transparent procedures and respond to those affected. The six areas offered here are intended to guide interpretation; they have not been validated as a measurement scale. The review is also limited by its single metadata source, one-reviewer screening, and selective full-text reading. It therefore offers a traceable critical synthesis, not exhaustive coverage or an estimate of causal effects.