Companion to Public Space

Vikas Mehta, Danilo Palazzo, Vikas Mehta, Danilo Palazzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351002165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Companion to Public Space draws together an outstanding multidisciplinary collection of specially commissioned chapters that offer the state of the art in the intellectual discourse, scholarship, research, and principles of understanding in the construction of public space.

Thematically, the volume crosses disciplinary boundaries and traverses territories to address the philosophical, political, legal, planning, design, and management issues in the social construction of public space. The Companion uniquely assembles important voices from diverse fields of philosophy, political science, geography, anthropology, sociology, urban design and planning, architecture, art, and many more, under one cover. It addresses the complete ecology of the topic to expose the interrelated issues, challenges, and opportunities of public space in the twenty-first century.

The book is primarily intended for scholars and graduate students for whom it will provide an invaluable and up-to-date guide to current thinking across the range of disciplines that converge in the study of public space. The Companion will also be of use to practitioners and public officials who deal with the planning, design, and management of public spaces.

PART 1

Perspectives

In these challenging times of diminishing democracy, there is a heightened awareness of the value of public space. At the global scale, the social and political uprisings and resistance movements in Istanbul, Caracas, Madrid, Hong Kong, Taipei, Paris, St. Louis, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have drawn attention to the civic and political significance of public space. Public spaces provide a physical platform for active democracy and a locus of the struggle between the citizenry and the power of the state. At the local scale, more groups have been identifying, claiming, and making space public in locations and ways unexplored in the past. Social media has enabled and strengthened cyberspace as the virtual public space for effortless and instant contacts and exchange that transcends the dichotomy of local–global space and its material components. Once thought of as the nemesis of physical public space, cyberspace, through its ability of instant and perpetual connectivity and information sharing is, in numerous ways, aiding the activation, use, and, appropriation of public space. In these new ways, public space has gained legitimacy, appropriately, not only as space but also as an act and event. In fact, we now experience new ways in which physical space and cyberspace seamlessly connect to create a new typology of the public sphere that delivers a unique experience of publicness.

The inquiry of public space in myriad disciplines brings a wide range of perspectives that examine public space through numerous and diverse lenses/concepts. Simultaneously, the rapidly evolving changes in global and local political landscapes become remarkably visible in public space. These transformations present new challenges, opportunities and perspectives to critique and understand public space. In this context, established and new scholars have a newfound interest reflected in contemporary views and voices. The opening part of the Companion builds on the trajectory of this discourse and narrative and also presents evolving and new perspectives on public space that are relevant today. The opening six chapters highlight important ideas and paradigms that shape the understanding of public space in contemporary times ranging from a critique of the rhetoric of civic and democratic space versus the practice of economic gain; publicness as a field of study; public space as dynamic, fluid and relational space; benefits and challenges of being in public space; topography as an influence on experience and performance of public space; and an evaluation criteria for public space based on social justice.

Much contemporary literature on public space, directly or indirectly, points to the clear divide between the heightened awareness and dialogue on public space as a democratic right and its adoption by neoliberal capitalist regimes. The opening chapter by Ali Madanipour focuses on this and demonstrates how the rhetoric of public space as a space of civic and democratic interaction continues in contemporary times, while simultaneously being used increasingly as an instrument to attract and generate economic benefits.

Moving from the political to the experiential aspects, Rianne van Melik and Bas Spierings’ chapter emphasizes the relational nature of public space in both time and space, and makes the case for its dynamic and fluid interpretation. The authors explore alternative epistemologies that give users an active role in research, which in turn helps researchers better understand how people combine and relate to public spaces across time and space.

The ever-heterogenizing city means new interpretations and meanings of public space for newcomers. Examining the mobile demographics of the twenty-first-century city, Clare Rishbeth presents the challenges and benefits of being collectively in public. For people new to a place, the outdoors in public space provides an opportunity of belonging, but being outdoors also exposes them to be visible as the “other,” resulting in an un-belonging. Exploring the idea and practice of “curated sociability,” the chapter highlights the potential for public spaces to be places of everyday and ordinary inclusion, where the process of “becoming local” is grounded in shared collective joys.

Building on this dichotomous outcome, Elahe Karimnia and Tigran Haas’ chapter brings to fore the challenges embedded in the process of spatial production of public space, particularly as it relates to achieving publicness. The authors call for a field of study where the design of publicness is an explicit focus. They argue that the design of publicness can be a locus of criticism in the way public space is used or misused as a justification for urban development, and as an active undertaking to understand how the right to appropriate space and produce publicness can be stimulated by urban design.

As tangible and physical, the experience of public space depends on the shape of the land that gives it form and influences the experience and performance of public space. Karl Kullmann’s chapter examines the topography of public space at numerous scales, from the city to the specific site. The author presents strategies for re-grounding public spaces and re-amplifying engagement with the topography of the city.

Emerging from the quest to define and understand public space, particularly in an evolving political landscape, an important question has emerged recently. How do we measure and evaluate public space? Since public space is multidimensional, the publicness of public space must be examined in ways that address issues of politics and democracy, sociability, leisure and recreation, economic exchange, symbolic value and social justice. Founded on 20 years of ethnographic research in numerous cities and a careful reading of the literature on the just city, right to the city and social justice planning, Setha Low’s chapter proposes an expanded framework for evaluating public space based on five dimensions of social justice designed to enhance diversity and equity.

1

A critique of public space

Between interaction and attraction

Ali Madanipour

Introduction

Public space has been widely discussed in the literature, and its development and provision have become a widespread policy embraced by many public, private and voluntary agencies (e.g. Carmona et al., 2008; De Souza et al., 2012; Hou, 2010; Low and Smith, 2006; Orum and Zachary, 2010; Parkinson, 2012; Sadeh, 2010; Watson, 2006). Public spaces have always been an integral part of the city, a key component in the vocabulary of urbanism (Benevolo, 1980; Morris, 1994), and their social and political significance has long been recognized (Arendt, 1998; Habermas, 1989); so what are the reasons for the renewed interest in something as old as the city itself?

The growing emphasis on the significance of the public space emerged as a critique of social fragmentation and privatization of urban development processes, as the urban space was increasingly being produced and controlled by private interests, undermining the democratic potentials of urban public spaces. The campaigners for public spaces saw them as a means of turning fragmented cities into integrated places, improving the quality of urban life and offering an alternative to the suburban sprawl. In this process, however, the idea of public space has been transformed from a critique to an orthodoxy, taken for granted by most stakeholders as an important ingredient of urban life.

The rising attention to the public space is a welcome development, as few people would doubt its value, but we may also wonder whether all the different actors who are involved in urban development have the same approach towards the public space. Do the property developers, advertising agencies, architects, city planners, urban designers, municipal organizations and local communities have the same understanding of the public space? More broadly, do the producers, regulators, and users of the built environment have the same approaches to and expectations from the public space (Madanipour, 2006)?

This chapter argues that in the journey of the idea from a critique to an orthodoxy, and in its pervasive acceptance in the urban development process, the approach towards public spaces has metamorphosed and a gap has emerged between the rhetoric and reality. The chapter develops a critique of this process of metamorphosis, showing how the widely used rhetoric of the public space as a multidimensional space of social and civic interaction may be at odds with the practice of creating of a space of attraction, an instrument of commercialization and gentrification, luring investment and maximizing rewards. The chapter examines this transition in four arguments within the broad processes of political, economic, and cultural transformation.¹

The changing relationship between the public and private spheres

An important reason for the rising concern for public spaces lies in the changing relationship between the public and private spheres, as urban spaces are increasingly produced and managed by private agents for private use. Historically, public authorities have been responsible for the development and management of public spaces (Madanipour, 2003). However, as the public authorities have become more entrepreneurial and market-oriented, the question is whether their approach towards public space has remained the same. How public are the spaces produced by these public authorities?

For a generation after the Second World War, a model of development emerged that was based on a stronger presence of the state in the economy; a welfare state involved in the provision of public services and the production of the built environment. This model led to large-scale urban-development projects, public-housing schemes, and comprehensive planning. The actual extent of the state’s role and intervention varied widely in different countries, but the Keynesian paradigm of state-market relations prevailed in the Western countries and spread around the world (Madanipour, 2011). Following the economic crises of the 1970s, this model was replaced by a neoliberal paradigm, in which the state withdrew from many fields, while the market was given a more prevalent role, transferring the production and management of the built environment to the private sector (Aglietta, 2008; Lipietz, 1987). This shift radically changed the balance between the public and private agencies and spheres.

In the first model, modernist designs were used to replace the overcrowded and badly built cities with mass-produced buildings in car-dominated environments (Le Corbusier, [1929] 1987). In the modernist design philosophy, public spaces were breathing spaces at the service of buildings, enveloping, and supporting them for health and recreation (Sert, 1944). With the end of this model, which came with deindustrialization and globalization, these buildings and neighborhoods declined, and their public spaces became a huge problem (Castell, 2010). The close connection between housing and public spaces was broken, as public authorities started to abandon their role in housing provision, and emphasis on the public space was a rather convenient substitute for this shortcoming.

In the neoliberal model that followed, the resources of the private firms were mobilized, which had access to productive capacities that could transform large parts of cities and regenerate declining areas. However, these firms had a limited remit, responsible towards their shareholders, rather than delivering services and spaces for the public. Urban development projects still needed common spaces, but these new spaces were functional intermediate spaces rather than publicly accessible ones. In an increasingly unequal society, these intermediate spaces were privately controlled, sometimes with the help of guards, walls, gates, and cameras, setting boundaries that would limit access to these spaces. This reduction in supply and access opened up a crisis of confidence and a rising sense of anxiety about public services and spaces, and by extension a crisis for the city as a whole (London Assembly, 2011). So much of the debate about the public space reflected anxiety about this changing relationship, which is a mirror of the broader relationships between the market and the state, and between the individual and society (Carmona et al., 2008; Low and Smith, 2006). The campaign for the public space, in this sense, was a campaign for the integrity of the city and society.

The early phase of criticizing the privatization of public spaces was based on the idea that the lines between the public and private agencies should be sharply drawn. In political theory, the public sphere is often the sphere of the state, distinct from the private sphere of individuals and households. The two spheres are kept apart, as the intervention of the public sphere into the private sphere would result in the loss of privacy and individual freedom, while the encroachment of the private sphere into the public sphere may create individual gain and collective loss (Nolan, 1995; Wacks, 1993). These lines, however, are increasingly blurred, as the public authorities adopt private sector approaches and enter partnerships with the private developers. Publicness, even when produced and managed by the public authorities, becomes a relative concept.

The early concerns about the privatization of the public space, therefore, have been compounded by concerns about the character of the public institutions, which has direct implications for the public spaces that they produce and manage. The rhetoric of the public space has been widely adopted by public authorities. However, these authorities now operate on a basis that is far closer to the way private companies function with their motives of risk and reward. This is evident in the growth of markets and quasi markets within public services, which is known as the N...