Public Space Design and Social Cohesion

An International Comparison

Patricia Aelbrecht, Quentin Stevens, Patricia Aelbrecht, Quentin Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138594029
• eBook ISBN: 9780429951046
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Social cohesion is often perceived as being under threat from the increasing cultural and economic differences in contemporary cities and the increasing intensity of urban life. Public space, in its role as the main stage for social interactions between strangers, clearly plays a role in facilitating or limiting opportunities for social cohesion. But what exactly is social cohesion, how is it experienced in the public realm, and what role can the design of city spaces have in supporting or promoting it? There are significant knowledge gaps between the social sciences and design disciplines and between academia and practice, and thus a dispersed knowledge base that currently lacks nuanced insight into how urban design contributes to social integration or segregation.

This book brings together scholarly knowledge at the intersection of public space design and social cohesion. It is based on original scholarly research and a depth of urban design practice, and analyses case studies from a variety of cities and cultures across the Global North and Global South. Its interdisciplinary, cross-cultural analysis will be of interest to academics, students, policymakers and practitioners engaged with a range of subject areas, including urban design, urban planning, architecture, landscape, cultural studies, human geography, social policy, sociology and anthropology. It will also have significant appeal to a wider non-academic readership, given its topical subject matter.

Part I

Public Space Design, Development and Management Processes

Top-Down Projects

1

The Making of Democratic Urban Public Space in Denmark

Tom Nielsen

Introduction

This chapter examines current trends in urban public space design and social cohesion practices in Denmark. It departs from a hypothesis that a special kind of ‘model’ of public space has been developing since the turn of the century, building on ideals that can be related both to the universalist welfare state ideology and the idea of democratic urban public space. In Denmark the political ideology of the welfare state has established a long tradition of understanding social cohesion as dependent on social and economic equity. However, Denmark is witnessing an unprecedented rise of cultural diversity, challenging its established idea of social cohesion and raising important questions for urban design practice. Is public space an important tool for achieving social cohesion in this context? And does urban design have an important role to play?

This chapter aims to answer these questions. It provides a framework through which to understand Danish public space design. The goal is to establish a general understanding of how this urban design practice relates to the overall theme of social cohesion. The idea of a contemporary model of public space should be understood here both as a consensual understanding of important principles and as specific physical qualities of urban public space. This is illustrated through a case study of five urban public spaces realised after 2000, based on empirical, theoretical and historical material. It combines empirical fieldwork observations with a historical and theoretical literature review, with a view to establishing a conceptual framework through which to understand the development of a particular type of democratic urban public space in Denmark amidst a rising context of diversity.

This chapter concludes with a new theorisation of ‘democratic public space’ and new lessons for contemporary urban design practice, and calls for the recognition of a Danish public space design model within international academia.

Social Cohesion and the Danish Welfare State

The Danish welfare state rests on two main pillars. The first comprises the cooperative organisations (andelsforeninger) developed in the nineteenth century to promote better living conditions for the rural population as well as for the industrial workers living in the cities. These organisations created a strong culture and tradition of relying on cooperation to share responsibilities, benefits and economic risks. Cooperatives and associations continue to be strong hallmarks of Danish culture and are understood as the foundation of the democratic welfare state (Boje et al. 2008, Frivillighedscharter 2013). The other pillar was the introduction of political and social reforms from the 1930s. The goal of these reforms was to prevent the kind of social unrest and political polarisation seen in other European countries at the time, with the rise of communism and fascism. The reforms resulted in large-scale state interventions and the introduction of universal welfare provisions. From the end of the 1950s throughout the 1960s, this was expanded by the application of Keynesian economic principles into a welfare state where a broad range of taxes financed universal welfare provisions such as pensions, unemployment payments, health care and child care.

Consequently, the Danish welfare model became characterised by a strong state, a large public sector, democratic organisations and an ideology of equality. Underlying this was the ideal of providing all citizens with equal rights and chances for a good life, regardless of background and social or economic status, through equal access to common public goods. The political ambition was to create wealth through policies which would encourage social cohesion and enhance the possibilities for social mobility.

However, since the 1970s the welfare state has come under challenge: from the mid-1970s by the first international oil crisis, the beginning of deindustrialisation and the emergence of neoliberal and Marxist ideologies; and from the 1990s by globalisation, the alignment of national policies with EU policies and the increasing popularity of market-oriented and (neo)liberal policies. All these factors are gradually shrinking the scope and impact of the universalist principles in the Danish welfare state. This changing context has brought about rising economic and social inequality, and debates on social cohesion have entered the political as well as the academic arena, as in many other European countries since the 1990s (Skovgaard Nielsen et al. 2016). Denmark nevertheless remains a country with one of the highest amounts of economic and social equality in the world, sustained by one of the highest levels of income tax. The original principles of the welfare state are still the pillars of Danish society and politics. All political parties from the most liberal to the most socialist today have the welfare state as their ultimate goal, even though they share no consensus as to how to define and develop it. This does not strongly influence the production of public space, however, since national as well as local policies and decisions are dependent on compromises across political parties. The political democratic system is in itself instrumental in creating a consensual model of public space.

International studies on social cohesion emphasise social homogeneity (provided in Denmark not only through the political control of economic difference but also by a long history as a small population that has established strong internal cultural bonds) as a prerequisite for social cohesion and a high social capital, as Putnam argued (Skovgaard Nielsen et al. 2016:16). The ideal of equality-based social cohesion of the Danish welfare state covers to a large extent all the dimensions of social cohesion identified by Kearns and Forrest: the idea of the need for a shared sense of morality and common purpose; aspects of social control and social order; the perception of threat posed by income and wealth inequalities to social solidarity; a high level of social interaction within communities or families; and the importance of a sense of belonging to a place (Forrest and Kearns 2001:2128). But the social homogeneity providing the foundation for the Danish societal model is being challenged by increasing cultural diversity. In 2017 immigrants and their descendants make up 12.9 per cent of the Danish population. In 1980 that number was 3 per cent (Bisgaard 2017:4). In Copenhagen it is 24 per cent of the population. The recent wave of refugees and migrants arriving in Europe, including Denmark, has not as yet had any significant influence on the use and layout of public space in Denmark – primarily because refugees have mainly been housed in smaller cities around the country on the principle of even distribution and strong policies of integration. Cities with the highest ethnic diversity have received the smallest number of refugees. The highly controlled system of asylum centres and assignment of housing for refugees means that there have been no substantial concentrations of this group around specific public spaces in the large cities. It must, however, be anticipated that international migration patterns will result in a steady increase in cultural diversity in Denmark, and thus will also influence the use and perception of urban public space.

The Urban Public Spaces of the Welfare City

The principles of international modernist architecture and urban planning were put to work to realise the societal vision of the welfare state. The built outcomes combining these principles with welfare state policies have been termed ‘the welfare city’ (Pedersen 2005, Nielsen 2008). From the 1950s to the end of the 1970s, the early welfare city rarely established urban public spaces directed at diverse users. The decentralised suburb was the ideal, and urban public spaces were seen as necessary for realising the democratic vision of the welfare state by democratising access to ‘green’ areas which in early industrial society and the nineteenth-century city had to a large extent been for the privileged elite. The affinity for open fluid space and the promise of free movement (mostly car-based) resulted in an unprecedented amount of grass lawns being laid out in the welfare city. Another characteristic of the early welfare city spaces which distinguished them from the spaces of earlier urban forms was their functionalist segregation of activities.

With the realisation of these modernist urban spaces criticism arose. The neutral and anonymous open and unprogrammed in-between spaces were for everyone and, therefore, for no one, it was argued. Users lacked links to recognisable urban typologies which they knew how to use and read, and the vitality of public space was lost without the blend of different user groups (Gehl 1987 [1971]). The relatively large scale and degree of ‘newness’ of the spaces and housing projects negatively affected the feeling of community and social cohesion (Allardt 1975). The critique also addressed the top-down approach behind their development, asking for user participation. This new focus on the users and their direct democratic influence and participation in their ‘environment’ radically changed over time the idea of the welfare city’s urban public space.

Democratic Urban Public Space and Social Cohesion

The discourse on urban public space has developed in parallel with other societal developments and ideals. A brief genealogy of key concepts developing within both social and urban design theories can be outlined as follows:

Public Sphere

The universalist and generic model of urban space in the modernist post-Second World War welfare city resonates with the interest in a universal public space for the practice of free individuals inspired by Hannah Arendt’s critiques of totalitarianism and her call for an uncontrolled and open public space (LaFay 2014:138). The idea of a common space for society where collective ‘meaning’ can be created was further developed by Jürgen Habermas through the idea of the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas 1989). This refers to the bourgeois society of industrial cities which formed an alternative to earlier feudal societies. Habermas drew attention to deliberation and ‘communicative action’ as the key aspects of the public sphere. The idea of the ‘public sphere’ was very influential on later and contemporary conceptions of public space which came along with the criticism of modernist urban planning. This criticism looked towards the early industrial city as an ideal model (Krier 1975). One of the ideas inspired by Habermasian thinking was the ideal of public space as democratic space. Richard Sennett in the 1990s related this idea to the pre-feudal forms of the Greek agora and the idea of the actual political democratic conversation taking place in physical space between free men (Sennett 1998). Sennett focuses on ‘difference’ as a key concept of democratic urban public space. This is interesting as it is the opposite of ‘equal’ or ‘same’ that were keywords in the conception of democracy during the welfare state in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sennett uses an Aristotelian understanding of difference, which is wider than how it is mostly defined today in terms of race, class and gender. It also included different ways of acting, and was equally related to identity and actions. Sennett’s interpretation of the Greek agora is that of a place where people could become accustomed to a diverse, complex milieu, which would help form an outlook including a differentiated understanding of politics (Sennett 1998:19).

Olmstedian Ideals and User Involvement

The contemporary idea of democratic urban public space is generally not linked to ancient Greece, but instead attributed to the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and nineteenth-century America (Low et al. 2005:209–10). Olmsted developed the idea of the modern city park – New York’s Central Park is his best-known project – which he saw as a democratic space (Olmsted 2007 [1870]). A democratic space in Olmsted’s vision had three important functions: it should create a point of identification between the city and its inhabitants; it should edify people’s character and morals by putting city dwellers in touch with nature; and, most importantly, it should create a space in the dense and class-stratified industrial cities with free and equal access for everyone, and thus become a rare place used by and attractive for everyone (Roulier 2010). The city park functioned as a kind of pressure release valve in unequal and densely populated cities.

Later, in the late 1970s, Barcelona’s large-scale urban renewal projects added an important new aspect to this model. This addition could be understood as parallel with the development from Arendt to Habermas. Immediately following the first democratic elections in 1979 after the fall of the Franco dictatorship, a string of market places, squares and city parks of high quality was established or renovated all across the city, following an extensive process of public consultation. The project played a central role in building new faith in the political system and in democracy as an attractive societal form. The inclusion of its users introduced a new aspect into the understanding of the democratic space, and was central to the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: From Mixing with Strangers to Collective Placemaking: Existing Theories, Policies and Practices around Social Cohesion in Public Space Design
• Part I Public Space Design, Development and Management Processes: Top-Down Projects
• Part II Post-Occupancy Evaluations
• Index