Whose Public Space?

International Case Studies in Urban Design and Development

Ali Madanipour, Ali Madanipour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135173333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

Public spaces mirror the complexities of urban societies: as historic social bonds have weakened and cities have become collections of individuals public open spaces have also changed from being embedded in the social fabric of the city to being a part of more impersonal and fragmented urban environments. Can making public spaces help overcome this fragmentation, where accessible spaces are created through inclusive processes? This book offers some answers to this question through analysing the process of urban design and development in international case studies, in which the changing character, level of accessibility, and the tensions of making public spaces are explored.

The book uses a coherent theoretical outlook to investigate a series of case studies, crossing the cultural divides to examine the similarities and differences of public space in different urban contexts, and its critical analysis of the process of development, management and use of public space, with all its tensions and conflicts. While each case study investigates the specificities of a particular city, the book outlines some general themes in global urban processes. It shows how public spaces are a key theme in urban design and development everywhere, how they are appreciated and used by the people of these cities, but also being contested by and under pressure from different stakeholders.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Ali Madanipour

DOI: 10.4324/9780203860946-1

Public spaces mirror the complexities of urban societies: as historic social bonds between individuals have become weakened or transformed, and cities have increasingly become agglomerations of atomized individuals, public open spaces have also changed from being embedded in the social fabric of the city to being a part of more impersonal and fragmented urban environments. Can making public spaces help overcome this fragmentation, where accessible spaces are created through inclusive processes? Do the existing and new public spaces of the city serve the public at large, or are they contested and exclusive? Whose public spaces are they? This book offers some answers to these questions through case studies of making public space in different countries.

The book investigates the making of public space in contemporary cities, through analysing the process of urban design and development in international case studies, focusing on the changing nature of public space and the tensions that arise between different perspectives and groups. Two broad frameworks of place and process are used to study and analyse the urban public spaces in transition. Public spaces, it is argued in this book, should be accessible places, developed through inclusive processes. With these criteria, therefore, it would be possible to analyse and evaluate the spaces that are being developed in cities around the world.

The book’s authors share a common concern about the quality and character of urban public spaces, a concern that has led us to investigate a series of major empirical case studies. Crossing the cultural divides, the book brings these investigations together to examine the similarities and differences of public space in different urban contexts, and engage in a critical analysis of the process of design, development, management and use of public space. While each case study investigates the specificities of particular cities, the book as a whole outlines some general themes in global urban processes. It shows how public spaces are a key theme in urban design and development everywhere, how they are appreciated and used by the people of these cities, but are also contested by and under pressure from different stakeholders.

The book builds on the theoretical foundations developed in earlier publications (Madanipour 1996, 1999, 2003a, 2007), and major research projects funded by the European Commission among others (Madanipour et al. 2003; Madanipour 2004). The chapters, with the exception of Chapter 6, are written specifically for this book, reporting on major research projects funded by international organizations, national governments and research councils. All of these research projects, with the exception of Chapter 11, have recently been conducted at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. This book is the first attempt to bring together the results of these various research endeavours in a single volume. The book is written for scholars and practitioners in built environment and social sciences, including urban design and planning, architecture, urban geography and sociology, with an interest in the relationship between space and society, and the dynamics of change in contemporary cities around the world, as particularly manifested in urban public spaces.

The book’s key argument is that, although the social and spatial composition of cities differ considerably across the world, there are a number of general trends that can be observed: that public spaces play a significant role in the life of cities everywhere, and that for cities to work, there is an undeniable need for public space; that the nature of this role, and therefore the nature of public space, in modern cities has radically changed; and that the development and use of these spaces mirror the way a society is organized, shaped by unequal distribution of power and resources, which creates tension and conflict as well as collaboration and compromise. Public spaces, it is argued here, should be produced on the basis of equality for all by being accessible places made and managed through inclusive processes.

Why has urban public space become a subject of interest?

Public space has been an integral part of cities throughout history, so much so that without it, human settlements would be unimaginable. How could people step out of their front doors if there were no public space to mediate between private territories? Like any other part of cities, such as houses, neighbourhoods, political and cultural institutions, it is part of an everpresent vocabulary of urbanism. It has been used in different forms and combinations in many different circumstances, with different degrees of accessibility and control, but they can all be seen as different variations on the same theme. This poses the question: if public spaces, in some form or other, have been a primary part of urban structure everywhere and at all times, why do we see a current wave of interest in public space as a subject of social concern, political action and academic research?

Recent attention to public space is rooted in the structural changes that societies around the world have experienced in the past thirty years whereby the provision of public goods, such as public space, has been under pressure through the ascendancy of the market-based paradigm. The aftermath of the Second World War was characterized by structural intervention by the state in the economy, resulting in large-scale public-sector schemes in urban development, particularly in western countries. Local authorities and their architects and planners were at the leading edge of urban renewal whereby cities were expanded and redeveloped with high-rise public housing schemes, motorways and new towns, implementing the ideas developed earlier by the garden city movement and the modern movement in architecture. As the prosperity of the 1960s was followed by economic decline in the 1970s, the post-war Keynesian accord between the state and the market came under pressure. Industrial decline deprived the public sector of its funds, and urban renewal projects and new town development schemes were abandoned. The solution that was introduced in the 1980s in the United Kingdom and the United States was to dismantle the age of consensus and stimulate economic growth through market revival and competition. Radical de-industrialization, reduction in the size of the state, privatization, individualization, globalization and liberalization of the economy were the new structural directions for the state and society, which spread around the world and lasted for three decades until coming to a halt with a global financial crisis. This paradigm shift had major implications for urban design, planning and development.

With reduction in the size and scope of the state, urban development was transferred to the private sector. The private sector, however, was interested in those aspects of urban development that would ensure a return on its investment. Private companies were answerable to their shareholders, and not to the urban community as a whole. Public goods, such as public space, therefore, were seen as a liability, as they could not be sold and had no direct profit for the private investor. Local authorities and their elected politicians, meanwhile, could not, or would not, invest in those public goods that did not have an immediate political or economic return. They also saw public space as a liability, as something that required higher maintenance costs and was a burden on their dwindling budgets. As a result, both public– and private-sector agencies abandoned public spaces as cities suffered from accelerated decline.

Large-scale schemes, however, could not be developed without some sort of mediating space, some public areas that would link different buildings and spaces. Private developers, therefore, preferred to control these spaces, so that the return on their investment could not be jeopardized by what they saw as potential threats to their operation. New public spaces that were developed after the 1980s, therefore, were controlled and restricted, in contrast to the more accessible and inclusive places of the past. This was a widespread phenomenon, and became known as the privatization of public space. It generated a fear that the city had become private territory in which people could not move easily and the democratic aspirations of liberty and equality would be undermined. This would be a fragmented city, in which some people would be free to go almost anywhere, whereas others would be trapped inside their ghettos or prevented from entering the exclusive spaces of the elite, facilitated through a process of gentrification. The loss of public space symbolized the loss of the idea of the city.

An associated trend was the change in disciplinary and professional division of labour, in which architects and planners both lost interest in public space, leaving it in an indeterminate state. Modernist architecture was interested in refashioning the entire built environment, from the scale of cities down to the level of individual pieces of furniture. Modernism was a relatively coherent, socially concerned movement that sought to solve social problems through physical transformation. With economic decline, which removed the possibility of large-scale urban development schemes, and the collapse of architecture’s confidence in its ability to deal with social problems, it withdrew into an aesthetic sphere. The postmodern reaction to modernism was more interested in playfulness of appearance than in grappling with social concerns. It focused on the site, trying to respond to the needs of the client, and paid little attention to what lay outside, the urban context, of which public space was a major part. The architect’s clients were private developers, and they were interested in rewards on their investment, which set the parameters for the architect’s scope of action. Meanwhile, as a result of rapid economic decline and the heavily criticized consequences of post-Second World War planning schemes, urban planning became focused on social issues, which included large-scale unemployment and the decline of infrastructure. There was no scope for concentrating on public spaces, which would be considered as icing on the cake, a luxury rather than a necessity.

While public and private organizations and their associated professionals had lost interest in the public space, seeing it as irrelevant or expensive, or were encroaching upon it for private gains, the social need for public space in the city had not disappeared. There were increasing concerns about the rise of individualism and the decline of public goods, of which public space was a key manifestation in the urban environment. Individuals were encouraged to follow their own interests, expecting the market to deliver prosperity. But social goods could not be delivered by the market, which had little interest in non-monetary forms of benefit. Social goods could not be delivered by the public sector either, as its financial ability to develop and maintain public spaces was undermined. There was a crisis about public goods in general, and about public space in particular.

As the neoliberal market paradigm spread around the world, other countries adopted, or were encouraged to adopt, the path of economic regeneration through stimulating the market and reducing the state’s size and scope. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the market paradigm grew in new countries, becoming the undisputed form of economic development. In these countries, therefore, the provision of public goods, which was already, or had become, less effective than in the rich western countries, faced similar issues and problems. Of course, the extent of marketization and the crisis of public space has not been the same everywhere, as is best evident in the differences between European and American cities. However, the global neoliberal trend posed a major challenge to public goods everywhere, as partly evident in the threats facing public space, which has resulted from the restless process of globalization.

The changing nature of public space

The nature and character of public spaces are closely related to the nature and character of cities. As cities have changed, so have their public spaces. In smaller towns and cities of agrarian societies, with their relatively cohesive and homogeneous populations, some public spaces were major focal points, where trade, politics, cultural performance and socialization all took place. As modern cities have grown larger, with heterogeneous populations spread across large areas, public spaces have multiplied and expanded, but have also become more impersonal, losing many of their layers of significance. In the city of strangers, the meaning of public space becomes less personal, more transient, and at best merely functional or symbolic.

There have been major changes in the nature of cities during their long existence throughout millennia (Southall 1998), despite some common features that they share across this time. According to Louis Wirth, cities are identified by size of population, density of settlement, and heterogeneity of inhabitants, and so are perceived as ‘relatively permanent, compact settlements of large numbers of heterogeneous individuals’ (1964: 68). As these parameters of size, density and heterogeneity, and the relationship among urban inhabitants and with the outside world, have constantly taken new forms, the nature of cities and urban societies has changed considerably. These changes can be seen in the different analyses made of the city. For Aristotle (1992), the ancient city was an association, in which people participated by playing different roles to construct a political community. Max Weber (1966) wrote about medieval cities as a fusion of garrison and market, indicating the defensive and economic functions of cities, as well as their political and legal autonomy. In modern cities, however, the military function of the city has been lost, its political function weakened, its economic function integrated into a larger national and international system, and even its population spread out into the suburbs. This is why one observer decided to write, ‘The age of the city seems to be at an end’ (Martindale 1966: 62). And yet we know that the age of the city has just begun, as the turn of the twenty-first century has been marked by a shift in the world’s balance of population from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban population.

The nature of public spaces has changed alongside the historic changes in the nature of cities. For most of urban history, the primary public spaces of the city were the core of the urban society, integrating the political, economic, social and cultural activities of a small and relatively coherent urban population. Examples of these primary spaces were the agora in Greek cities, the forum in Roman cities, and market squares in medieval cities. The other public open spaces of the city, such as streets, intersections, minor squares, etc., were also essential for everyday sociability and trade. In modern cities, however, the city has grown, with populations so large and heterogeneous that they could not rely on proximity and close encounters to engage in their complex range of activities. Its physical space has also grown to such an extent that co-presence is no longer possible, or even desirable. The role of public space in the close-knit community was fairly clear: facilitating a multiplicity of encounters that were essential for everyday life and helping consolidate the social order. In the modern city, a large number of anonymous individuals are engaged in nonconverging networks, while the transport, information and communication technologies have changed the location and shape of these networks. These changes are reflected in the nature of public spaces, which have kept some of their historic functions but now primarily play residual roles.

The change in the nature of urban space can be traced in the relationship between ‘space’ and ‘place’ in the literature, whereby space is considered to be more abstract and impersonal, while place is interpreted as having meaning and value. One of the key criticisms of the urban development process in modern cities has been the transition from place to space, through a loss of meaning and personal association. The humanist critics of modernism, as well as others, have raised this criticism in response to the urban redevelopment programmes of the mid-twentieth century (Jacobs 1961). The same criticism was raised in the nineteenth century against the modernization of cities with wide boulevards and soulless public spaces (Sitte 1986). While this criticism partly captures the changing condition of cities, it may also tend to misjudge the complexity of places and identities in cities, hence promoting place as a particular enclosed space with fixed identities, which is not what the spaces of modern cities can or should be (Massey 1994). This is part of a larger debate about the nature of modern cities, and of modernity itself.

The transition from an integrative community to the anonymity and alienation of large modern urban societies has been a key concern in the development of sociology (Engels 1993; Tönnies 1957; Simmel 1950). Behaviour in public spaces has been analysed as the reflection of this transition, from engaging with others to avoiding them, as the overload of encounters and emotional stimuli, and the wide gap between social classes, keep people apart and turn public spaces into residual places of avoidance rather than encounter. Two of the major theorists of the public sphere in the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, mourned the passing of these integrative societies and complained about the rise of what was called a mass society. Arendt analysed the ancient polis (1958) and Habermas investigated the early modern bourgeois public sphere (1989), both as examples of situations in which interpersonal communication led to a rich public life. Both of them saw the rigid routines of the industrial city as alienating, and as tending to degrade the qualities of public life.

The result has been a degree of false romanticization of historic public spaces. The Greek agora has been portrayed as the material manifestation of this magnificent ancient civilization. This was a civilization, however, in which women, foreigners and slaves had no place in the public sphere. The medieval square has been portrayed as the picturesque heart of the city, in what are often little more than romantic and aesthetic notions of life in the medieval city, and yet at the time it was a place dominated by trade, and it displayed the hierarchies and harshness of life within the city walls. The eighteenth-century coffee houses in London or the salons in Paris are seen as the prototypes for the emergence of a public sphere, in which people were able to discuss matters of common interest and come to an informed opinion about their society, and yet these places were often accessible only to the elite among the emerging bourgeoisie. The early modern city squares and boulevards are portrayed as examples of the rise of a new age of reason and modernity, and yet they resulted from speculative development, monarchical power and suppression of the poor. What we often see is the architecture of the city, or at least a sanitized image of the history, on which we project our own expectations, aesthetic, political a...