Public space as a field of urban struggle: Everyday life practices as the outcome of power relations. (original) (raw)
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Urban public space between fragmentation, control and conflict
City, Territory and Architecture, 2014
The article is focused on the different tendencies affecting urban public space in contemporary cities. It is based on a reflexion on some emerging themes in the recent debate in urban studies, paying particular attention to the approaches that emphasize the fragmentation of public space and the presence of control strategies, highlighting the function of tecnologies and material elements of built environment. The main thesis of the article is that public space, far from having become marginal in a context where virtual relations have a growing importance, is a field in which various types of dialectical tensions operate. In particular, at the one hand, in different contexts it is possible to recognize the presence of a complex strategy of domestication and control of urban places, linked to a process of commodification and privatisation. On the other hand many types of opposing practices and movements are also present, that propose an alternative project of use. In this framework, public space is both a place of confrontation between opposing tendencies and a stake, on which future city models depend significantly.
Narrative Review of Pertinent Theories on 'Public Space' in Cities
bagh-e nazar, 2023
Problem statement: The problem of space in the public domain of the city extends beyond the simplistic definition used as "opposite of private space". This issue is associated with the socio-spatial structure of urban life and has multiple dimensions formed under the influence of various social, economic, and political dynamics and the agency of city managers, designers, and citizens. Despite the growing concerns about the performance of public spaces in recent decades, there is no consensus among researchers about the different dimensions of "public space". This issue has made it difficult to develop theoretical perspectives and propose practical solutions for this interdisciplinary concept. Research Objective: This study attempts to shed light on the various dimensions of the concept of "public space" and show the contradictions and theoretical gaps in the existing theoretical literature. By combining and criticizing the views, this study aims at developing a new conceptual model and contributes to theory development and reconceptualization of public space. Research method: In line with the purpose of the research, a integrative literature review method was used to develop the theoretical foundations of public space. The data was collected by the bibliographic research method and analyzed through content analysis and meta-analysis methods. Conclusion: The conflicting definitions of public space are tied up with the concerns and interests of multiple stakeholders and influenced by human, contextual, and institutional agencies contributing to human actions. Publicness is a relative, abstract, and dynamic quality and, at the highest level of performance, is the common denominator of the specific characteristics of each space and the response of a multivariate equation, including the role of man, space, city, and time. Public space is a multidialectic system, a contested entity with a wide range of meanings and uses. It does not lend itself to a single definition because it is based on the relationships shaped between agencies, over time, and across space. Different manifestations and possibilities are available to different stakeholders, including citizens, designers, specialists, city managers, and power institutions. The substantive and functional dimensions of public space change under the influence of a series of relationships as a chain reaction and butterfly effect. A minor change in metropolitan processes, the context of public space, human actions, or even the transformation of public space in another part of the city can have far-reaching and unexpected consequences for the publicness of the space. The publicness of space should be explained as a holistic value through an adaptable model by considering the set of factors involved in each specific example and realized with larger strategies and long-term processes.
Conceptualization and typology of contemporary urban public space
2015
Introduction “Public space” is the subject of a growing academic literature from the full range of social science and humanities disciplines. Each discipline sees public space through a different lens, and with particular interests and concerns to the fore. Political scientists, for example, focus on democratization and on rights in public space; geographers on sense-of-place and placelessness; legal scholars on the ownership of and access in public places; sociologists on human interactions and social exclusion etc. The result is a diverse array of multi-disciplinary approaches towards understanding public space. Furthermore, the combined term "public space" with the words "space" and “the public" and its association with words like "place" and "people" has added to the uncertainty and complexity of this concept. Acknowledging its diversity and differences, the first aim of this paper is to try to shed some light into the meaning and the...
The Relevance of Public Space: Rethinking Its Material and Political Aspects
in Basta C., Moroni S. (Eds), Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment, Springer, Berlin, 2013, pp. 45-55
Two recurrent theses in the recent literature about public space are the following: first, “public space” has a central role in the “public sphere” creation (where public sphere is the locus of public debate and collective exchange of opinions); second, public space is currently subject to a privatization process (due to the development of new types of private settlements). These two established theses are for several reasons unconvincing: first, there is no necessary causal relation between “public space” and the “public sphere” (this is even more true nowadays, thanks to the development of the new information technology); second, no “privatization of public space” is actually under way (on the contrary, an increasing “collectivization process of private space” is taking place thanks to contractual communities and shopping malls). Rejecting the aforementioned theses does not, however, imply denying the fundamental importance of public space for our cities, but simply appeals for a different kind of defence of it. Our point in particular is that the necessity of public space is above all dependent upon its “functional” value, whereas its “political” value is secondary.
The place of the privately owned public space in the contemporary city
This article discusses a specific type of public space: The Privately Owned Public Space, or POPS, which originated from the 1961 revision of the New York Zoning Resolution, offering legal incentives of increased floor area to buildings providing street-level spaces for public use. POPS with similar regulations can currently be found in cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Detroit, Santiago, Hong Kong and Tokyo. In Brazil, from 2013, the city of São Paulo began to adopt the term " Public Use " for privately owned public spaces in its Strategic Planning Legislation. Changes to cities in recent decades through the spread of large-scale urban projects make this discussion of POPS timely. 'Placemaking' and 'placemarketing' techniques have created places in regions lacking in centrality, which Castello (2013) terms " eccentric centres " , diluting the boundaries between public and private. This article presents the disciplinary context of the discussion of Privately Owned Public Spaces and considers some typological experiences. It then addresses the conflicts they cause in the urban setting and the potential for public appropriation of this type of space. It concludes with the need for a plural understanding of what kind of system of urban spaces might meet the growing demand for urban places, given that conditions in cities are leading exploration of every opportunity for the creation of appropriate public spaces. Perhaps it is in the light of this that authors such as Ascher (2010), Carmona (2014) and Chung et al. (2001) have defined new parameters for dealing with this important element of the urban environment. Published online in Portuguese on THESIS – REVISTA DA ANPARQ: http://anparq.web965.uni5.net/artigo.php?num=4&l=/revista-thesis/article/view/88
The Journal of Public Space
Considering the tendency for expansion, diversification and fragmentation of the present city´s urban spaces, and considering that in the last decades public space lost much of the formal and functional attributes that it held in the past (in the historical city), the main problem that we currently face as architects and planners, seems to be how to articulate and (re) build (new) public places that materialise, in a qualified manner, the collective experience (the new ways of living, social interaction and displacement) of the "newer parts" of the city, and that simultaneously incorporate attributes that transform them into memorable and perennial spaceslandmarks of the city that is to come. This article has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in The Journal of Public Space. Please see the Editorial Policies under the 'About' section of the journal website for further information.
The Place and the City: Trends in the Construction of the Public Space
This paper analyses the evolution of the concept of public space in the European city in a diachronic framework, from its historical and foundational functions to the opportunity it provides to trigger regenerative strategies in socially and environmentally degraded urban contexts. The specificity of ‘potentially public’ spaces resides in their peripheral position inside metropolitan areas and in their episodic and fragmented character. This autonomy with respect to other typologies of free spaces appears to require the elaboration of specific analytical approaches and design models that move from the explicit recognition of the reticular structure of the territory. Examples of urban regeneration promoted in the last decade, in general supported by the European Union, open new perspectives on urban governance that are implicitly based upon the role of social inclusion in welfare and sustainability policies. Keywords Public Space, Urbanism, Participation, Urban Governance, Enclaves
Bagh-e Nazar, 2022
Problem statement: The question of ideology has occupied the minds of most urbanologists from the past to the present during modernity. The present study is a geographical-philosophical introduction to the role of this concept in the public spaces of cities. The discussion of ideology is one of the cases that has not been widely studied in explaining the physical, social, and psychological affairs of public spaces in Iran. From this point of view, it is necessary to pay attention to this issue in urbanological analysis. Based on this, this research seeks to answer the following questions: What can be done to create successful cities in the 21st century? How can the role of face-to-face presence in creating public spaces of cities be explained from the philosophical and scientific perspectives? What is ideology? And what effects does it have on the physical, social, and psychological spaces of cities? How does the relationship between socialist and neoliberal ideology and the public spaces of the city create a space? Research objective: This study attempts to shed light on the concept of ideology and show its relationship with urban public spaces from a geographical perspective to achieve urban spaces on a human scale. Research method: This study employed a textual analysis. To find the answer, we first tried to explain the characteristics of a good city, the role of face-to-face presence in human interactions, the formation of social affairs as well as the concept of public rights and collective interests. Then we explored the use of different socialist and neoliberal ideologies as a case study. Conclusion: The results show that limiting and expanding the concept of public space in cities based on various ideologies changes its spatial, social, and psychological form and create an active, vibrant, and democratic civil society in which the concept of the right to the city can find its true form, creating the possibility and opportunity for purposeful social interaction and exchange, is one of the requirements for the creation of this matter and also the factor of the success of cities in the past and will be in the future.
In the last 60 years architects, geographers, planners, sociologists and urban designers interested in public space have been very busy compiling detailed overviews of the ways these places change. From accounts on the transformation of publicness and public life (Arendt, 1958; Sennett, 1990), public opinion and the public sphere (Habermas, 1989), to observations on dystopic landscapes and the privatisation of public space (Whyte, 1980; Sorkin, 1992; Christopherson, 1994; Low & Smith, 2006; Minton, 2012). This major body of literature exists alongside less mainstream (although very relevant) accounts on insurgent, interstitial, yet persistent forms of appropriation or re-creation of collective spaces (Watson, 2006; Franck & Stevens, 2007; Hou, 2010). While we acknowledge the importance of these analyses, the complexity and richness of which cannot be addressed here in full, we contend that new (relational) approaches in urban studies have allowed the emergence of new ways of seeing change and paths for acting change, which can be important tools for overcoming the limits of a dualistic approach.