Abstract
The debate about public space is amply covered by a broad spectrum of disciplines: sociology, anthropology, architecture and planning and political sciences. Within this scenario, certain invariable focal points can be pinpointed that are common to a great deal of academic works and of journalistic and public debate also. The two recurrent theses on public space to which we refer are as follows:
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Notes
1. This article is the result of joint research activity undertaken by the two authors. The final written version of Sects. 3.1 and 3.3 can be attributed to Stefano Moroni and that of Sects. 3.2 and 3.4 to Francesco Chiodelli.
2. “Because by definition a public space is a place accessible to anyone, where anyone can participate and witness, in entering the public space one always risks encounter with those who are different, those who identify with different groups and have different opinions or different forms of life. … Politics, the critical activity of raising issues and deciding how institutional and social relations should be organized, crucially depends on the existence of spaces and forums to which everyone has access” (Young 1990, p. 241). “Publicly accessible spaces are important features of any vibrant and sustainable urban environment. The best spaces present opportunities for discussion, deliberation and unprogrammed, spontaneous encounters with those maintaining diverse viewpoint on the world” (Németh 2009, p. 2463).
3.To quote Low and Smith (2006, p. 3), public space “is not a homogeneous arena: the dimensions and the extent of its publicness are highly differentiated from instance to instance”. In the same way, a private property space is not necessarily used by few persons – and in any case private ownership is never absolute, for it always includes duties and obligations (Needham 2006).
4.On this point, see Howell (1993, p. 311) and Mitchell (1995, p. 16).
5.As Sisk (2007, p. 1198) observes: “While the town square evolved in an era in which the primary means of communication was oral and most interaction was face-to-face, the opportunities for expression of ideas have expanded in number – and changed in nature – tremendously in the past several decades. The development of inexpensive access to a broad audience through internet technology promises to further revolutionize and democratize wide-ranging public debate in the future”.
6.As Amin (2008, p. 6) argues: “Today … the sites of civic and political formation are plural and distributed. … Urban public space has become one component, arguably of secondary importance, in a variegated field of civic and political formation”. See also Amin (2008, p. 5): “In the age of urban sprawl, multiple usage of public space and proliferation of the sites of political and cultural expression, it seems odd to expect public spaces to fulfil their traditional role as spaces of civic inculcation and political participation. We are far removed from the times when a city’s central public spaces were a prime cultural and political site”.
7.According to Light (1999), the origin of the public sphere in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be linked to private property space (e.g. coffee houses and salons). “It is possible to make the case that the public sphere has always been… part of an ongoing and ramifying development of congeries of semi-private social spaces” (Crang 2000, p. 309).
8.As Miles (2000, p. 255) notes: “In Attica in the time of Perikles, only twenty to thirty thousand people were citizens, all men, of a population of perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand; … citizens alone participated in a democracy from which women, slaves and strangers were excluded”. See also Basson (2006).
9.In other words: “At the end of the twentieth century, there was a … shift in the United States from individual private ownership of residential property to new collective forms” (Nelson 2005, p. 351). See also Glasze et al. (2006, p. 2): “The value of ‘public space’ and its endangerment through ‘privatisation’ is a frequently cited topos within the critique of contemporary urbanism. … [But] many master-planned private settlements simply involve the subdivision of a piece of land formerly under single private ownership into many titles under shared ownership. … A piece of land under single private ownership may become co-owned by many residents”.
10. Another point is worth clarifying. The fact that many collective activities take place in private spaces does not render them the opposite of “publicness”. As Tyndall (2010, p. 134) writes, “too often urban research has framed publicity as a zero-sum game which, given the privatization occurring in our cities, is necessarily equated with a decline in publicness itself. … Publicness is a social practice that is applied across a variety of spaces … [and] is both constituted by, but also constitutive of space”.
11.On this point, see for instance Mitchell (2003) and Laurenson and Collins (2007).
12.This does not mean that to allow a homeless individual to sleep on a bench is a desirable solution. This means simply that, in the absence of some form of public aid, to impede a homeless person from sleeping in a public space is to prevent him from sleeping at all. On this point, see also Mitchell (1997). As he observes, the “annihilation of (public) space” through a lot of restrictions as regards its use is a form of “annihilation of people”. In Mitchell’s opinion, anti-homeless legislation is not about crime prevention (as sometimes held) but about “crime invention”.
13.For instance, in the USA, “freedom of travel can be invoked either as an implicit constitutional right or as a fundamental interest that triggers strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause” (Ellickson 1996, p. 1239).
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Moroni, S., Chiodelli, F. (2013). 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. Urban and Landscape Perspectives, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5246-7_3
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