The Ramblas in Barcelona, the Cannebière in Marseille and Lake Shore Drive in Chicago are locations that have practically become clichéd references for generations of designers, architects and urban planners. They are presented as the highest ideal for new public spaces. They are examples of spaces that have a strong public significance; places with which people identify and make the city what it is, an integral part of urban identity. However, at the same time it remains unclear what exactly defines the strengths of these examples.
What are the characteristics of good public space? Since the late 1980s, public space has been a subject of intense interest. It is the key to urban renewal strategies all over the world. The approach to parks and squares in Barcelona and Paris forms the inspiration for designers and administrators, the development of waterfronts in the cities on the east coast of North America has been imitated everywhere, and since the 1990s the New Urbanism has rapidly won support.
Public space is unequivocally important for new urban planning strategies. We also tend to think that public space fulfils an important role in increasing social cohesion in society. But the explanation of the exact significance of public space remains an implicit one. What are the factors that actually constitute this elusive quality?
One of the reasons for the lack of a vision as regards the quality of public space lies in the fact that important players such as administrators, designers and developers to a large degree think along the same lines, at least at the moment, when it comes to the design of that urban public space. There are a number of clearly defined design discourses that determine the reorganisation of urban spaces everywhere. The similarities between the retro-romantic reconstruction projects in Berlin, The Hague and Birmingham are just as eye-catching as those found among late-modern projects in Barcelona, Rotterdam and Paris. Common themes include an interest in reducing untidiness, an emphasis on the aesthetic, and a predilection for design.
We gain a different perspective when we focus our gaze on the state of public space in general, rather than taking trendsetting designs as the starting point. The celebrated and often photographed new aesthetics of the public spaces of Barcelona, Birmingham, Rotterdam or Berlin are only occasionally mentioned in the same breath as the problems encountered in other public spaces in those same cities. At the same time, there is still an approach to public space that focuses on themes such as lack of safety and mindless violence. This also generates new ideas for the organisation or reorganisation of public space, but here designers are conspicuously absent.
Public domain as urban space
To gain a perspective on the developments in urban spaces, we differentiate between public space and public domain. We define public domain as those places where an exchange between different social groups is possible and also actually occurs. In choosing public domain as a context, we are positioning ourselves in a lively and complex debate. After all, the term public domain is not only used to refer to physical places in the city, but also has a broader political and philosophical meaning. Philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas have often written about the public sphere in society, and others also employ the term public domain in a broader context.
The approach to public domain outlined here comes at a moment when public space is once again the object of a large-scale design task. Over the coming five years, stations for high-speed passenger trains (HSTs) throughout Europe will be designed as new urban interchanges. Each of these can become a new public domain. But what notion of public space actually stands as the foundation for the design of these stations and their environs?
What is the cultural programme of requirements that forms the basis for this design task? Mostly we see how these spaces are developed as zero-friction environments designed to facilitate the processing of crowds. In addition, will inner cities have to safeguard their economic and socio-cultural future in the coming years? But how successful will the various strategies that are currently being drafted prove to be: the city as mall, the city as theme park, the city as historic residential enclave? And what are the consequences for urban society and the public domain?
A third challenge is the concern about public violence. There is a growing sense of insecurity and governments are under a great deal of pressure to take tough measures. What kinds of spaces will be created by these new measures? What new divisions will they erect in the urban space and urban society? And what alternative strategies can be envisaged?
It is only possible to answer such questions if they are placed in the context of the new social and spatial patterns of the late-modern urban society. Given the enormous demand for single-family dwellings and mobility that is increasing at a rate faster than the growth in economic prosperity, is it reasonable to assume that the city will become increasingly disparate, in spatial and social terms, over the coming years. The rapid developments in the fields of information technology and telecommunications are an important factor, which mean that people are no longer tied to specific workplaces and that contacts in leisure time are organised in a completely different way.
Due to people being reachable all the time by mobile telephone, the notion of meeting place has taken on a fundamentally different meaning. This expanded and mobile city implies a new agenda for the design of public space, not only in the urban centres or in the new residential districts, but especially in the ambiguous in-between areas. What meaning do these places have for urban society, and how can that meaning best be reinforced? For example, though not necessarily public, can the new collective spaces such as amusement parks, factory outlets and chain stores develop into new public domains?
If we take the time to consider these design tasks, we realise that the way in which we have thought about public space and landscape design thus far has its shortcomings. We actually have no standard by which to ascertain the quality of public space. Moreover, a great deal of potential public domain is simply ignored. Politicians and other policy-makers seem as yet unconvinced that these will be the most important strategic questions for the coming years.
On the lookout
In order to answer our pivotal question about the role of design and strategy in the development of public domain, we must first seek what now constitutes publicness. Do large public spaces in the city actually function as public domain? Which other, unexpected, places possibly manifest themselves as a public domain?
The search for the public domain is not only a question of the identification of places that might function as public domain. This cultural geography also needs explanation. In which force fields does the public space take shape? And how is this force field reflected in the existing design strategy? Using the concept of the new cultural geography formulated here, as well as new insights into the way in which public space is produced, in our new book Arnold Reijndorp and I consider in more detail the implicit cultural policy that is adopted in the design of public space.
Is there reason to talk of a deterioration of public space or not? Is the sacrifice of authenticity the problem, or is this merely based on a superficial reading of the new publicness? What is clear is that the new urban landscapes that are being developed, not just in the Netherlands, but in many urban centres throughout the world, will be found to function most intensely around airports and train stations, retailing centres, theme parks and other focal points for the consumption of pleasure. Traditional urban design, along with much urban theory, has not yet developed the tools to ensure that these new landscapes will still make a contribution to civic society, as well as to market society. That is one of the main issues we explore in our book.
