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December 7, 2005 - Notes On Public Space

Despite my lack of blogging in the last few months, I've been quite busy thinking about different issues. One of my term papers was on Modernism And The Urban Landscape. In particular, I decided to focus on the construction of public space in modern cities. Obviously, there are several problems surrounding public space which need to be explored.

Firstly, it's worth noting that public space has been greatly diminished in the last century or so. North American cities in particular were never noted as great centres of public spaces, for a variety of reasons, the main one being a particularly rigid overemphasis on the supremacy of private space and life over public space and interaction.

Secondly, the reconfiguration of the urban fabric itself has hampered the development of public life. The shift in emphasis from the 19th Century street as a social space to that of a functional traffic funnel has removed a significant arena for experiencing the surprise, diversity and chaos of cities. The further reconfiguration of our physical geography from traditional neighbourhoods to suburban subdivisions that lack any geographic denotation of place or any significant public space has consigned a significant chunk of the population to minimal social interaction on an informal basis.

Thirdly, the increasing commercialization of the public realm in cities has quite negative ramifications. No longer is the focus of these spaces the furthering of the public discourse or encouraging social life and innovation, it is about hawking the latest "it" product. One only need visit Times Square in New York City or Dundas Square in Toronto to see obvious examples of this. However, it is also much more subtle in many cases: the proliferation of ads throughout many cities gives people almost no relief from the relentless probing of consumerism.

Fourthly, in Nordic cities in particular (I refer specifically to the North American variety, as I have little knowledge of the European ones), the lack of response to sharply differentiated seasons has created challenges for creating viable public spaces that have not been addressed. One need only flip through the pages of almost any development proposal to see bucolic pictures of people gaily strolling down streets lined with deciduous trees on a sunny day. However, they do not address that those trees will be bare for nearly half the year, or that the squares they may line are not very pleasant places in the winter. So far, the most popular response to this has been the shopping mall, but that only brings us back to the conundrum of relentless consumerism: the mall is a private space constructed for the creation of wealth, not public discourse or interaction.

These of course are only preliminary identifications. The problem of public space is tied up with several broader social processes such as atomization, the decentralization of cities, the changing nature of work, as well as changes in the working life of modern societies. How all these issues are to be resolved requires a nuanced response that requires an understanding of locality and space. There can be no "one size fits all" response to these problems, as they will vary from place to place, and can only be resolved by building around the identities of regions, not large scale political units.