How can public spaces be designed to help individuals become more active participants – socially, economically, intellectually, physically – in the life of their communities?

A key issue with public space is what people do in it. In that sense, urban designers should not only design these spaces as beautiful places, but also as scenarios of public activities. Programming becomes then a key issue. These spaces should be designed in order to allow social interactions and activities to emerge: markets, meeting points, playgrounds, sports, concerts… It is then when public spaces strengthen communities and become the driving force for social cohesion.

Monday, December 6 at 5:58pm

some thoughts:

Good Public Space is a diagram of civilized society. How we behave in public, how we interact with others and what happens in Public Space is about participation. And participation is the essence of the body politic, the Demos.

my list for successful Public Space would include:
Density: empty spaces are not participatory, so public spaces should be dense enough to encourage confrontation…the good kind of confrontation.
Continuity: buildings participate by providing continuity, either by style, by continuous street wall, by geometry, spatial focus or by materials. A Public Space needs some glue to hold it together. Otherwise it’s a World’s Fair.
Activity: if you’ve passed through it before you realize its gone, it’s not really a Public Space. Public Spaces need some magnetism or friction to slow people down and attract use. Good food always works.
Hierarchy: if cars are the most important things in a Public Space it’s a freeway. If trees are preeminent it’s a park. People and human interaction make real Public Spaces.
Scale: all spaces are not created equal. Like any personal accessory fit matters.
Authenticity: there is a reason that Las Vegas has no real public spaces
Information: Great public spaces often have information as an integral part of the offering.

Its a prosaic list, but great public spaces are often made of the most prosaic elements, but artfully assembled.

Monday, December 6 at 11:07pm

Of course I agree with James and Patricia, but there’s one thing I often think about when I think about public space that’s maybe a little outside the usual bounds of discussion on the topic.

I feel that public spaces, in cities at least, have to be just rare enough to make them exciting. I live in New York and there are so many “pseudo” public spaces–these little semi-private plazas–and so many of them are mediocre at best. They were created by well-intentioned people, obviously, and by well-intentioned policies; but having too many small, middling-quality public spaces takes away not only the resources to maintain and improve each individual space, but also takes away some of the special-ness of coming upon a truly high-quality public space in the city.

I want the excitement, the sense of discovery I get when I find a really great public space right in the middle of a built-up city. I think communities have to marshal their public spaces, so that each one feels like a real event–like breaking up the dense fabric of the city is a serious statement, not something you do lightly. I’m not saying we need fewer public spaces–au contraire–only that we need to recall that space in the city has to be considered a very valuable commodity, a commodity that’s in limited supply and that should be treated accordingly.

Wednesday, December 8 at 3:34pm

I feel the most important part is being overlooked: the public’s involvement in creating the space. There’s no greater way to be involved in something that o have had a hand in it’s creation. From that develops attachment, a sense of pride, belonging, ownership and more. All of these feelings are very integral as motivating factors in an individual’s choice to participate in their community.

Without these, there is simply a place to come and handle domestic activities like sleep and laundry, while other places beyond serve as the social, economic, intellectual and even physical havens.

From what little I know, the best way to develop the kind of active participation discussed in the question is to have active participation from square one as opposed to setting up a space and hoping that “they will come”.

Thursday, December 9 at 2:48pm

Patricia says that public spaces should be designed “to allow social interactions and activities to emerge: markets, meeting points, playgrounds, sports, concerts.” She could have said that public spaces should be designed FOR these activities, but instead she said they should be designed to ALLOW them. This phrasing suggests an important question: who are they being designed for and what do people want to do in those spaces? As of 2009, for the first time in history more people live in cities than not, so obviously there will be an ever increasing demand for public space and a correlative diversity of perspectives on the role of public space in civic life. Jim has succinctly detailed pretty much all the elements great public spaces share (which I would argue aren’t prosaic at all), but he ends by saying they need to be “artfully assembled.” I’m not sure. Maybe it’s asking too much from our designers to understand all the dynamics and programmatic elements that need to be present to serve and delight an enormous diversity of users. Instead, maybe we should be asking our designers to deploy a strategy of flexibility, in which design elements are conceived to empower users to create the spaces they need. Chukwuma suggests this can be done by integrating the public from the earliest stages of conceiving public spaces and I agree. But I think designers can also design for flexibility. I’ll give you an example. When the Design Trust held our ideas competition for Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, one scheme included stanchions embedded below grade in a new public plaza between the Arch and Bailey Fountain. The stanchions would secure a range of structural elements to provide cover for a farmer’s market, outdoor performances, sporting events, art fairs, etc. Our public spaces deserve more of this kind of ingenuity.

Yesterday I attended a panel discussion on the High Line at The Graduate Center at City University. Malcolm Gladwell was one of the panelists, and at one point he said – and I’m paraphrasing here – that the job of cities was to incite surprise as much as possible. This is what Susan is getting at too. Maybe part of that surprise is recognizing our own potential for imagining the future and contributing to the life of the city.

Thursday, December 9 at 5:40pm

Public spaces- as focii of human experience- are all venues within which one or more of several possible (and possibly interesecting) timelines or chronologies of events might occur. This is the essence and the special power of places frequented by people: human events happen there- whether planned or unplanned, large or small, routine or one-off, public spaces are the vessels and channels into which grand and mundane social histories are poured.

I was at a small TEDxLive lunch lecture by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels at the Washington DC Economic Partnership on Tuesday, and he said something that appealed to me- not about architecture, but about the existence of living things:

“You get some kind of fuel, and you invest that energy into action, which is called “life”.

As has been noted here, theoretical expertise in design and architecture can yield a certain level of public inaccessibility or uncommunication on the part of creators. Bjarke is one who has the uncanny ability to cut to the core of a challenge- not only architecturally, but philosophically as well. This statement of his denotes a certain brand of intention- life, as a thing to be invested in, and energy as currency, neither of these things should come as a surprise. But as a society, we deal in approximations and representations: money to represent energy and intention, corporate and governmental bodies to represent a collection comprised of many individual people. To bring it all back to public space, my thought is that without a basic understanding of and attention to individual human needs and values (often overlooked on behalf of the corporate entity), there’s already some level of failure inherent in any work of design. We struggle with public space because private interests represent smaller social cross-sections, and have more unified energy and intent. Being everything to everyone is hard, and I don’t think our public spaces need to try to do that, but I do think that all of our spaces, public and private, could be benefited by a greater attention to the existence of ‘the other’ a la Martin Buber’s “I and thou”, or Rawls’ Theory of Justice. At the same time, I like the language that I’m hearing from the architectural community of late, when it comes to creating spaces without worrying too much about what everyone will think- as long as the spaces promote a variety of kinds of interaction and social movement, and at least as importantly, as long as there are a variety of them. It’s important that different kinds of people can each get something close to what they want or need once in a while instead of always having to compromise and create neutral space. We need experiential pluralism- multiple experiences and individual worlds nestled together in the same space, or in nearby spaces, and spaces that, collectively, as organs in a larger urban system, are designed to give as many of these worlds as possible a fair and equal valuation without being a bland, boring attempt at synthesizing them all into one existentially empty space. Over time, I think that architects are seeking less of the lukewarm middle ground, and more opportunities for creative coexistence. I do think that the input of the individuals for whom the spaces are being designed is quite important of course, but I perhaps put even mores store in the philosophical, emotional, and moral aptitude of the various architects, planners, and builders responsible for administering and creating such spaces.

Friday, December 10 at 1:19pm