In the past, a surveyor would have staked out a rough circle or rectangle to define a public urban place. Today, the designer of the product “public space” is confronted with such a daunting catalogue of requirements that he can scarcely fail to founder on them. The professional world is more or less unanimous in its diagnosis that the public realm in its traditional form is a thing of the past and that it is necessary, therefore, to draw up new criteria for urbanity and public space. But what criteria should they be? Obviously they should translate the ideal conceptual substance of public space to another sphere; for as soon as the concept acquires a different connotation from those we traditionally associate with it, the familiar images vanish – the citizen debating in the marketplace, or the flâneur, sauntering along the boulevard, engaged in conversation and observing life around him.
The political realm has shifted its ground to the mass media, to television and chat shows; and the bourgeoisie has disappeared as a distinct class. Today, we are all political equals; and the flâneur has long been transformed into a dull consumer who now regards the city merely as his shopping domain.
What functions do we expect of public space, then? Great uncertainty still exists as to whether the electronic, digitalized, globalized society will not simply be scattered to the four winds; or whether it wishes to retain its tried and trusted model or urbanity, with central locations, short routes, dense structures, attractive streets and squares, spontaneous encounters and direct exchanges.
Urban design today, on the threshold to a new millennium, is indeed an encyclopedia of doubt; and this is compounded by a political lack of vision, by planning impotence and by the chutzpah with which, in spite of everything, a programme with a theoretical basis is forged from all these handicaps. The motto is: if we can’t get rid of these defects and shortcomings, let’s design them!
Aware that the concepts of the 1960s and 70s have miscarried, a younger generation of architects, especially those in the Netherlands with their great role model Rem Koolhaas, are seeking “to redefine the interface between urban planning and architecture” (Kees Christiaanse), at the same time reviving the urban concepts of classical modernism and even of the 50s in part. Urban planners are also beginning to think in the categories of sociologists and statisticians again. Landscape architects are attempting to strengthen the role of the environment in their planning by introducing aspects such as climatology and the principle of sustainability. One might say that their idea of urbanity is essentially based on the French 19th-century novel, where Parisians met in the Tuileries Gardens or the Jardin du Luxembourg to celebrate the public realm.
The aestheticization of public space in the city is the central theme of urban planning today. Designed as a stage for public life, this realm is meant to reproduce those qualities that are regarded as lost. It would seem as if the inhospitable nature of our cities, as formulated by Alexander Mitscherlich in the early 1960s, had now been turned into a state of virtuality. Communication takes place on the Internet or by phone. Interaction, self-depiction and social role-playing are staged in places that an increasingly nomadic society cultivates as “the scene”: short-lived public venues.
What this implies is the designed or designable identity of places – in response to the changing moods of modern society and its increasing tendency to dissolve into discrete and ever smaller part-societies. In other words, one is concerned with continuity, where constant change is required; with spatial, urban qualities that anyone can “adopt” for himself, but that should together form a unified whole; and with small planning and design measures in an urban context, since the planners are no longer capable of the grand gesture – or no longer have the power to attempt it. Metaphorically, one might refer to these strategies as urban acupuncture or plastic microsurgery. Pretension and reality enter into a new relationship with each other. The forecourt of a kiosk, which now serves not just beer, but espresso and prosecco, is redesigned and suddenly becomes a miniature Piazza Navona.
Planners feel an enormous urge to turn urban spaces into new world stages. This phenomenon is fuelled by the “Barcelona myth”, for which the Catalan architect Oriol Bohigas is responsible. In the first half of the 1980s, prior to the Olympic Games, he invited international architects and artists to help revamp the neglected districts of the harbour city. Critics and experts throughout the world were full of praise for the outcome, and the Barcelona myth continues to cast its spell today.
It has been effectively supplemented by a second hypothesis, which claims that public space has an important socio-psychological function in the age of electronic networks. Ursula Paravicini of the University of Hanover writes: “Because of the increasing banalization and the growing global availability of the new technologies, everything that cannot be communicated by means of the computer and media [acquires] a much greater significance: direct, informal social contact, personal communication, and sensuous perception related to a specific place.
This appreciation of a sensuous urban quality, it is suggested, functions almost everywhere in any spatial or social circumstances – on the periphery of towns and in city centres. For the latter, inventive planners have even come up with the idea of a public realm that has a vertical rather than a horizontal dimension – in the form of the high-rise block. Coupled with this is the notion that public space can function only when it is linked up in a network with other locations; and when it forms a “station” in a whole network of routes.
Whether a particular space becomes a public place no longer depends on its established architectural and urban design qualities. It depends on the “vibes” it radiates. These stimuli, which can turn a “scene” or social environment into a public venue, are not reliable, permanent impulses, however. They are here today and gone tomorrow, and the consequences of this have to be considered by the designer of public space. These stages for real life have to be planned in a flexible manner, so that they can react to changing designs for life and different target groups.
One has therewith come full circle. The inviting place with an identity of its own is something that has long been familiar in urban planning: the pleasant urban space that radiates a certain aura even when it is not filled with people. This stands in stark contrast to the freestyle aesthetic that is the leading ideology today.
Rem Koolhaas’s decentralized “Generic City”, equally boring or exciting at every point, makes no attempt to organize centrality and public life. It is a city of discrete, disparate elements, of isolation and self-organization. If these ideas are taken to their logical extreme, public space in the future would have to be capable of being “interactive” in itself, of being redesigned every day, or completely neutral. That is not a particularly inspiring objective, and the instruments needed to realize it scarcely exist; e.g. lighting masts that can be activated by the insertion of a coin and the click of a switch (Schouburgplein, Rotterdam, by Adriaan Geuze); or TV entertainment screens covering entire walls of buildings (Shinjuku station forecourt, Tokyo).
But perhaps that would corroborate today what Goethe remarked about the squares he saw on his journey to Italy: “Squares of this kind are really made so that the people can make an impression on themselves, so that the people can have themselves on.
