Transformation of Urban Public Space

by Biljana Spirkoska

Most current debates concerning the Public Space, are dealing with the different transformations that the public spaces are undergoing in/under the new urban conditions, among which the Virtualization and Privatization of the public space are most discussed.

Ideally and traditionally conceived, the public spaces were seen as "a part of the urban territory that is supposed to be accessible to everyone". They were representing the political authorities, and at the same time they represented "a place of sociability and interaction".

In the contemporary city the public spaces are undergoing fundamental change. It is argued that, in its most immediate material sense, the public spaces are facing the same fragmentation and separation as the overall post-urban space. The debate continues that the public domain even "no longer resides in parts of the city, but it has been displaced to the realm of the mass media and has sprawled through the global networks of communication technologies". The traditional material urban spaces of streets, squares, shops, cafés, and clubs are no longer the primary places of public debate, but as Marc Augé remarks have "often became no more than a transitional space which is being used in traditional sense only by outcasts".

Not only that the public space has in a way been dematerialized by the various media and communication technologies, it has also been physically and materially threatened by economic and social privatization processes. In the recent debates a new category of space standing in-between the public and private space has been introduced. "Collective space", as Manuel de Solà-Morales explains, „refers to those meeting-places in the city which, though privately owned and hence in some respect exclusionary, continue to form the scenes for various public activities: places like the shopping mall, the sports stadium, the theme park, or the grand café". Those spaces are neither public, nor private, but "public spaces that are used by private activities or private spaces allowing a collective usage". The introduction of the new term, according to Solà-Morales, is a result of the processes of privatization, collectivization and separation of public spaces by diverse groups in a multicultural society. The urban public spaces of today, he argues, are subdivided into sections, taken over by particular group, whether we are talking about street gangs using spray paint or homeowners associations using neighborhood signs, and avoided by other groups.

Among the most obvious examples of appropriation of public space are those of the park, the atrium and the shopping mall.
Historically speaking, the parks have for a long time been an exclusive domain of the urban upper classes. They became open to the general public at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, however, the urban parks are again more and more exclusionary. As a result of the growing presence of unwanted visitors (drug addicts or homeless people), in an answer of the middle classes demand for safety actions, different measures are undertaken, ranging from: not providing public toilets, seen as magnets for transients, to fencing, the gates of which are closed after dark.

The desire for shielded, constantly monitored public environments goes even step further in the skyscraper’s atriums. The atriums are not only revamped to keep unwanted visitors out, but they also simulate urban totality. By attracting selective parts of population, "skyscrapers tend to become cities-within-cities", but as more exclusionary they become, the more they weaken the essence of the traditional downtown: „its messy condition, its complexity, its irregularities, its densities, its ethnicities".

The last example can be found in the shopping malls, the suburban phenomenon, which found its way into city centers. Not only that the malls became urban, but by including facilities like hotels, fitness clubs, banks and medical centers, entertainment industries, they become in a way new type of downtown. But, what differs them from the traditional metropolitan downtown, beside being privately owned and privately run, is that by being exclusively design to respond to the demands of the middle-class, they "reject many of the activities of a true center- controversy, soap boxing, passing and leaflets, impromptu entertaining, eccentric behavior- harmless or not".

The three given examples represent only a part of the adapted forms of urban public spaces. The fragmentation and appropriation of the contemporary metropolis continues in various forms and directions. The New phenomenon of BID’s (Business Improvement Districts) is another example of the further administrative and managerial fragmentation characterizing the contemporary metropolis.

What all those examples have in common is that they are all working on the principle of inclusion and exclusion on different segments of the urban population. Because of the exclusionary politics, they face a subsequent loss of possibilities for interaction, which make them "lack the socioeconomic reaches and diversity of the traditional metropolis".

Reference:
Ghent Urban Studies Team, 1999. The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam.