Re-Activating Public Spaces

Europe has existed as a cultural, political and economic identity for centuries; it is no mystery in this regard. However, the nature and consistency of this identity has been greatly contested over time. Since the mid-twentieth century, for example, one of the major challenges facing the powers sponsoring the Council of Europe has been the need to relate the identity of the continent to forms of integration that could produce tolerance and respect, thus promoting coexistence and mutual interaction among people of different nationalities. The problem, however, has been that from a certain point of view, the construction of an open and inclusive European identity cannot simply be based on neofunctionalist approaches that explain Europeanisation only in reference to national governments operating within an international functional order. On the contrary, to fully develop, it also needs a social constructivist perspective that highlights the multiple ways in which reality is continuously created by social actors and public discourse, in processes that cannot be reduced to either agency or structures (Delanty and Rumford 2005, 2).
In this regard, an essential role is played by creating open and inclusive public spaces that support the development of these processes (Delanty and Rumford 2005, 68). Public spaces are in fact recognised as arenas in which key cultural interactions and societal dynamics take place, where values, belief systems, memories, languages, daily practices, and social lives operate and evolve.

[...]
It is therefore not surprising that over the last decade, the physical definition of an open and inclusive public space has been considered an essential precondition for developing more sustainable and resilient urban societies.
Since 2015, in fact, more than eighty percent of European citizens have been living in or around urban areas, and the awareness that inadequate planning and design can have a deep negative impact on promoting forms of integration, coexistence, and mutual interaction is commonly acknowledged within the Community. For this reason, the identification of tools and methods for more open and inclusive urban design plays a very central role in the European agenda on research and innovation regarding social sustainability and resilience (European Council 2013).

[...]
Although their lack of formal identity frequently reflects a lack of public interest or collective engagement – for which they have been interpreted as a failure of urban development or even the prototype of “anti-public space” (Chevrier 2011) – they can also be seen as non-prescriptive spaces liable to the continuous redefinition of social roles and values. They are therefore not only places of social exclusion, but may also represent possible incubators for testing new practices of public citizenship beyond a merely commercial perspective (Hudson and Shaw 2009). These are practices, in other words, that demand new forms of inclusivity from spaces which in the past mainly reflected a sort of collective representation, but in the last few years have seen the emergence of different, stratified “publics” (Fraser 1990), constantly fuelled by new mobility patterns and migration flows (Basso Peressut, Forino and Leveratto 2016, 9).

[...] from a spatial design standpoint, the need for specific tools partially clashes with the substantial inconsistency affecting this field of research. In fact, while current socioeconomic trends have been pushing the concept of inclusivity towards the centre of the debate on urban resilience, the architectural culture is still struggling to define a speculative approach to inclusivity which could produce a differentiated set of operational indications. To date, the focus on this topic, with very few exceptions, has been oriented in a single direction with almost exclusive thematisation about physical or cognitive accessibility (Burton and Mitchell 2006). This overlooks the fact that inclusivity, first of all, is a constructive factor based on building a sense of belonging that makes people feel a part of a certain space (Basso Peressut, Forino, and Leveratto 2016).
In this regard, the most interesting advances have probably been made by the uncoordinated efforts of a significant part of design-related disciplines.

[...]
These “tactical” modes of intervention arose as a counterpart to a classical, strategic notion of planning in the form of everyday bottom-up approaches to local problems, making use of short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions and policies (Lydon and Garcia 2015). Whether or not they are sanctioned by urban authorities, spontaneously arising from the streets, or emerging from given creative practices and professional specialisations, they always represent creative re-appropriation of the contemporary city’s public dimension in the form of diffuse, uncoordinated domestication.

Jacopo Leveratto

Extract from the essay "Re-Activating Public Spaces: A Very Provisional Manifesto." Full text available in the book "The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices for Public Space Re-Activation," forthcoming.