Public Space
The Public Space Network is an interdisciplinary forum established to enhance our understanding of the design, production and experience of public space across the world. It is a place to share research, ideas, stimulate discussion, and provide a support system for those working or interested in understanding the ways that public space plays a role in, and affects, the lives of people.
Public space is a dynamic arena for environment-behavior interactions and thus a thriving place for environmental design research. The research and teaching work of many EDRA members already focuses on or intersects with public space.
Objectives
The Network has four interlocking objectives that are aligned with the goals of EDRA:
- To formalize Public Space as a field of research and practice, and to promote the study of public space from a critical and social justice point of view.
- To enable researchers in the field to work together to produce books, special journal issues, workshops, conferences and EDRA panels to highlight and disseminate public space research.
- To create a platform where researchers and practitioners of public space can work together for more effective translation of research into planning and design practice.
- To develop a more robust international communication and circulation of theories and research methodologies in order to overcome cross-cultural and language barriers.
Relevance to EDRA
The contemporality of public space —as the locus of stimulation, exchange, empowerment and emancipation— has erased any doubts of the resurgence and relevance of public space in contemporary life. On the one hand, the public realm in the contemporary city can be characterized by oppression, such as the assault on civil liberties, rise of racial inequalities, the rise of the panoptic state, the reduction of public investment and severe constrictions on public life in societies across the globe. At the same time, citizens worldwide are taking to the streets to occupy and appropriate public spaces in order to question the fundamental social and cultural structure of society; communities are organizing with an ethos of diversity and inclusiveness using bottom-up actions in public space to reclaim and revitalize, to challenge symbols of contested pasts, and to build and strengthen their rights and identities. The persistent contractions and expansions of public space have generated an exponential increase in the awareness and research on public space.
Building on the primary areas of inquiry in the late twentieth century — the concern over the neoliberal takeover of public space and the humanizing of public space through design — current research on public space has thus burgeoned into several domains reflecting the increasing meaningfulness of public space in people’s everyday lived experiences, mundane and profound. Much research on public space mirrors the increasing heterogeneous and urbanizing twenty-first century by exploring appropriate ways to theorize public space based on varying spatiotemporal realities — where the making and occupation of public space differs vastly based on neoliberal, authoritarian, digital, democratic, communitarian and other (often) non-Western ontologies.
A growing number of contemporary public spaces are being produced by much more dynamic processes that go beyond the primarily institutionalized paradigms. As a response, research has expanded to explore how the various publics take part in the production of public space including new processes and emerging typologies of the impermanent where citizens employ tactical, responsive and nimble ways to produce temporary projects that reshape the public realm. With the recognition that the boundaries of public space are blurred there is a better understanding of the public-private continuum; the research focus has shifted from public space as a strictly bounded spatial and material form to also include processes and outcomes of production of public space and how they enhance the overall quality of public life. On the global scale, the New Urban Agenda adopted at the UN Habitat III conference in Quito (2016) and the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development have defined public space as key a priority for the future of equitable and inclusive cities.