Essay on public building and Space
This essay seeks to discuss some ideas about public space, due to the importance that it undoubtedly has to produce a city, generate social integration and build respect for the other elements of a city. Additionally, public space has acquired a significant weight in the debates on the city and in the urban policy agenda; which is not accidental: it has become one of the topics of greatest social confrontation with respect to the future of cities.Today the urban crisis has determined a positioning of management models and urban intervention policies that is expressed, finally, in two different perspectives: one that seeks to overcome the crisis from a perspective that tends to deepen the private commercial method , in which public space is seen as a break, as something marginal; and another that seeks to temper the crisis under an approach that tends to give greater meaning to the public and, especially, to public space in urban organization. This confrontation acquires increasing importance, given the privatizing attack that causes cities to be governed more by the weight of the market than by the effect of public policies. But also, because public space, due to the processes of privatization, fragmentation and segmentation that exists in cities, ends up being a sphere of expression and action for the popular urban world.
This essay seeks to systematize this debate and expose three types of ideas that define the logic of exposition of the essay: the first, referring to certain components of a conceptual nature that tend to clarify the content and define the concept of public space; the second one, that tries to find the reciprocal links between public space and the urbanization at the present time, because public space is constituted historically and has different functions according to the city and the historical moment; and the third, aimed at pointing out some guidelines and strategies that would be interesting to consider for social inclusion in terms of public space.
What is public space?
The content attributed to the concept of public space is usually very general, to the extent that it loses specificity, or very restrictive given its marked spatial character, a tributary of the conceptions of modern urbanism. It is a diffuse, undefined and unclear concept, which may include the plaza, the park, the street, the shopping center, the cafe and the bar, as well as the public opinion or the city, in general; and that, on the other hand, it can refer to the "public sphere", where the community faces the State, constituting it as a space of freedom. In this sense, the public space is not exhausted nor is it associated solely with the physical-spatial (plaza or park), be it a unit (a park) or a system of spaces. It is, rather, a container of social conflict, which contains different meanings depending on the situation and the city in question.Dominant concepts
The dominant concepts regarding public space are as a tributary to the currents of modern urbanism since its components make exclusive reference to a physical place (space) that has a management or property (public) modality. This concept is highly restrictive, where there are three dominant concepts of public space.There is, first of all, a concept coming from the theories of operational urbanism and real estate speculation, which understand it as what remains, as the residual, as the marginal after building housing, commerce or administration, when, on the contrary, it can be affirmed that from public space the city is organized. In other words, the urban structure is composed of different land uses where public space has the function of linking (road) to the others (commerce, administration), of creating places for recreation of the population (squares and parks), to develop areas of product exchange (shopping centers, fairs), to acquire information (centrality) or to produce symbolic landmarks (monuments).
A second concept, predominantly legal and quite widespread, is one that comes from the concept of ownership and appropriation of space. It distinguishes between empty space and constructed space, individual space and collective space, which leads to the formation of private space in opposition to public space. That is, it is a legal concept in which the public space is the one that is not private, belongs to everyone and is assumed by the State, as representative and guarantor of the general interest, as well as its owner and administrator.
A third, more philosophical concept, points out that public spaces are a set of nodes - isolated or connected - where individuality gradually vanishes and, therefore, freedom is restricted. In other words, it expresses the transition from the private to the public, a path where the individual loses his freedom, because he constructs a collective instance in which he denies and alienates himself.
From this third position arise questions such as: why in everyday life do you think that you leave the private to enter the public, and not the other way around? Or, failing that, are the facades of buildings the limit of the private or the threshold of public space? Does the facade belong to the public space or the private building? Is the facade of the private space or the public painted? Is it inside or outside of which of the two spaces?
Alternative concept
The public space is not the residual, nor is it a form of appropriation and less a place where it is alienated from freedom. It is about overcoming these concepts, to begin to understand it from an interrelated double consideration: on the one hand, its urban condition and, therefore, its relationship with the city; and, on the other hand, its historical quality, because it changes with time and in each moment, it has a different logic, as does its functional articulation with the city. Originally the public space could fulfill, for example, a mercantile function (the big Indian markets called tianguis), later assume a political role (agora) and then predominantly aesthetic (monument). This changing condition allows it to have multiple and simultaneous functions that, as a whole, add to the past and go beyond here and now.The foregoing also implies a relationship between the city and public space that is historically specified and transformed. For example, if at a given moment the public space was the axis of the organization of the city, today it is more a residual space. From that city organized from the public space to which today exists there is a real abyss. For that reason, it is possible to be affirmed, without fear of mistake, that the organizing place of the city is an urban product under threat of extinction. Within the new trends of urbanization in Latin America, the plaza has lost functionality, and, with it, the people are living its forced disappearance. Today the city is organized from the private, and certain community spaces - like the squares- end up being both a waste for the economic logic of the maximization of profit, and a necessary evil to comply with the norms of urbanism. Structuring space has become a structured space, residual or marginal or, even, to disappear by the loss of their roles or by replacing other more functional spaces with the current urbanism (the shopping center or the social club). There can also be a mutation in the sense that public space becomes a non-place: the Zocalo in Mexico today is an immense roundabout through which hundreds of thousands of vehicles pass through.
If the public space is defined in relation to the city, it is necessary to start with a definition of a city, for which we can resort to two of the classic definitions of modern urbanism. The first states that, a city can be defined as a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals. The second, that a city is a community of considerable magnitude and high density of population, which houses within it a great variety of specialized, non-agricultural workers, as well as a cultural, intellectual elite. These are concepts that reveal the heterogeneity of the city in several of its dimensions or, even more, that it is the social construction with the greatest diversity. Today these definitions have more meaning, validity and meaning thanks to the change that globalization has introduced into democracy: the step from respect for equality, to respect for difference.
This starting point is important because if the city is the space that concentrates the social heterogeneity of a large and dense population group, it requires spaces of contact, tangible (squares) or intangible (imaginary), that allow diverse reconstructive unity in diversity (the city) and define citizenship (democracy). Those places are just public spaces. In other words, public space is a fundamental component for the organization of collective life (integration, structure) and the representation (culture, politics) of society, which builds its reason for being in the city, and is one of the fundamental rights in the city: the right to public space as a right to inclusion.
If the city is the space of heterogeneity, it is feasible to find two concurrent positions, referring to the public space. For one of them, public space is the essence of the city or, according to some authors, it is the city itself, or, to put it another way, the city is the public space par excellence. And it is because it makes feasible the meeting of wills and diverse social expressions, because there the population can converge and live together and because it is the space of representation and exchange. The city is the space of heterogeneity and diversity; that is to say, that in the city the diverse ones are found - because the equals have no sense that they are -, which leads to the position that the whole of the city is a public space.
From a second perspective, the city is a set of meeting points or a system of significant places, both for the urban whole and for its parts. That is to say, that the city has to have meeting points and significant places operating in a system so that it can exist as such. In other words, public space does not exist if it is not in relation to the city operating as a system or because the whole of the city understands it as such.
In short, the city is a set of public spaces or the city as a whole is a public space from which collective life is organized and where there is a representation of that society. From there arises the need to understand it as one of the fundamental rights of citizenship: the right to public space, because it allows reconstructing the right to association, identity and the polis. This right to public space is part of the respect for the existence of the other's right to the same space, because not only do we need a space to find ourselves, but a space where we build tolerance, which is nothing other than a pedagogy of otherness. That is, the possibility of learning to live with others in a peaceful and tolerant way.
For the public space to operate as a space for the pedagogy of alterity, the multiple voices, manifestations and expressions of the city must coincide - because it is only possible to find the heterogeneity of the city in the public space - and to do so harmoniously within a framework of tolerance and respect. But, in addition, it requires an institutionality and policies (urban, social) to process the differences and build integration in that context. Therefore, the best city is one that optimizes and multiplies the contact possibilities of the population, that is, one that has good public spaces.