Rethinking urban public space

Abstract

This paper aims to connect to recent debates in City (2011) regarding what assemblage thinking can offer to critical urban praxis. It proposes assemblage as a tool to take Sennett's (1970. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. Yale edition with a new preface by the author, 2008. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) ‘uses of disorder’ in city life from theory to practice. The main reason for this is the consideration that Sennett's early thoughts about providing non-regulated spaces for interaction have not been implemented in urban practice to their full potential. Planners and architects have not been able to counter the overdetermination of functions and the social segregation resulting from modern urban developments. Assemblage can offer tools for urban practitioners to combine definition and indeterminacy when intervening in the public realm. In order to do so, the paper looks at similarities between recent contributions on assemblage thinking and Sennett's notion of disorder: the influence of sociomaterial associations on how people perceive strangers, the interest in indeterminacy and public space as an open process. Based on these findings, the paper proposes two sets of concepts as approaches for intervening in public space: ‘assemblage’ and ‘disassembly’. The first group of concepts proposes three tools to design associations introducing certain planned urban elements that give rise to an unplanned use of public space: ‘reassembling’, ‘convergence of diversity’ and ‘complex connections’. The second set of concepts offers two tools that propose to leave unbound points in public space: ‘open systems’ and ‘failure and disconnections’. These concepts address different uses of disorder proposed by Sennett and serve as guidelines to propose interventions in public space.

Key words:

• assemblage
• Sennett
• disorder
• public space
• critical urbanism
• urban design

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and City’s editorial team for their comments, which have helped to improve the paper. I would also like to thank Ash Amin, Carlos García Vázquez and Antonio Tejedor Cabrera for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Instituto Universitario de Arquitectura y Ciencias de la Construcción (IUACC), Universidad de Sevilla (Spain).

Notes

1 Both sites have been visited on different occasions. Gillett Square was first visited in November 2011 during the event ‘Inspiring Cities’, where the participants of the event had a lecture and a Q&A session with Adam Hart of Hackney Co-operative Developments, a key actor in the development and management of the square. It was also visited in August 2012 and more systematically between April and August 2013, carrying out participant observation in the square. Stockwell Skatepark was first visited in November 2008 and was visited systematically between May and June 2013. Observations have been made on the use of the skatepark.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pablo Sendra

Pablo Sendra is Lecturer in Planning and Urban Design at The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. The majority of this research was conducted at the Instituto Universitario de Arquitectura y Ciencias de la Construcción (IUACC), Universidad de Sevilla. Email: [email protected]