Inquiries into public space practices, meanings and values

Urban design shapes public space in the sense of ‘forming’ it. Planners typically presume this. However, that premise also appears to assert something else, namely, that urban design forms public space in the sense of ‘informing’ it, so that it also instructs; it educates and empowers. In our view, this argument merits a more thorough study and an investigation of how the relationship between urban design and public space is configured. In order to get at this relationship a further question arises, and that is the question of what actually constitutes public space. From an urban planning perspective, discourse on public space focuses mainly on an accessible, contained spatial situation, i.e., a public square in a city. In other disciplines, political theory for example, the meaning of public space is slightly different and more broadly defined (Light 1998; Low and Smith 2005; Hou and Knierbein 2017).

Public space is constituted twice. First, it arises from common performative and fleeting action, and contains the spirit of the public and the political. Second, it can be constituted permanently only through a spatiality that causes the political and the public to receive the chance to last longer than the moment (Arendt 1958; Benhabib 1996; Parkinson 2012). Two fundamentally opposing driving forces that act in public space can be identifed: one ephemeral and performative, the other, stabilizing and solidifying. Public space is at once the outcome of conflicts and negotiations, and (potentially at least) protective of these negotiations through spatiality.

People make places, as well as places shape people. The way people adopt, shape, use and manage the spaces around the city will determine the meanings of space. Space is constructed in a relational way (Massey 1984, 1991) and it is this characteristic that allows for a continuous production and reconfiguration of meanings, adding to historical legacies of public spaces. Space has the ability to produce new meanings, as experiences and practices take place in them. Moreover, it is about recognizing that the success of public space foresees various dynamics of inclusion, particularly ensuring the means that allow individuals and communities to participate as ‘fully fledged social subjects in urban life’ (Amin 2008). Even if globalism and neo-liberalism processes tend to supress or overcome the true meaning and cultural values of urban spaces, allowing for local encounters, conviviality, community engagement and social interactions can intensify what Lefebvre calls the ‘urban as urgent utopia’ (Lefebvre, Kofman, and Lebas 1996), where little eruptions emerge and flourish. In this line of thought, Purcell (2013) suggests seeking and learning to recognize the ‘urban’ that is around us although often hidden, and to nurture it in whatever way is possible. When people decide to rise up and reclaim space in the city, by asserting use value, they are producing and giving shape to public spaces.

Public spaces play a variety of roles in the cities’ everyday life, being the physical meeting spaces of cultural, political, economic, social and individual trajectories. They can create places of interaction and cooperation with the public sphere and the different social/ethnic groups in the city; a sphere for mutual tolerance and understanding; a place for acculturation, places for groups to penetrate and get acquainted with ‘other’ cultures. Public space has repeatedly been suggested to be an important and necessary platform for the (diverse ethnic and cultural) groups’ socialization, building of group identity and negotiations of relations among different groups themselves as well as between them (Madanipour 2003).

Apart from spaces of cooperation they can also be spaces of competition depending on where and between whom interaction takes place. Whereas tolerance and everyday interaction may smooth out differences, some conflict may also take place creating both tensions as well as opportunities¹ (Collins 2004).

Understanding the processes at work in the way different and diverse users of public space relate to it and to each other is quite complex and difficult. The difficulty may be, as Massey argues, because the notion of place is a process redefined in terms of social interactions which are dynamic processes. Since places do not have boundaries in the sense of divisions that frame enclosures, they do not have unique identities and are instead full of internal conflicts, a mixture of wider and local social relations, making them progressive and outward looking instead of self-enclosing (Massey 1994). It could also be because community membership can shift in time and space, so that an individual can express different solidarities throughout the course of a day or week while the term ‘community’ can have a highly spatialized as well as a highly transpatial formation (Hanson 2000). As Hanson has shown, different social groups have different principles of solidarity encoded into ‘different daily routines and practices’ that are then realized in different patterns of local encounters and interactions leading ‘to different modes of spatial co-presence’ (Hanson 2000, 15).

The pattern of streets and public spaces in cities create opportunities for chance encounters and co-existence across diverse social and ethnic divides whilst patterns of daily encounters may foster familiarity between individuals. Hillier and Hanson (1984) through micro-morphological exploration of how movement patterns differ in line with spatial configuration, provide a more nuanced understanding of why variations in the physical co-presence generate solidarity and social meaning; space, they suggest, shapes society as a pattern of ‘encounter possibilities’. Rather than being a neutral container of social activity, public space can facilitate the potential for different levels of social encounter to take place. The potential for interaction and meetings between people from different areas, ages, social and ethnic backgrounds in the public realm is a crucial prerequisite for creating an integrated society and encouraging tolerance and a feeling of belonging.

However, the meaning of multicultural (ethnic) coexistence and daily encounters within public spaces has been contentious in academic literature. Writers on this matter debate whether daily encounters in space translate into meaningful day-to-day interactions (Pullan 2013) or remain superficially at the level of familiarity (Amin 2002). While some argue that non-direct interactions, such as vision and sound can contribute to interethnic/intergroup understanding, establishing familiarity with the other (Pullan 2013), others posit that coexistence or cohabitation in public space cannot be equated with meaningful interaction and interethnic/intergroup understanding outright and that direct interaction is essential (cf. micropublics in Amin 2002). Kohn (2004) sees shared spaces as sites of co-inhabitation, leading to solidarity with strangers; whether or not discussion between strangers subsequently occurs is of less importance. Amin posits that while planners and architects aim to cultivate an intercultural ethos with open shared spaces where strangers have the freedom to mingle and linger, they often achieve nothing more than ‘place[s] of transit, with little meaningful contact’ (Amin 2002, 967). Amin traces the problem in spaces that enable only sociality and suggests that the ‘micropublics of everyday social contact and encounter’ are far more crucial in ‘reconciling and overcoming ethnic cultural differences’ (Amin 2002, 959). Intergroup cooperation and the involvement of informal, yet personal interaction across the groups, leads to cross-cultural understanding. Another approach is to see these matters as being on a continuum, from familiarity through co-presence, to encounter, to interaction and to actual social engagement between different and diverse identities.

Furthermore, the aforementioned discussion suggests that public life takes place not only in the streets and squares of cities but also in the markets, train stations and public events, all of which are in differing degrees public spaces and all of which allow for varying degrees of interaction. Wise (2005) reiterates the importance of local proximity, small-scale interactions and everyday routines in creating a degree of familiarity. Social interactions in everyday locations such as markets, schools and coffee shops alongside similar semi-public spaces become familiar spaces allowing for different worlds to intersect in one place and provide locations for the essential ‘small-scale meetings in which a public is constituted’ (Hall 2015). This observation widens the canvas of public interaction also taking into consideration those everyday places, to capture the broad range of economic and social transactions that may take place in the public sphere through place making practices (Vaughan 2015).

This themed issue aims to contribute to better understanding the relational nature of public spaces by using different concepts of urban culture as analytical perspectives; and to support studies on evolving urban cultures and renewed intellectual and practical challenges that these practices pose to the way public spaces are used, interpreted, designed and taught.

As such, encompassing research from different socio-spatial contexts Ljubljana, Amsterdam, Vienna and Acre, this themed issue highlights manifold perspectives on the localized ‘meaning’ of places, constructed and shaped by practices, behaviours and collective memories.

The first paper, by Aharon-Gutman and Ram, supports a critical investigation of the socio-historical marks of relational public spaces, to deeper understand the constructions and reconstructions of meanings and values, through everyday practices and processes. The study looks into the informal synagogues in the city of Acre, established in bomb shelters, private homes and structures constructed by the community, functioning with no funding or formal leadership, but representing fundamental spaces in the city. They apply the concept of objective possibility by Max Weber, or understanding possibilities as imagined constructions, to study roads not taken in environments that underwent a process of spatial erasure. In Acre, synagogues are recognized not as lived museums to remind a past way of life, but essentially as spaces enduring an ongoing alternative present. The paper further explores the concept of ‘intimate publicness’, to refer to the possibility that was not realized, suggesting a scale in between the intimacy of the private and the public. Meirav Aharon-Gutman and Moriel Ram suggest importing the concept of objective possibility to better understand contexts of erasure, where the modern knowledge of urban planning have contributed to silence and deny needs and desires to some minorities and vulnerable groups.

The second paper, by Sezer, discusses the presence and changes of immigrant amenities in Amsterdam to analyze the socio-cultural inclusion of immigrant groups, in this case, of Turkish origin representing one of the largest communities of immigrants in the city. In particular, the study focuses on Turkish amenities located in two shopping streets with different dynamics (period 2007–2016), one located within the city ring with a semi-public character and the other located in the outskirts with a private character, influenced differently by urban renewal processes. Immigrant amenities, as she stands, contribute to the diversity and vitality of public spaces at street level, enriching public life, through a set of features (languages, signs, marks, products, cuisines and practices). The comparative analysis shows it is possible to undertake a neighbourhood transformation with a positive impact enhancing public life, promoting new immigrant shops, leading to socio-cultural inclusion. On the contrary, the pressure of market trends creates interventions that promote and increase daily vitality, but result in the displacement of vulnerable groups, or even threaten the distinctive cultural character of a street. Ceren Sezer reflects on how new rationales associated to post-Fordist transformations, drown symbolic, cultural and cultural capital, evidencing the urgency of revisiting the role of public entities, the market and the community, and questioning these transformative processes that intermingle and translate global trends into negative local cultural impacts.

The third paper by Viderman and Knierbein brings the topic of international mobility and migration in a time when solidarity and hope are ‘supposedly’ in crisis. They explore affective practices of providing care and support to refugees in the train stations in Vienna, during the autumn of 2015, by reflecting on the role of activists and refugees to transform ways of understanding and inhabiting public space. Humanitarian governance structures and other social support institutions tended to face refugees as an abstract and homogenous figure, providing assistance through quantitative and efficient aid. Activists performed a crucial role, by extending assistance to affective engagement with refugees’ unique histories, memories, cultures and experiences. Ultimately, the authors suggest that affective practices and bodily experiences, combined with more rational enquiry into structural conditions, can produce meaningful knowledge for analyzing and interpreting lived spaces in cities. Local identities are constructed through community behaviours and collective memories, giving public spaces the multidimensional perspective.

Finally, the paper, by Niksic and Butina Watson, investigates how open urban public spaces are present in the mental image by its users, relating to how ‘meaningful place’ construction can be observed and analyzed in the link between the material and imagined public space. The authors conclude that both physical design and provision of activities play an important role in shaping the perceived image of space; although, in line with the European culture, the physical characteristics of space have the strongest influence when perceiving the borders of perceptual micro-ambiances. Functional organization of space is less influential, and meaning and symbolic dimension even less. Spaces that are used more often are perceived as closer to one another at the perceptual level, evidencing how practices are relevant to create more meaningful places.

Overall, these four papers have built on the aims of this themed issue: (1) understanding public spaces as ‘places’ where global tendencies ‘sediment’ and are being ‘translated’ and ‘transformed’ according to local cultural, social and political contexts; (2) public spaces as a ‘reflection of local identities’ shaped by community behaviours, patterns of everyday life and collective memories; and (3) public spaces as a ‘ground of investigation of place-making practices’ by different actors and agents particularly in the context of changing role of state, market and civil society in shaping, creating and transforming public spaces.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Classic urban theorists in Heidelberg and Berlin (known as the German school), at the University of Chicago (known as the Chicago school) and later political theorists, geographers and sociologists (such as Hannah Arendt, Ash Amin and Richard Sennett) have written about the cosmopolitan city, questioning whether living together with strangers is possible.