Public space and its challanges: a palimpsest for urban commons

In future cities we will have to deal with challenges of different sorts related to the irreversible overpopulation of urban citizens, which the UN estimates will reach 6.5 billion in 2030. “The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality” assert Garret Hardin in his paper about The Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin, 1968): population is growing exponentially, consuming a prodigious amount of energy enough to jeopardize the very concept of common goods. Because of these circumstances, the international debate is now oriented around issues like holistic sustainability, quality of life, well-being and urban happiness in the built environment, in order to reverse this point of view. At the same time, the “recent revival of emphasis upon the supposed loss of urban commonalities ref lects the seemingly profound impacts of the recent wave of privatizations, enclosures, spatial controls, policing and surveillance upon the qualities of urban life […] and the potentiality to build or inhibit new forms of social relations” (Harvey, 2012: 67). Public space has a transversal role in the whole discussion, crossing each of these issues and ensuring the delicate balance between the physical and the social domains of the city. As observed by Stephen Carr (1992: 3) in his very accurate definition of public space, it is “the stage upon which the drama of communal life unfolds”. From this perspective, the publicness of public space is enhanced by the presence of life that is communal, collective, and shared between individuals that are simultaneously the actors and the audience of this ‘drama’. In such a respect, discussing the quality of urban life seems to be a wide and democratic issue, since we live almost all in built environments and are joined by the same interests in political and cultural debates about the places we live in, regardless of age or social background. In terms of political efforts, research and literature production, the social role of public space, and of urban design too, has been reconsidered in the public agendas as the proper tool to be adopted for a better quality of urban life. In both material and immaterial ways public space is crafted by how it is lived, by the criss-crossing f lows around, inside and outside the built domain during the many everyday-life activities. This phenomenon has remained unchanged throughout the centuries, even if it has been weakened or neglected by social, political and economic forces that have altered the sense of living the city.