Public Space

Public space has long formed an integral part of the history of American urban space, both as a place and as an ideal. Spaces that suggest free and open access to the public, whether they are consciously designed—such as plazas, parks, and walking paths—or just areas of popular congregation such as street corners, are part of the basic fabric of virtually every American city. The very existence of public space in the American city is one of the most exalted and controversial aspects of urban life. Public space is generally identified as literally the grounds upon which traditional participatory democratic activities can flourish, and in recent years has been considered increasingly endangered, threatened by privatization, commercialization, and related urban trends that had emerged by the middle of the 20th century.

The phrase public space means many things to many people. The term can be employed to refer exclusively to government-owned property, such as a city park or a public swimming pool. It might include communally held land, like a commons or a community garden. It is sometimes used to describe privately owned property that through zoning or benevolence guarantees 24-hour daily access to all people, such as an urban plaza or the steps in front of a museum. It may also refer to privately owned property that, while not actually freely accessible to all, nonetheless provides a popular meeting place, for instance, a shopping mall or a café. The term may likewise be used to identify places that can be appropriated for public uses for which they were not originally intended, such as a homeless encampment set up under a bridge.

What links all these disparate sites together as public space is that they are thought to offer a setting where strangers can mingle on equal ground, where spontaneous expression is possible, and where the citizenry can engage without undo restriction. Public space is as much about what happens there as it is about what is there, and at least since the days of Socrates and Aristotle, vibrant public space has been heralded as the quintessential expression of a healthy city.

By the time urbanization had become a significant process in the American landscape, the shape and meaning of public space had been formulated and reformulated many times over. The designers and occupants of even the earliest American cities thus inherited a long and often convoluted discourse regarding public spaces. Classical public meeting spaces such as the Greek agora and, to a lesser degree, the Roman forum were powerfully alluring models often held up as architectural and social ideals for which any city should strive. The medieval street and central marketplace, in which movement was made nearly impossible by the clutter and bustle of the market lifestyle, were likewise important historic antecedents. The Renaissance and subsequent Age of Enlightenment in Europe yielded their own prized public spaces, including the bohemian coffeehouse and salon as well as more formal avenues and monumental squares. In reality, few of these places actually provided the complete freedom of assembly that was later associated with them. None were publicly held in the modern sense of the term, and some imposed fairly rigid access restrictions. Even the very prototype of public space itself—the agora—was conceptualized by Aristotle as a space best kept off-limits to a substantial portion of the population (including laborers, farmers, and most women). Nonetheless, the notion that the right kind of urban space can encourage spontaneous and liberating civic congregation [Page 626]plays a central role in American urbanization. Equally central to American urbanization is continual discussion concerning what the right kind of space should be and who should be granted access to it.

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