| Although the concept ‘urban public space’ appears central to the theory of Architecture and Urban Planning today, its semantics remain profoundly uncertain and unstable. The thesis investigates this paradox through a critical history of the variant uses of the term/concept in texts dealing with the built environment in the U.S.A. First, it traces the rise of the term from emergence, in the 1950s and early 1960s, to becoming a staple of debates on urban form and urban life, by the mid-1970s. Second, it investigates the link of this phenomenal rise with the critique of dominant politics and everyday life in the 1960s and early 1970s—especially the critique of suburbanization and Urban Renewal as prevalent methods of urban development. Third, it recounts the prompt appropriation of the initially critical discourse by the established public and private institutions of urban development and management, after the mid-1970s. Preempting this discourse helped the establishment react to the collapse of the legitimizing capacity of the post-war modernist ideologies of technocratic urban redevelopment, and to new urban marketing requirements on the scene of a rapidly globalizing economy. Fourth, the thesis examines the critical responses to the institutionalized ‘new public space’ discourse, in the 1980s and 1990s, by authors who described its product as a commercialized and controlled simulacrum—a ‘pseudo public space.’ Fifth, the thesis surveys the debates which marked, in the 1990s, the rising recognition of tensions and contradictions inherent in the notion, as it incorporates a number of analytically different but subtly linked issues (accessibility, property status, identity-representation, sociability, participatory politics, etc.). The thesis concludes by acknowledging the irreducible complexity, layering, and ambiguity of the conceptual tool urban public space. This recognition does not, however, preclude that of the resilient significance of the notion as a field open to the investigation of the links between the form of tangible places of urban life and the everyday actuation of human creativity, freedom, diversity, pacific coexistence, fertile interaction, and democratic participation; a field ultimately open to the negotiation of the values of urban change. |
