The Post-public City: Experiences from Post-socialist Europe

Hirt, Sonia

The Post-public City: Experiences from Post-socialist Europe

dc.contributor.author	Hirt, Sonia	en
dc.date.accessioned	2015-08-26T20:50:53Z	en
dc.date.available	2015-08-26T20:50:53Z	en
dc.date.issued	2014	en
dc.description.abstract	Public space has become an increasingly important focus in the work of architects, urban designers, philosophers, geographers, sociologists and others interested in promoting a more civil and democratic society. This vigorous attention to public space as an object of design and scholarly inquiry is likely driven by two factors. The first factor is the strong purported connection between vibrant public space as a material arena and a vibrant public sphere as a social condition. Space is not just a blank canvas on which social phenomena are imprinted. Rather, it is one of the very “constructive dimensions” of social life. Open, accessible, inclusive public space may serve as venue of social interactions that teach the values of tolerance, engagement and citizenship—values that are an “essential precondition for building a public world.” Lack of such spaces may lead to the opposite: a “trained incapacity for public life.” The second factor is the recent erosion of public space. Despite its importance, public space has in recent years been increasingly replaced by explicitly private or quasi-public spatial forms that are easily accessible only to select segments of the population. Examples include malls, gated communities, exclusive suburbs, office parks, new or gentrified urban districts, etc. Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson make a useful distinction between the values of community (i.e., exclusivity, membership, belonging to a group) transmitted in quasi-public spaces of the type mentioned above and those of civility (i.e., openness, inclusion, respect for otherness) transmitted in truly public spaces. This trend toward the privatization of urban space as a part of the broader privatization of the public sphere was initially highlighted in the United States and other parts of the “Western” world by scholars such as Michael Sorkin, Edward Blakeley and Nan Ellin but has by now been documented around the globe.	en
dc.description.notes	Post-print	en
dc.format.extent	10 pages	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document	en
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf	en
dc.identifier.citation	Hirt, S. 2014. The Post-public City: Experiences from Post-socialist Europe. Globalizing Architecture: Flows and Disruptions. Refereed Proceedings of the 102nd Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 123-129.	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10919/56493	en
dc.language.iso	en_US	en
dc.publisher	Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture	en
dc.relation.ispartof	102nd Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture	en
dc.rights	In Copyright	en
dc.rights.uri	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/	en
dc.subject	Public space	en
dc.subject	Urban planning	en
dc.subject	Eastern Europe	en
dc.title	The Post-public City: Experiences from Post-socialist Europe	en
dc.type	Conference proceeding	en
dc.type.dcmitype	Text	en