What makes a successful public space?
This essay will explore the ideas and processes of what makes a public space successful and how it becomes successful. The focus of this essay is to discuss and discover the extent to which some processes will make a public more successful than the other. Public space is a term used to describe a place as a space in which all citizens have a right of access to, there are many definitions of public space however they all suggest some type of public interaction taking place. Another definition could be a space where the public is formed and where social and cultural rules governing behaviour are predominate (Mitchell and Staeheli, 2009) Something else to pick out is the word ‘successful’; this could be regarding the environment, social aspects, or economic aspects. The themes that this essay will explore in relation to the success of public space are exclusion and inclusion, social value, social interaction and domestication. To support these themes about what does and does not make a public space successful, the use of
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In the setting of industrialization, building a public space like a city park is desirable, especially for working classes in a metropolis like Montreal. Until the first half of the 19th century, Canada’s industry operated by shipping raw materials to Great Britain in exchange of manufactured goods. Around 1840, the completion of Lachine canal and railway network made Montreal a transportation hub, in the addition of having one of the largest Canadian ports and being Canada’s financial and commercial center speeded up the pr...
In Ray Oldenburg’s piece The Problems of Place in America, he concludes that communities lack the “third place”, which is a public space in communities outside the home and workplace that serve as a common ground. Oldenburg defines the third place as “a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” (51) Coffee shops fall under this description of the third place because they attract people of all ages for various reasons; this includes serving as a place to meet up with friends and family, do homework, and regularly host events like poetry slams and live band performances.
Historically, the city was an all-encompassing entity. At the dawn of industrialization, large masses of people flocked to the city in hopes of a better economic life for themselves and their families. It was within the city limits, particularly closest to the areas of commerce and exchange that people took up residence, worked, and pursued various social activities. The city served the needs of all its citizens. However, as industrialization moved further along, there was a major shift in urban economics. While many businesses flourished, so did wealth and as this increased, society faced an evolving class system. Three notable classes emerged: the lower/working class, the middle class, and the upper/elite class. While these class divisions grew, a large amount of money was being invested in the creation of public venues. Public institutions were designed to bring education, culture, and in many ways, a sense of community to modern city life. A public park or library was a place that people of various classes could come together and share space. However, by the end of the Twentieth century and into the Twenty-First, true public space is becoming almost extinct, as is the middle class. Privatized public space has become the new trend across many American cities.
Aesthetic control in the city serves a number of purposes. For one, the zero-sum logic of interurban competition incentivizes the purification of urban space and the presentation of ‘cleanliness’ for the purposes of city marketing. As transfer payments decline as a source of revenue for municipal governments, cities are desperately attempting to enhance their international reputation for the purpose of attracting tourism and capital investment. The cleansing of visible poverty from urban space is accomplished through police harassment and displacement of visible poverty and other ‘undesirable’ uses of space(Kennelly 9). The city’s adaptation to market logics also influences the way urban space is produced and presented internally, to its own population. For example, concentrations of homeless people are said to deter visitors and consumers from traveling to and shopping in those parts of the city [BY WHO]. Visible homelessness is also targeted by city authorities because it disrupts attempts to render the city as a landscape (Mitchell 186). Rendering the city as a landscape is a means of presenting the individual with an illusory sense of control and freedom in the complex urban environment where control in fact belongs to the totalizing economy and freedom for some comes at the expense of freedom for others. The illusion of control is in a sense the way citizens are alienated from the constitutive parts and production of the city. Instead of seeing the realities of capital relations, or the activities of labour reproduction required daily to renew the urban workforce, citizens are presented with a stage on which the daily dramas of the “pacified public” can take place (Mitchell 186). On this stage, a certain kind of “legitimate” citizen expects a broad freedom to move through space without resistance or disturbance, such as may come from encountering or being confronted by
The inside look of Jeff Ferrell’s urban experiences in his book Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy gives a unique perspective of resisting how traditional urban environments are shaped and practiced from a radical standpoint. He concentrates on the nonconformist’s population in public spaces that ranges from the homelessness, street musicians, skater punks, base jumpers and more that constitutes an “act of political resistance” (Ferrell, 95). Ferrell explores new terrain in the anarchist street world by participating in battles for cultural spaces and then examines the intentions and meaning behind their cause. That urban engagement from Ferrell’s experience reveals a massive reflectance on “anarchist practice” and “spatial
This paper will be predominantly focusing on public housing within Ontario. Not only will it look at the basics of Ontario but examine more directly on Regent Park within Toronto. It will discuss what public housing is and the explanation for why it exists, the government housing programs that are present with regards to public housing and the results of the government programs. The Purpose of this essay is to argue that the problem of public housing will never
Tony Hiss Author of The Experience of Place brings to our attention that as humans “We react, consciously or unconsciously, to the places where we live and work, in ways we scarcely notice or that are only now becoming known to us…In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become.” Place defines characteristics in both human and extended moral communities. Place is not necessarily specific to gender, race, generation or specie. This understanding and recognition of place is fundamental when thinking about institutionalizing ecological and social responsibility.
In R.T. Legates, & F. Stout (Eds.). (2009).The City Reader. (4th Ed.) New York, NY. Routledge.
Public Spaces provide unique experiences and contribute to the identity of a city. Found as places like plazas, parks, marketplaces, within buildings, lobbies and many more. Public spaces are important to our society and therefore face more arguments in design and construction compared to private spaces.
Sheehan, R. (2010). 'I 'm protective of this yard ': long-term homeless persons ' construction of home place and workplace in a historical public space. Social & Cultural Geography, 11, 6,
Homelessness is descriptive condition of someone without a permanent or regular dwelling. Homeless people most often are not in a position to acquire as well as maintain a safe, regular, and adequate housing. Being that one of the most fundamental human needs is shelter, it is important and health for every human to at least acquire one. Unfortunately, it is becoming rather a difficulty to own a home in the current century given the economic recessions frequently occurring in almost globally. Although the legal definitions for homelessness may vary from country to country, the central idea includes people whose primary nighttime residence could be a homeless shelter, a domestic violence shelter, cardboard boxes or ad hoc housing circumstances. They could also be people who take shelter at night in a private or public place that is not primarily designed or suitable for use as a regular sleeping housing for humans.
Hopper, Kim. “Housing the Homeless.” Social Policy 28.3 (1998): 64+. Academic OneFile. Web. 29 Oct. 2013.
Fundamentally, all human being’s capabilities and performances reflect a complex collaboration of biological and social-environmental factors. In fact, unique environments that are “nurtured” in one’s life can greatly influence the “nature” of basic biological processes. Such is the case with personal space. Even though human beings have a “natural” need to interact through human contact, the social-environmental factors in a human being’s culture dictate how much personal space is acceptable. Thus, it isn’t nature alone that determines what exact distance is comfortable between human beings during conversations. Instead, it is the individual’s cultural environment that determines the appropriate personal space necessary to feel comfortable. Indeed, research on personal space is an excellent example of how a supposed biological factor is influenced by social-environmental factors.
Homeless is a convenient label for a variety of objective and subjective conditions of impoverish (Gory, M.l., Ritchey, F.J., & Mullis, J.,1990: Phelan, Link, Moore and Stueve, 1997). One serious obstacle to the study of homeless is the lack of characteristics of homelessness. National Heath Care for the Homeless (2016) shared there are groups of people who experience homelessness in different ways, but all homelessness is characterized by extreme poverty coupled with a lack of stable housing (Lee, Tyler & Wright, 2010). According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary (2016), homelessness refers to “having no home or permanent place of residence.” Persons who are housed marginally are defined as homeless. Others define homeless
There have been many significant movements throughout urban planning history which have influenced the way that planning theory is shaped and thought. Combined Modernist and Neoliberal planning theories have influenced the erection of a vast amount of planning project that have left an imprint on the way that urban planning is practiced today. In this paper, I will begin by describing the components of modernist and neoliberal planning practices. Then, I will outline a brief history of the project and explain how the Los Angeles South Central Farm was influenced by both modernist and neoliberal planning theories. Lastly, I will analyze this project through two different critical perspectives, neo-Marxism and critical race planning. These critical perspectives will enable us to understand the planning practices that were implemented in this project and will helps us explain the planning theories achievements and failures in this case study.