ArchDaily is happy to announce a new development in our partnership with The Architectural Review. Each month, AR's editor, Catherine Slessor, will weigh in with a thematic introduction to the subjects addressed in their current issue. Up now: public space. Is it on the brink of extinction? And, if so, how can we reclaim it?
Just over 20 years ago, Mike Davis and Michael Sorkin predicted the end of public space as we knew it. ‘America’s cities are being rapidly transformed by a sinister and homogeneous design’, they wrote at the time. ‘A new kind of urbanism - manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space - is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and pseudo-historic marketplaces.It marked the beginning of the realisation that public space was being stealthily privatised and commodified; the historic freedoms of the agora and the piazza replaced by the patrolled and proscribed confine of the theme park and shopping mall.
