“It simply never occurs to us to make streets into oases rather than deserts.”1
What if we think of the streets of our cities as places of wellness rather than vehicular tubes?
What if we describe them as livable places rather than uninhabited remains of urban motorways?
What if we can search for smells, voices, and human behaviors hiding in the traffic noise?
What if we propose transforming our cities starting from the most extended element of their public space?
If most people on the planet live in urban areas, as researchers and designers, we must intervene in those community spaces that allow society to meet, clash, discuss, equalize, relating: they are places that fall within what we define as public space, that is, open, free, publicly accessible urban space.
Public space is the place of the future of the cities, on which it is necessary to work to build a communal identity, as a recognition realm for the entire community.
Within the public space, streets represent, quantitatively, the most extensive and the most characterizing element: public space is born with the street, a place of connection of communities, a primordial space of agreement and disagreement between citizens, an essential element for urban settlements on the planet.
Communities from all over the planet are here, in these large spatial apparatuses, which allow people to move, work, recreate, play, rest, and build economies.
They are the spaces of the new nature in the city, of the attempt, increasingly necessary, to bring environmental issues back into extremely impermeable urban fabrics, often poor in biodiversity, which tend to increase the effects of the heat island dangerously: the new approach on streets is an optimistic catalog of possibilities, of glances at the future, or rather at present, at the extraordinary opportunities we have to improve our living space, our city, our neighborhood.
- Rudofsky, B. (1964). Architecture without Architects. The Museum of Modern Art: Distributed by Doubleday. ↩︎
Bibliography
- Solnit R. (2014). Wanderlust. A history of walking. Granta.
- Pinzuti P. (2020). La mobilità post-covid: ripensare la strada per superare crisi climatica, energetica, industriale, economica e finanziaria, in Belloni E., Maggi S. (eds.). Muoversi domani. Verso una mobilità più sostenibile. Franco Angeli
- AKT & Czech H. (eds.). (2023). Partecipazione/Beteiligung. Luftschacht Verlag.
