Architecture and the Edges of Public Space: Tools and Strategies for a New Urban Agenda

okay we're going to let people come in in the next minute or so and then we're going to get started is this broadcasted or do they have to be admitted in no people are coming in as we speak right now i'm going to give another minute or two for people to come in and then we're going to get started here so sorry i'm gonna have to i should have tested this never had a problem before um [Music] okay louise so you got a question in the chat box yeah yes to the question i was about to answer actually hi lance yes i will be at roof 11. definitely julia hi nice to have you well i'm gonna get started and uh i'm just gonna talk okay um but welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries um providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on pressing issues of the day and today we're going to have a presentation on architecture and the edges of public space tools and strategies for a new urban agenda with luisa bravo peter ellmland michael mahaffey and duru to doni and you know you can register for coming webinar uh um next week we've got a webinar on uh two major traditional uh neighborhood developments underway uh in uh oklahoma which is the uh the state where we are having cnu 30 upcoming later this month you can go to cnu.org resources on the park bench and i wanted to talk a little bit about cnu 30 in oklahoma city which will be march 23rd through 26th 2022 and it's going to be cnu's first in-person congress since 2019 it's very exciting and we pretty much have the program finalized we have a congress app that you can download on the cnu website you can go to cnu.org connect to download that app and we're still filling it out but you can see what we've you can see it as we fill it out the program that's coming up you can still register for for cnu 30 and there are hotel rooms available it is going to be a great opportunity to to meet some of the best urbanists in the world who are going to be there and check out oklahoma city which has done some amazing things with its commitment to urbanism in and around downtown but first join or renew your membership to seeing you become a current member and save 200 off your cnu 30 registration check your membership status today members.cnu.org memberships and today as i said that we're going to be talking about architecture in the edges of public space tools and strategies for a new urban agenda and the new urban agenda came out of the habitat 3 conference that was adopted by all 193 countries of the united nations its provisions closely parallel those of the charter of the new urbanism particularly in the emphasis on a well-structured walkable public realm and joining us today are luisa bravo who is an academic scholar activist urban designer and social entrepreneur she is the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal of public space the first interdisciplinary academic open access journal entirely dedicated to public space it was established by the city space archit by city space architecture in 2015 in partnership with un habitat peter elmlund is director of urban city research and future of places at jackson johnson foundation and a board member of the international making cities livable conference and joining us today with a recorded message is michael mahaffey a development consultant planner designer author educator researcher and executive director of the international making cities livable conference as well as executive director of the organ-based sus stasis foundation and duruta dhani is an architect and urbanist based in washington dc winner of many charter awards from cnu he is also an author including two major books on seaside the latest reflections on seaside i'm rob steudeville editor of cnu's public square and i'm going to talk just a little bit about uh the cnu history i don't usually do that with this audience but we have quite a few international people today who haven't heard it and um this relates to the content today but cnu was founded in 1993 by a group of architects in alexandria virginia um they were working with developers and planners and public officials and others but uh they were this was uh founded in in response to this problem of sprawl in north america the problem of cities being damaged by bad urban renewal and highways and development through these cities um and uh the our metropolitan area is really spreading out in an automobile-oriented sprawl and these architects had designed solutions to uh uh to the problem with sprawl other people have had public policy solutions and have had other kinds of solutions maybe partial design solutions but this group had a comprehensive [Music] design uh approach to to sprawl and uh this was uh um all uh written uh clearly in a charter of the new urbanism which was signed and adopted in 1996 in charleston south carolina uh and uh the charter the new urbanism had 27 has 27 principles uh at scales from the uh the street in the block and the building to the neighborhood to the region and it has been actually quite influential uh internationally and not just nationally because the provisions of the charter the new urbanism apply anywhere uh they could apply uh in in cities and towns around the world and in fact uh people were picking up on on the charter of the new urbanism in all different in countries uh around the globe uh right from the beginning and when we started the charter awards in 2001 immediately we had international applicants who had applied the principles of the charter of the new urbanism and won awards and we've had 71 international charter awards uh so with that i'm going to pass this along to dirham right thanks rob challenged [Music] okay can you see my full screen yes yes okay great so um as ron mentioned um this is actually the first uh of hopefully many uh events uh on the park bench that deals with uh international new urbanism and or international partners in urbanism because we find that many many organizations have adopted the very same principles the goals are the same maybe how you get there is somewhat different but we're all looking at issues of sprawl and the disinvestment in cities uh and the damage that has been done to cities uh by uh various infrastructure or poor architecture uh or the lack of understanding on how cities work so it doesn't really matter how you what you what how you get there it could be you know a motive of profit it could be an environmental issue it could be a health issue uh i could just be plain old philanthropic somebody wants to donate money to improve the place that he he or she grew up in or it could be to solve issues of diversity equity and inclusion or it could just be simply you know the installation or the return to goodness truth and beauty uh we really can't stand a discussion on public spaces unless we look at this uh kind of enigmatic drawing by leon crea it's all it's iconic now it was done about 40 years ago and leon essentially pointed out that the true city was built by two elements a private realm and a public realm and within the public realm what we had was public buildings and associated public spaces so uh public spaces in the public buildings belonged to everyone and that was really the kind of uh essence that held a society together was the fact that we had these public spaces where people could congregate uh discuss enjoy themselves etc um after hearing that um talk initially by uh leon i went back and tested this idea with my hometown bombay and here's a map of the the core the colonial i would call it the colonial core of bombay and the diagram on the right is all the public spaces with their corresponding public buildings uh that line uh that front them so it really made this this idea of these two realms made a lot of sense to me which then led to the notion that what we've been doing is uh really focusing in the last 60 years on the object the building is the object and a little plan on the upper left could be the plan of this building which tries to put an entire city into a single building or the diagram on the upper right is a plan of florence and this space and you can see that one both of them are very linear in one case it's white in the case of florence selenia a ufc gallery and the ideas of buildings there are irregular but they contribute to making this figural space and so i think this emphasis on the building is object has really taken us away from making wonderful public spaces so a lot of us have been doing a lot of research on public spaces and they mostly uh been planned drawings and here's just a collection of uh public spaces from around the world that i've been documenting there's hundreds more of these and uh a lot of them are available were printed in my book the language of towns and cities so they're easily accessible but here you know predominantly we were looking at um planned views uh uh not like uh the traditional figure ground drawings we did and uh green for the landscape uh and blue for the water so the drawings were a little more clear in your definition but we never really started to look at the edges of buildings and i think the conference coming up in paris is really important because it's actually now focusing on these edges and those edges can be made by buildings or they could be made by walls as you see in the case of piazza del popolo on the the axis the cross axis or to be defined by landscape and the edges so there's a lot to learn on how to make public spaces and the definition of these public spaces uh public spaces uh like this very intimate space in france which you actually one of the entries is through this uh through a building a tunnel in a building it's very well defined but then it's also shaded by these magnificent trees and you can see that three of the trees have been replaced the one on the right is one of the original trees so there was care enough to you know to kind of replant the trees uh to kind of recreate the space as it was originally intended and here is another example of a small extremely well-defined space in paris but again the kind of central feature here is a landscape these four large trees and again three have been planted more recently one is the original so i want to take this one step further and this idea of the edges i think we've you know we've looked at all these spaces without actually trying to develop some hierarchy or some grouping or some method of actually analyzing these spaces so what i've done is my first stab at this is that along the top row i'm trying to define different types of public spaces one which is closed where the wall is extremely well defined the second is a public space in the case of university of virginia which is dominated by a central figure in that case a library or a kind of a nuclear space where like the u.s capital which has all these auxiliary gardens going off from it or the thought condition is where they group as in the case of savannah where there's a kind of rhythm to how these parks occur within the city plan both north south and east west it's also true in washington dc along k street we have a series of uh parks that kind of show up every two blocks uh two blocks of buildings one block of park uh so that's the kind of grouping of parks and then finally the amorphous uh open space uh which really a lot of times does have have nothing to do with um the shape uh or the name in this case what i'm showing is harvard square and really there is no square there uh it's essentially a traffic uh traffic intersection then uh in the other column i've listed residential uses i mean abuses now spaces don't have to form clearly in one or two of these they can fall in multiple categories in here so building can be both uh residential and have retail i mean space could be both uh residential or retail or uh you know civic and monumental uh things can you know occur so this is just the first stab at trying to organize these and it's it's the kind of for me the inroads start to look at the elevations of buildings of that front these public spaces and then try to kind of categorize those so we start to understand what kind of architecture is appropriate for the kindness for the youth and the kind of space that we're trying to make so this is just the first uh stab at this as i said uh it's not a clear it's not totally you know cooked but um it's a way to just start and start grouping these public spaces that i've been uh documenting and finally i just want to reinforce uh what rob suitable said about the new urban agenda uh if you read the new urban agenda and others will talk about it uh in this um this webinar uh it's really broken down into four categories exactly the same photograph the four categories that urbanism has been involved in uh economic environmental spatial and social and that really is the framework for the new urban agenda so with that uh i'm gonna stop and uh put michael's uh video on [Music] greetings everybody and uh i'm sorry i couldn't be with you in real time but i did want to leave some grist for the bill for this conversation uh which i'm looking forward to viewing later online and uh in the meantime i hope to see many of you in oklahoma city or maybe in paris so the title of this webinar is drawn from our upcoming conference in paris of the international making city liverpool we're doing it this year in partnership with the congress for the new urbanism this year our theme is architecture at the edges of public space tools and strategies for a new urban agenda so it's really thinking differently about the way architecture has a job to do really in framing public space and creating the edges of public space and supporting all of the benefits that we get from public space social interaction walkability exercise more ecological lifestyles all the other things that we get from a more walkable mixed-use city or town or suburb you must put on your sound we can't hear the sound here you know the sound of the video is connected to your own system to take away the news known as the new urban agenda and 193 countries adopted this document by acclimation so this is a landmark in urban history really yeah six different points of agreement between the charter the new urbanism and the new urban agenda okay and in fact completely religiously much earlier athens charter of 1933 on the zoning of urban elements on street design on the orientation of buildings on treatment of historic structures and patterns on the role of specialists in relation to citizens and citizen involvement and on but we don't see the video oh okay greetings everybody and uh i'm sorry i couldn't be with you in real time sorry i'm always challenged we can't see your screen at all dearer okay share screen stair screen there we go okay sorry about that folks so [Music] you see it now greetings everybody and uh i'm sorry i shouldn't be with you in real time but i did want to leave some grist for the bill for this conversation uh which i'm looking forward to viewing later online and in the meantime i hope to see many of you in oklahoma city or maybe in paris so the title of this unmute how's this can you hear it now yes okay sorry apologies [Music] greetings everybody and uh i'm sorry i couldn't be with you in real time but i did want to leave some grist for the mill for this conversation uh which i'm looking forward to viewing later online and uh in the meantime i hope to see many of you in oklahoma city or maybe in paris so the title of this webinar is drawn from our upcoming conference in paris of the international making city livable we're doing it this year in partnership with the congress for the new urbanism this year our theme is architecture and the edges of public space uh tools and strategies for a new urban agenda so it's really thinking differently about the way architecture has a job to do really in framing public space and creating the edges of public space and supporting all of the benefits that we get from public space social interaction walkability exercise more ecological lifestyles all the other things that we get from a more walkable mixed-use city or town or summer so that's what we're going to be talking about at the conference and by the way you could go online to imcl dot online and you'll see a lot more information about the conference including this little video tour that i did of the venue which is a really fantastic suburban retrofit exemplar of an old paris bandu that has been retrofitted into a much more walkable mixed diverse kind of neighborhood and really fascinating case study actually this is the main venue we'll be meeting and having a fantastic opportunity to explore what they've done not only here but in the paris region in general some of the lessons of the 15-minute city and the livability interventions that they're doing there and also some of the other challenges that they are confronting that we're all confronting affordability and equity and other challenges of more ecological more resilient more livable human habitat so we look forward to a fantastic conference and we hope to see you here so what are the tools what are the strategies that we can share with each other that's what we're going to talk about in the conference bringing people from the united states from europe from around the world to bring their expertise bring some of the best practices some of the research expertise and examine the lessons for this moment in history this is a very interesting moment in part because we have an international agreement now known as the new urban agenda and 193 countries adopted this document by acclimation so this is a landmark in urban history really and many new urbanists don't realize that actually the new urban agenda embodies many of the principles of the charter of the new urbanism as the research from my colleague tigran has and i have shown in fact if you go through the two documents as we have done you can see six different points of agreement between the charter the new urbanism and the new urban agenda and in fact complete disagreement with the much earlier athens charter of 1933 on the zoning of urban elements on street design on the orientation of buildings on treatment of historic structures and patterns on the role of specialists in relation to citizens and citizen involvement and on the accommodation of change and flexibility over time by the way i talk about this in a little more detail in the public square article that i believe is running right now if you're interested in that but the upshot is that i think we have a historical moment right now where new urbanism by whatever name has been very very influential all around the world but the big challenge now of course is implementation how do we take this forward how do we achieve success in implementation at a larger scale and i think we all need to work together on that challenge and share our case lessons which is exactly what we're going to be doing in paris and in other places around the country and around the world and uh yes to work locally to focus on local implementation but to learn from each other internationally you know to coin a phrase to think globally and act locally and i think that's what we've got to do so i look forward to seeing many of you there [Music] thank you michael uh luisa you're on yes i'm here okay okay so thank you for this invitation i'm i'm uh now speaking from from italy and this is exactly in line with what michael was mentioning that we need to cooperate internationally to develop meaningful contents related to public space i've been into just some background information i've been into public space research for quite a long time i'm an academic scholar i've been working in italy but also abroad and i'm currently a junk professor in urban design at university of florence so i approached the public space from a research and academic perspective first during my postdoc but then at some point i realized that i needed to expand activities uh also related to research on public space by being more attached to the ground and to what actually was happening in public space and so i established the non-profit organization city space architecture in 2013 um and i started to develop this community of public space researchers professionals community organizations artists and activists and through city space architecture in 2015 i established the journal of public space in cooperation with the u.n habitat the first issue of the journal was launched at the habitat iii conference in quito where also the new urban agenda was adopted and so the journal of public space is a part of the implementation activities related to the new urban agenda and the approach to public space from a journal perspective is not just about academic research but it is also about design solutions and opportunities for public space to expand the huge potential that it is embedded in a lot of different you know spaces pocket spaces gardens streets in the historic center but especially in the suburban developments so i just i don't have a powerpoint presentation because i i prefer to share with you um [Music] the website of the journal of public space for those of you that do not know the journal um i have to mention that the way the journal has been established you can go online journalpublicspace.org is actually resembling how a public space should be so the journal of public space is an open access academic interdisciplinary journal so you can read and download all contents for free we also do not apply article processing charges so authors are publishing without paying so the idea is that nobody is paying um for publishing and for reading so the journal of public space is setting a model a way of behaving that is resembling public space um since we started as i said in 2016 we have already published a number of issues so if you go on archives you can see that we have really worked hard in the past six years and now the journal actually is collecting a lot of contents as you can see we have thematic issues for example we have automatic series on art and activism in public space we have special issues on specific topics we have published two issues on arab cities and arab urbanism and we are currently working to develop a special issue on african public spaces we are also cooperating with international organizations for the development of the journal i have to thank kth royal institute of technology and the center for the future of places because they supported us since the very beginning and now the journal is also supported by rmit university in australia and the school of architecture of the chinese university of hong kong and during the pandemic we got a very generous donation by the robert bosch foundation in germany since we do not get any revenues from the journal actually this is a really very challenging project and i'm just now scrolling down to show you all the different issues that we already published so it's very challenging activity and um [Music] since we want to set the standard on a very high quality we need to engage really very good peer reviewers and we make a very um careful selection of contents that we want to publish because we are receiving many many requests we have the online submissions that are ongoing throughout the years and we it's really so enriching to see so much work around public space but at the same time we have to make you know some [Music] some selections um the journal is really an instrument to promote the contents in the new urban agenda related to public space you know that public space is clearly identified in several paragraphs of the journal of public space and has also a specific target and indicator so the objective is very clear but surprisingly the effort around the public space is big because public space as a cross-disciplinary topic is not completely and fully established and so it is mostly part of some other major disciplines like architectural design urban design landscape design but doesn't exist with its own let's say identity as a topic and so efforts in terms of establishing the knowledge around public space is really very difficult and the reason why i established the journal is that in 2014 i started to search regarding um you know other journals that were publishing articles on public space and i was surprised that at that time there was no journal that was clearly focusing on public space and so this is the reason why we established the journal of public space which is still the first and you know first ever journal entirely dedicated to public space but as i said the challenge is big and so we are now working on several other projects that are supposed to work together with the journal of public space and so for example we are now developing this web magazine which is mastering public space this is aggregation of contents related to public space that are already available on the internet from reliable and quality sources so what we are doing is that we are creating um you know like a journal which is a non-academic which is about you know general readings related to public space divided in different sections and because i think five minutes are gone already um we are also starting this brand new project which is the public space academy that has been funded now in january so recently by the overarup foundation and if you come to visit us in italy in bologna you can come to visit us at the public space museum where i'm sitting now so hope to see you soon in italy [Music] hello there i'm the final one first of all i'd like to mention that while deru is not a genius computers he has other talents i have seen him draw on the napkin at cafe upside down in front of my eyes and i can assure you that dear is a true genius uh i'm peter emblem from the exxon johnson foundation i have been running the urban city research project for 20 years i'm quitting at the end of april and but i was uh from the beginning a convinced new urbanist and i actually introduced new urbanism to sweden 2002 and in the beginning it was well received but after a while i was heavily criticized in by many in the morning press and everywhere by architects and educators so i stopped using the term new urbanism but i have been working for the term during this 20 years and i have been funding research and education at different scales the micro scale which is public space and the mesoscale which of course is master planning and among other projects i have found the strat cloud university's morphological studies project which is very exciting but also at the macro scale economists don't really understand the city's structure for them the city is just geography and liberation density such things but i have been trying to influence some important economists so we have a collaboration with oecd about small firms in urban fabric and we have a final conference in torrento in the end of april where we mix macro economists with herbalists and i think you can apply for that conference soon i think it's open for everyone we also have been funding education one of the biggest projects in that regard is the master in sustainable urban design as we call it and we have had examinated about 350 students and the first guest professor was by the way ellen dunn and jones they're very famous new urbanists so yeah in europe the term has been tricky our most successful project was the future of places project that we did in collaboration with your inhabitants and and the project for public spaces in new york and we gathered about 1500 people from more than 700 organizations 275 cities and 100 countries and the purpose was to change the focus from objects to places in city building and our key messages was influencing heavily the writings in the new urban agenda and in the sdg 11 7. it was more or less copic so it was a very successful project but of course if you collaborate with human habitat who was organizing the habitat free event it's easier but also a strong representation of power we had was important here so the start of the future places was actually a lunch at union square manhattan 2012 with fred kent and his companion kv madden and the director for you in habitat cecilia martinez and we were discussing that we needed a shortcut another type of language to convince policymakers mayors investors all these non-urbanist people who decided about cities and during that lunch we we found out that we should work for shifting the perspective from objects to places so if you look at this picture here this image of paris for most people this is a part of a city but if you can look at this part more closely you see that this is not really urban it's very dense but basically suburban in its structure the building doesn't really define public space you have no visitors behind the buildings you have no diversity so basically the city dies here of course here we have very lively streets and squares and everything but how do you explain such thing for for people who are not educated architects or urbanites that was the discussion we had at that time and it's still a very valuable discussion so i think also in our when we are describing city planning our imagery should start with places what kind of places do we want and the architecture so should support those places so whenever i'm involved in any kind of city planning uh projects i always start with that we need to just start talk with the places first architecture after that and then you will find out that all these disciplines all this silos among city planning within a city when we address the issue of public space they sort of go out of their professional role and talks like citizens because there are really manuals for creating public spaces within in the city's bureaucracy so that's a very good start so let me just finish with how you can talk about places from the other perspective so this is the space that can be defined by architecture different types of architecture of course with different specifics different morphology different blood structure so i would like to see more and more of this kind of image when you start with the places and then add the architecture uh and in the long run the architects will need to adapt to this perspective so it can be very very influential in the long run thank you is rob coming in here no peter if he could stop sharing yeah i will okay so far um unfortunately we do not have any questions in the um q a so um [Music] uh peter uh i mean those are an interesting set of diagrams um and um how far are you taking that or is that what the conference is about yeah yeah it's a part of the conference the imci conference is a little bit different from the typical cnu conference because it's much broader we always try to connect urban design with something economy sociology environmental psychology etc we never talk about urban design in itself and i think everyone should always try to connect it to some kind of outcome so i i can since we have time i can i can continue a little bit okay well um if you want to uh we do have a question um uh can you put up a link to the conference someone asked now we can do that okay we can post it on put that into the chat we can put that into the chat that might be easier everyone can see that um one question um is uh ready for both of you is uh one of the kind of main reasons against new urbanism in europe yeah of course sister was the connection to perceived style preference the shorter doesn't say anything about style it just says we should accept pluralism but since many projects that were built in america were traditionally in their style that was really controversial in the beginning of this millennia it's easier now but let's say 2002 27567 it was really controversial [Music] and i think one issue we have here is many architects see the symbolic value of architecture while ordinary people have another type of perception that they have a more prac they see it practical what can i do here is it nice here is it diverse interesting they don't think symbolically like many architects do you know is this the future or is this progressive or whatever they have in mind so we have different perception about places and architecture also uh why you know the the architects in the us have not embraced new urbanism because they see this retro lisa what about you yes yes i would like to add something to this question the issues against the new urbanism in europe since i was into actually new urbanism when i was a student during the 90s in italy and i remember that we discussed at that time implementation of the project in plinci robinson where you will have the conference uh inmates here and there was a an exhibition in um in in a beautiful monumental building in the center of bologna um presenting that project and i was a student i was with my professor you know um visiting the exhibition and understanding you know the meaning of new urbanism and it was very logic you know and coherent for me as a student but then i realized that professionals the architects and also you know local public officers didn't really give the same meaning to that intervention because um because of the tradition that peter was also mentioning you know in italy in europe we have certain values related to history and tradition and so replicating those values in contemporary times was a kind of you know disturbing let's say and also creating a lot of confusion regarding you know the legacy of history so that that was understood as an attempt to replace history with something that was resembling history but was contemporary um and so i i think this kind of um you know concepts uh are still in place uh in italy and that's why there was a huge criticism and in fact i remember when i was a student again there was there were so many things happening around the new urbanism we had a big conference in bologna with leon cree against ricardo buffiel who at the time designed a new project for the railway station by having a very very tall tower much taller than the the leaning towers that we have in bologna and so this was um there was a big reaction from from you know public opinion because they were really against this idea of a tower so tall you know the [Music] close to very horizontal neighborhoods and so leon clear was the opponent and there there was an event um that really is very much impressed in my memories uh where there was this comparison between new urbanism values and contemporary values and so it was really enriching experience but still you know those ideas are struggling to to be fully understood in europe yeah i think one of the misunderstandings is that newer urbanism promotes traditional architecture it doesn't uh if anyone reads the charter uh you know new urbanism is really agnostic to uh any style uh all styles can make greater urbanism uh but it is really the marketplace that has determined the preference of style so most of the projects at least in the us are response to the marketplace versus really the new urbanism dictating tradition uh or traditional architecture uh there's clearly a disconnect as you say peter between uh what people want uh and uh what's being delivered by the architectural profession there is a question here um i want to go on to about winterizing how do these spaces work in winter i'll start because i know that uh from john gill's work he tells me that you know yangel says that there's a little bit of italian in everybody and uh at least in places like copenhagen they now use blankets electric blankets while they still sit outside in the restaurants and the cafes give out electric blankets and i've actually experienced that myself sitting outside with an electric blanket when the weather was cold but that doesn't stop you from the rain in the snow but do you have any ideas about or conditions that you've seen that make spaces habitable in the winter no um how these spaces use in the winter time is there uh you know well if you talk about uh winter public spaces in italy um i think we have this practice to stay outside because we are mostly a mediterranean country so even if it's cold you know there is always uh you know in bologna there is a very big square at the center of the city piazza najore which one which is one of the biggest squares um in bologna and you know you always see people crossing the square you know on a diagonal trajectory even if there are particles so almost all around the square because uh i mean this there is a kind of attraction to stay outside and leave the atmosphere because public space is also about you know [Music] senses you know feelings and so this is also part of the human experience in public space and they know people are also rediscovering the value of urban qualities so up here in the north the life here has changed enormously the last 20 years people are spending much more time outside outdoors during wintertime [Music] so yes i think that that'll be a slow process of america because people are not used to people want to be inside if the weather is bad so it's not uh you know i think that's a personal comfort seems to override you know the need to be outside but it is true i think bologna is lucky because of you know whatever 20 30 50 kilometers of arcades uh allow you to you know allow the restaurants to spill out into the arcades and also make it very comfortable to walk around when it's either very hot or uh when it's the weather is bad but not all cities are that fortunate yes yes my hometown doesn't have so many you know kilometers of portuguese but still when i was um a very young student i was used to go to the main square and actually i have a nice story because when young girl came to italy to study public space he actually visited and stayed several days in my hometown which is part of life between buildings investigations and also the latest how to study public life and so that that's the inspiration that is coming from my hometown that was good for young girl and that's been good also for myself the idea that you can actually enjoy a public space because that was also the way i was living the city center in my hometown going to the main square without even having scheduled any meeting but just for the sake of enjoying you know public space and then i was sure to meet someone friends relatives you know parents because everything was happening in that main square so one of one of the things um you know we we always thought white paris and you mentioned paris uh peter uh and you know it has a population of 22 000 people per square kilometer one of the pretty dense uh by any standards and um but when you start to look at the parisian house even within the city it is really quite small the actual house itself the the spaces that you occupy i mean of course the exceptions but generally uh the units are extremely small and that forces i think in a way the need for public spaces that you have these lungs the places that you can go out and enjoy and i think going into the future as we start making smaller and smaller places uh the need for public space going to increase even more because you're referring to the plot structure yes you're referring to the plot structure yes yeah so we are at an hour point i i don't know if you want to ask and answer one more question or uh um and then bring it to a close there's a lot of conversation on uh the chat but not in the q a for some reason um and some of the comments in the chat are quite long so um it's difficult to ready to pull out a question from from those yes i see a lot of comments actually yes um three metals oh see there's a question here about today's syntax do you see that yes there's a question about space syntax uh developed and actually uh a lot of folks have actually talked about that within the um there's been uh several um folks from england who have been part of urbanism and have brought those ideas uh and that conversation uh at the various congresses so i can it's a very good analytical tool that's for sure maybe not so convincing for ordinary people for but for an urbanist architect traffic engineer maybe but i think its strongest value is in in the suburbs but if you look at the traditional part of the grid you'll you understand you understand when you see it how the flows will go it's much more difficult to understand the flows in the suburbs right verifying space syntax really valuable to figure out where to do something where should i create let's say main street in the suburban desert for example [Music] so uh rob i mean um we could continue for a few more minutes um [Music] and um i know that this will be posted so people who want to you know leave at one o'clock or it's already past one uh and so on peter can you continue or can you uh yeah do you have to sign off right now i didn't get it uh can you continue for a few more minutes or do you have to sign yeah i can i can okay okay okay so uh peter was talking about the value of space and tax in the suburbs and not so much in the city yeah for me it's more valuable as an instrument analyzing the suburbs especially european quite dense suburbs [Music] yes yes i agree because in the suburbs we have um a diff completely different environment from the consolidated historic city and so the analysis is on flows and dynamics rather than on spaces actually you can understand how to put a new public space or to adapt an existing public space according to the flows and dynamics that are happening in a certain area or in a certain neighborhood so instead of maybe designing in a traditional way let's say you can actually re-adapt reuse redesign even small parts or maybe but just adding urban furniture to create some liveable opportunities for public space um so for example the place where i'm here now the public space museum was a neighborhood supermarket and so i completely renovated this space now it's a cultural space but we are in the suburb well it's you know bologna is a very small city so when i say suburb means 15 20 minutes walk distance from the main square in the city center but still you know the environment is completely different so also the way people understand live and perceive public space is um very very very different from what they understand when they are in the historic city and there is this kind of mental attachment to the main square in the city center because that is what they understand as a public space rather than you know the street or the small park near their apartment so this is this is superimposition coming from history especially in italy and european cities in general that have this very strong legacy of the past is a kind of influencing you know the way people common people um leave public space in the suburbs but they don't even know that they are living in a public space because definition of public space in suburbs is really blurred and not fully understood there's an interesting question about formal versus informal public spaces and the best ways is places to place and use uh public space uh uh you know the formal and the informal how do you decide that there's a whole spectrum yes it's um you know very related to what i was explaining now uh because you know in um even as a dito was showing even when we see a map of a city center we clearly understand the network of public spaces but then when we compare the the map of the urban form of the city center with the same map and urban form of this verb you know public space is disappearing because it is not shaped according to the same principles that were used for the city center and so then someone could say well so public space doesn't exist in the same way it was conceived and designed for the city center but it actually exists in a completely different way that is made also of informal opportunities and so this is the richness i believe of suburban public spaces because it is always constantly different and with so many opportunities of adaptation reinvention also some temporary you know opportunities for public space and public life that are not supposed to be long-lasting and forever public space as we have you know in the city center you're much more optimistic of a suburban public space than i am um because i really think uh public space is being defined it doesn't have to be regular but as you said you know a lot of cities have a small especially the italian towns uh small towns have a public space that's the stabilizer as collin would refer to it it's a clean form that everyone can relate to and then you measure things off from that stabilizer uh that particular open space and that happens you know washington has all these intersections and uh public spaces um which really are more now more than uh traffic and it was one of my categories but all the addresses they make addresses within the city and then everything is measured off those addresses so you say i'm three blocks from dupont circle east or whatever and that's i think the importance of those public spaces because they uh their contribution is addresses but you also have as you said uh you know amorphous spaces that aren't traditional in that sense and they could just be equally exciting uh or the most important urban design element for public spaces is what you imagine it's the plot structure [Music] you can do a lot of different types of architecture if you have this fine grain mix of buildings if you allow me to share three minutes i can show you some entertaining okay about plot structure um i am sharing now yes yes yep but i have no response from the do you see this yes so this is uh one of the most important streets in stockholm honshoto extremely complex a lot of small firms a lot of bigger firms and a nice flow people live here people working it's everything it was threatened in the 60s and the politicians want to turn it down and replace it with this okay where you have one building on the block basically it never happened there but it happened at other parts of stockholm the current pattern where we build blocks in stockholm today is about two buildings on the block it doesn't really make an urban fabric maybe four or five on the block start to create something and maybe in 20 years from now we will be able to arrange the plots like this and you will have a livable main street again and the result of going from the patterns of the 60s to the traditional pattern now if you do it on the large scale they will be enormous the impact on the city will be enormous yes and and you can easily mix different groups in the block you can have different types of houses different types of price levels you learn more entrances on the street uh easier to encourage premises at street level because the individual building it's not a big economic challenge and you can have a great variation architecture as i said etc etc i think you know uh this is something we talked a lot about in urban and europe in this conversation about incremental growth and uh you know those days seem to it's almost impossible now to have incremental growth i mean uh you know developers are always packaging up lots to do large buildings and i'd like to say that a city can survive a few several small ugly buildings it can't survive a large ugly building you know because that totally devastates the block uh when you've got this very banal facade like you were showing uh maybe the only solution to help that is is landscape um you know trees hiding the building but i think those days unfortunately economics today you know and the people who are developing are developing in very large quantities under the guise of efficiency you know that uh it's efficient to build like in china you know in china you know if you don't build the same floor plan for 2 million square feet or 10 million square feet they think it's inefficient uh because every bathroom is the same every you know all everything is the same between the units and i think there's a false economy there because what you actually then produce is something that's really uh unlivable unlikable unlovable uh you know because it's so monotonous and it'd be great if you could find a way economically to return to building small uh and incrementally and uh you know i'm not sure how you do that peter maybe some of your folks uh you know uh but mostly all the developers uh that we deal with um really want to aggregate lots as much as possible and build the largest thing and you know and unfortunately when the economy collapses you know you're left with this gigantic unfinished monster sitting in the city um or it's vacant um so i don't know peter you got any thoughts about the economics of building small it is not that expensive as you might think okay i have worked with some big building companies in sweden and we have been calculating back and forth it's absolutely possible to build fine grain structure okay any examples the trick is to that one builder is doing the whole block right so you can have efficient production of it right but what about one architect the trouble here is if you have not divided the block into different pieces you can have different architecture as long as you have the same structure around the block okay the basic structure then you can have a different type of architecture at the front if you want to do it on a large scale yeah yeah i think that's a works in theory but i think when you come in front of the developer development community uh they bargained the price with one architect and uh you know that's the other part of the the feed that's much lower when you're dealing with one entity versus dealing with multiple entities you also see examples in germany obvious where they allow people to build their own multi-family houses on the block you have seen those maybe they're quite fine-grained right have you been in tubingan for example lots of fiber [Music] that's a policy that's uh it's really more policy from top down that permits that or makes that possible yeah we're getting some interesting questions about um i think sort of modern society uh um uh bob haley from upstate new york also um uh notes that the public realm has been evolved traditionally from the growth of the village and it's uh being is it being attached from the evolving private urban our private urban lives uh we have another question about the the importance of public spaces in the digital realm i think they're related can you all talk a little bit about that well i would like to personally not have any digital in public spaces you know the whole point of the public space is interaction with other people and what you find today is a lot of people sitting in public spaces you know looking at their cell phone um so you know i think we've lost that one-on-one communicator what we're doing now i think it's very common that people talk about public space as something related to democracy or something like that you know going back to the anti-greek analytics and so so but you should the opposite of public space is private space or maybe i would say private behavior you have the bathroom behavior the drawing room behavior the garden behavior you know it's a sequence of different behaviors and out there you have public behaviors and they can happen also in in the orthotherian country they also have public behaviors it's not related to democracy or free speech or something like that it's about behaviors different degrees of publicness or privateness can you say some english but what whatever well yes if i can add this concept of publicness is very important and also going back to what you were discussing before related to economy um you know in italy we have been into a lot of austerity measures i mean the south the south of europe went into a lot of restrictions economic restrictions and in general i would say that in italy there is a certain investment in public space in the city center because also politicians and public officers understand the value of public space in the city center also because it produces tourism and economic revenues but they do not understand why it is important to invest also in suburban areas for public space development so investment it means investment in terms of design investment in terms of the financial resources and so also the way you know the city center is approached and suburban areas are approached is different from those that from top down are supposed to develop policies implementation and actions so in in the suburban developments that the publicness is coming without any economic support somehow and it is mostly based on community efforts and bottom-up temporary activities that are really a mirror of this the suburban society i would say so that's why it is very interesting to study you know suburban areas and to understand how such public dynamics that are uh really much linked also to private behaviors as uh peter was was saying are intertwined and are you know informing uh way of life a way of urbanism you know in a certain way i think i read now i will uh thank everybody for uh being part of this and uh thank you peter luisa deru and michael who is not present um but contributed and all of the uh the people who uh uh participated and watched this uh we thank you very much for this and i look forward to seeing people in oklahoma city and and perhaps meeting up some people will meet up in paris as well yeah well thank you peter and louisa and michael um look forward to having more of these conversations with an international group of folks so thank you thank you for having me absolutely good day bye