PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT.

Throughout history, public space has formed the backdrop to public life, for commercial transactions, social exchange, entertainment, protest and contemplation. Now as Western society becomes more introverted and private, such spaces are under threat, but the need remains for poetic and pragmatic responses to public life.

In around 1730 Canaletto painted the Piazza San Marco in Venice. His picture is an intricately detailed portrait of the activities of daily Venetian life: clusters of people engaged in conversation, others crossing the piazza, some observing activity, children running about and playing, dogs stretched out in the sun, vendors and hawkers along the edges. The space is filled with energy and a palpable sense of the enjoyment to be derived from spending time in such a lively public setting. In Canaletto's painting, everyone seems to have a place, with ample opportunity to engage in the various activities depicted by the artist. The minutiae of public life enrich and animate the scene. Over two hundred years later, the piazza still looks much as it did in Canaletto's day and is still the backdrop to the same sorts of activities.

The existence of public life is a prerequisite to the development of public space. Public space is the stage upon which the drama of communal life unfolds. The streets, squares, parks and public buildings of towns and cities give form to the ebb and flow of human exchange. Such spaces are an essential counterpart to the more settled, private places and routines of work and domestic life, providing channels for movement, communication and common spaces for recreation and contemplation. In all communal life there is a shifting balance between public and private activities. Within this equilibrium, different cultures place a different degree of emphasis on public space. In Mediterranean cultures, civic and religious power is manifest in palaces, town halls and churches that face main streets and squares. In Muslim North Africa, public space is limited -- apart from markets and shopping streets -- yet the private domains of the home, mosque and Koranic school are rich in form and expression.

Places, spaces and meaning

From the Greek agora to the contemporary mall, the forms of public space are a direct reflection of society's public and private values. Throughout history, communities have developed public spaces that support their needs -- markets for commercial transactions, places for sacred celebrations, or sites for local rituals. Specific places acquire meaning through their functions, further intensifying their role in people's lives. The river used for laundering clothes can be a place for exchanging information. The market has historically played a role in communicating local news, providing a context for political behaviour. Public places are a source of social exchange and also often a rallying place for demanding wider personal and political rights -- the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe was precipitated by mass demonstrations in public settings. But the form of public space can also be used to exert authoritarian control. The axes, allees, triumphal arches, colonnades, rigidly symmetrical planting and carefu lly controlled vistas of past landscapes are vivid expressions of domination.

For most people, the various parts of the day are distributed over public and private spheres. Examples of individuals living largely private or anti-social lives are the exception rather than the rule. The balance of public and private life and its effect on space emerges from a complex set of factors --physical, social, political and economic -- that have evolved through history. In ancient Rome, all wills had to be opened in a public setting -- a basilica or forum -- and this had to take place during the day with witnesses in attendance. Conversely, marriage was a completely private activity requiring no public authority. Over time, changes in the nature of family life have significantly affected the public/private balance. By the seventeenth century, the concept of domestic privacy -- formerly a luxury of the well-to-do -- slowly began to reach the middle and lower classes, stimulated by social and economic changes, notably the separation of the home from the workplace. Privacy has since become a cherish ed aspect of Western life, assiduously protected by constitutional laws and public policy. At the same time, many of the settings for public life have disappeared. Strategic interventions of capital have violently transformed the public substance of the city into a privatized realm, reconstituted for the few rather than the many. Spaces that were once sites of markets, recreation and social intercourse have been lost or made redundant. This must be a profound source of regret. When public life and public space are lacking or neglected, people become isolated, eroding any sense of communal spirit and cohesion.

The intimate society

Contemporary social and political systems, especially as they affect cities, tend to encourage privatization as people are drawn inexorably inward by their work and personal lives. The growth of today's intimate society has been fast forwarded by advances in communications technology and the rise of the virtual realm. From its modest beginnings, the World Wide Web has evolved with dizzying rapidity into the ultimate virtual public space, a vast, throbbing cyber agora populated by a global community of real users, indulging in all kinds of activity -- shopping, browsing, chatting, studying, being entertained, stimulated and informed. Unlike Piazza San Marco, it is spatially infinite and phenomenologically abstract, untouched by the effects of climate, time, seasons, geography or physical humanity.

Cyber fiction writer William Gibson is a prominent speculator on the consequences of such advancements. 'For millennia, architects have been concerned with the skin-bounded body and its immediate sensory environment -- with providing shelter, warmth and safety, with casting light on the surfaces that surround it, with creating conditions for conversation and music, with orchestrating the touch of hard and soft and rough and smooth materials, and with breezes and scents. Now they must contemplate electronically augmented, reconfigurable, virtual bodies that can sense and act at a distance, but that also remain partially anchored in their immediate surroundings,' he proclaims. [1] Gibson's vision is seductively articulated, but his new virtual order is yet some way off and its potentially depopulating and negative effects on public space have broadly been resisted.

The relationship of public life to public space is dynamic and reciprocal and made up of many strands. The task of architects and urban designers is to weave these diverse elements into a sustainable, integrated fabric that takes account of the spatial, social and technical systems that constitute the private and public life of the city. The notion of the architect as weaver is a particularly useful and apposite metaphor, as Judith Kinnard describes: 'In rejecting collage in favour of weaving, one discovers a potential therapeutic metaphor that prescribes no specific or formal strategies beyond the notion of the city as a connected structure -- a man-made network of individual threads that gains strength through their interconnection, which encourages the expression of their visual and tactile qualities. Such a conceptual model might encourage the development of analytical methods and urban design sensibilities promoting the creation of a city structure that is not rigid and brittle, but has the supple streng th of woven fabric. The architect and urbanist might then be conceived not as the autocratic surgeon or artist, but instead a skilled craftsperson -- a weaver carefully contexturing the fabric of the city.' [2]

Underpinning this thoughtful approach should be a recognition that the city is part of nature, balanced by a concern for social equality and a resolve to keep private initiatives under public control. Only then will it be possible to devise new and poetic public spaces capable of sustaining our pluralistic urban life.

(1.) 'Cyborg Civics', William Gibson, Harvard Architecture Review, vol 10, 1998, p173.

(2.) 'Contexturing the City' Judith Kinnard, ibid, p22.