Public Spaces, spaces of public domain: Icons of a contemporary simulacrum?

Abstract

The contemporary city is a result of plural connections between the historical matrix and the effects of global policies. Immersed in a flux of multiple contents, it seems to respond to an era of transition in which the sense of belonging to an urban space is profoundly tensioned by transformations in the cultural, social, technological and political dimensions of public space. On the one hand, contemporary urban territorialities bring new possibilities to issues related to urban morphology and fabric that are still mainly culturally determined; on the other, contemporary thinking confronts itself with the tendency of a global scenario where public life and contemporary culture are related to consumption and capital circulation. Although relations of belonging and attachment to the urban space may persist, the flow of global conditions seems to have an impact upon collective experience in the urban territory and in the production of public space. These are transformations that may lead not only to the instrumentalization of space but also to the reduction of its ‘public’ value. In the contemporary city we observe particular processes of functional and economic spatializations of the urban where public spaces are not conceived as spaces of a public realm. Noting that the intersection between past/present time-cultural flows should go beyond the (re)production of any new global paradigm of thematic urban configurations, we argue that the theoretical constructs of the contemporary public space, or spaces of public domain, must be representative not of a thematic ‘everywhere-nowhere’ urban environment, but rather of a public life urbanity, one built upon awareness and around political and civic issues.