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Many agree that the notion of the urban and public areintertwined: that is, we cannot conceive of the urban withouta conception of public space. Yet in the current reality ofurban environments at low densities, the interdependence ofurbanity and public space as we know it can be questioned.

The concept of public space enables the architecturalprofession to go beyond the sole service of the private sector,beyond the whims and particular desires of the individualclient, and directly engage in giving shape to public life.Architects here become interpreters of the public good their client being the public itself, they act on behalf of thecollective interest.

Can urbanity exist without the production of public spaceor vice versa? And, in parallel, can architecture as aprofession give up the role of designing for the public?

Stan Allen: I think to start with we need to be sceptical of thisvague notion of public space. Public space is a concept that ison the one hand hardly ever defined with any degree ofspecificity, and on the other never questioned as to its value.Thats a dangerous combination. We think of the traditionalcity as the locus of public space, but what do we mean? It isworthwhile to look at the traditional city, historically, and askwhat was the notion of public space, what and where arethese public spaces, squares, markets, etc, and how are theyused? We would find that each one has a very specific andoften very different pattern. If we look specifically at the

American city, as Robert Venturi pointed out, the romanticnotion of the European piazza (as the emblematic publicurban space) is something that never really existed in theAmerican city. So, with full awareness that I am treading on asacred icon (public space is like motherhood or apple pie, itcant be criticised), I would start by signalling my scepticismabout the concept as it is usually evoked especially in theAmerican context. In my view its more important to thinkfirst about publics, in all their specificity and multiplicity, andthen look at their spatial practices.

This notion of spatial practice derives from Michel deCerteaus, who also elaborates a distinction between spaceand place. Space is an abstract notion that acquires specificityin relation to specific practices. Place, writes de Certeau, ispracticed space. So you would almost have to ask thequestion: What are the spatial practices that could activatethis abstract notion of public space? We can talk about thosespatial practices that create the potential for public places. Inthe larger sense, another interesting thing about de Certeausviews is that he has a faith in the collective creativity ofsubjects, in their tendency to invent ways to use the spacesthat are given to them. You could argue that the traditionalnotion of public space is a kind of top-down argumentwhereby public space is given to the public. I would turn thatequation around to say: How does the collective create publicspace with the spaces that are given/found?

This means that the role of the architect is to make a spacefor that public to create the conditions where the public can

Discussion

Paola Vigan, Landscapes of Water, Veneto, Italy, 2006 Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Westside, Berne, Switzerland, due for completion 2008

Architecture and DispersalArchitecture and DispersalTo close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion withStan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocativequestions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the publicsphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects andurban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have beenquick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change?

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freely exercise its collective creativity. Its for this reason thatIve always been suspicious of the attempt to overscript theuse of public space. For me, a successful public space isprecisely a space where something unanticipated happens. Sothe job of the architect becomes calibrating the right mixbetween specificity, imagining and projecting potential usesinto the space, creating the right measure, understandingflow and access, while always leaving some noise in thesystem, a degree of play, that allows for the unexpected. Thearchitects job is to create spaces with potential. Thatpotential is in turn activated by the way in which the space isput to use put into play by the public itself. There is animportant paradox that has been articulated by MichelFoucault, who has pointed out that there are architecturesthat constrain freedom and free expression, but there are nospecifically liberating architectures. Freedom, writesFoucault, is a practice. In this sense it can be given space, butit cannot, by definition, be dictated from above. I dont seethis as a problem for architects, but rather quite the reverse it means that our job is not to script spatial practices, butrather to create the precise architectural conditions wherethose practices have the best chance of survival.

Marcel Smets: The classic answer would be that the churchsquare no longer works, since people no longer go to church.Public space has become a telanovela, an individual yet sharedexperience. In each type of urbanity, places that are sharedcan be considered public spaces. Whether this is necessarily ahighly concentrated space can be questioned. Even in highdensities we see a tendency for isolation. In a certain way, weare talking about places where we frequently spend time,spaces that touch and connect people with other people, fromcemeteries to recreation places, sports fields, transportlocations, etc. Public space does not disappear but multiply,it loses its hierarchy and has become more temporary, forexample in the form of events and festivals.

Cities are now concentration points in urban nebulae.Places of gathering that used to be associated with city centresare splintering. In Flanders, this has created a new type of citycentre where recreation is the only urban activity left. Inmany Flemish towns, even civic services such as post offices

and administrative centres are moving away from the centrebased on a false idea of efficiency. The main square that usedto host political demonstrations is now only a place forentertainment and tourism. The flocking together ofprogrammes such as sports, education, etc causes urbanity todisappear. Collective space gets to be pre-coded if not privatised.

Sarah Whiting: Lament-drenched, post-lapsarian narrativesabout a lost public sphere that needs to be recovered appearto have wormed their way even into AD. These sentimentsinvariably feed futile retrieve and recover missions thatshare success/failure rates with other contemporary missionsbased on myths. The public sphere in the US has, from itsinception, been tied as much, if not more, to business than toits presumptive origin in government or some variant ofpublic organisation. As much as we may want to believe in thealtruistic alignments of public space and public agency, nowmore than ever the public sphere invariably finds easieralliances in private partnerships than it does in public policy.Bottom Line Public Spaces (BLPS) dot the entirety of Americanurbanism and are very likely the only hope for public spacethat we will see in the near future. The American urbanlandscape, beginning with Daniel Burnhams ChicagoExposition of 1893, the Washington DC MacMillan Plan of1902 (also designed by Burnham), or beginning even earlierwith the nations land surveys and acquisition policies, haslong been directed primarily by monetary concerns. Whilecolonial cities such as Savannah were organised so as tocreate miniature cities within a city, each centred on a publicgreen, the incentive for cities planned after independence hasarisen from the private sector, illustrating John Lockesobservation of 1690 that: The great and chief end, therefore,of mens uniting into commonwealths, and puttingthemselves under government, is the preservation of theirproperty. In short, the space of the American urban landscape urban, suburban, dense, or not utilises the delineation ofproperty ownership as its base map. This fact simply cannotbe avoided when discussing public space.

The privatisation of public space finds a willingaccomplice in programming in the definition,organisation and construction of what happens in that space.

Manuel Vicente, Carlotta Bruni and Rui Leo, Nam Van Square, Macau, China, 2007 Manuel de Sol-Morales, Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire, France, 1998

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But as the programming of contemporary life accelerates, theprogramming of contemporary public space cannot keep pace.Unlike Burnhams Grant Park of 1909, a green and sandy stripbetween the city and the lake, Chicagos recent MillenniumPark is fully programmed with music, art, wildflower paths,skating and eating. It was easier to believe that we had apublic sphere when we felt that we had time for it; now,without that time, were seeing how small that sphere maybe. Accompanied by constant headlines such as Is your childtoo busy? Make sure to schedule family fun time too, we arefast becoming a culture with no time or space, let alonepublic. The Center for Economic Policy Research, based inWashington DC, points out that the US is the only advancedeconomy in the world that does not guarantee its workerspaid vacations, and that 61 per cent of workers in the US takeless than 15 days vacation a year. If we drop the falsenarrative of an original, pure, wholly public sphere andaccept that, at least in the American context, the publicsphere is always very much intertwined with the private oneand is being squeezed out of existence because of a lack ofspace and time to perceive it, the ensuing questions need to beretooled. How do we, as architects, foster new possibilities inthe public sphere, particularly in the dispersed environmentsthat are the focus of this issue of AD? Lamenting an absentidealised public sphere is futile. Starting from the status quodoesnt mean selling out: given the public sphere that weveinherited the American BLPS here is what we need to do:

BOTTOM LINES: Give public space a bottom line. Let it make aprofit.

MASS MARKET: Multiply, multiply, multiply. Like LadybirdJohnsons wildflower campaign, the small aggregates tocreate the large. And the large is just fine.

STACK THE DECK: If lawns and asphalt are irresponsible,discover the new horizontal.

MAKE A PITCH: Sell the public to the public. Let them speak,and give them a space to say it in.

KNOW YOUR MEDIUM: To know your image is to know yourpublic (even when it looks funny).

LOVE YOUR SKIN: Revel in surfaces. Colours, textures, patterns these are the plinths, frames and tones of public space.

The fleeing of the public from the city, as described in thisissue of AD by Bruce Robbins reading of Thomas Pynchon onthe one hand, and Albert Popes analysis of changes in theorganisation of settlements from grid to cul-de-sac on theother, raises questions about the relevance of previous formsand expressions of public space to contemporary culture andsettlement patterns.

Alex Wall seems to suggest that in Southeast Asia, thelifestyle shopping centre has the potential to become a modelof a new type of public space. More and more we see theemerging of a wide range of collective spaces produced by ahighly advanced private market. Their design andorganisation is based on mechanisms of high profit, limitedaccess and high security environments.

How can architects develop new models for public spacewithin dispersed urbanities? Can self-contained spaces withlimited access be considered public?

Margaret Crawford: There are many opportunities forproducing public spaces within existing suburban landscapes.But, in general, architects know almost nothing aboutsuburban life. Trying to understand how people live, work andinteract in dispersed areas should be their first priority. Theyalso need to acknowledge the enormous variety of dispersedurban conditions. In the US, suburbs can be rich or poor, closeor far from a city, with or without a centre, to name just a fewdistinctions. To discuss, say, Montecito, a wealthy suburb ofSanta Barbara, California, and working-class Medford,Massachusetts, outside of Boston as equivalent examples ofdispersed urbanism does justice to neither. Although thediversity of suburban lives and circumstances demandsspecific strategies, still, there are several obvious types of sitesthat cry out for a little more public-ness. One is the ubiquitousstrip mall. Home to virtually every suburban commercialfunction, from grocery stores to restaurants to local boutiques,the strip malls current form is a bar of programmesurrounded by a sea of parking. Yet with a little tweaking itcould become a public place. Add a piazza or town green,include some public functions (library, vehicle registrationdepartment, city offices), a coffee shop or caf, close the bar

arquitectura 911sc, New Caracol, Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007 MUTOPIA, Mikado Plaza, restad Nord, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2005

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with two wings, and rearrange the parking. Voila! a newpublic/private place that would satisfy most urbanists. Andwithout disturbing the malls necessary commercial functions.A beautifully designed strip mall? Why not?

Other suburban sites whose public-ness could easily beamped up include schools (by adding functions, introducingafter-hours uses or even commercial activities), existing butfaded main streets (where, often, everyday commercialactivities like supermarkets can enliven street life), or evenmonofunctional civic centres (whose lives can be extendedbeyond working hours with new public and privateprogrammes such as theatres, sports complexes and parks).All of these transformations should acknowledge the realitiesof dispersed urbanism, such as the primacy of the automobile,by providing sufficient parking. But at the same timeresidents should also be offered alternative means of access bycreating bicycle and pedestrian paths, and even well-designedbus stops. In dispersed areas, architects will have to give uptheir dream of fixed rail transit as a generator of publicspaces. Buses are cheaper, more flexible, and with new formsof electronic scheduling can nearly reproduce the door-to-doorcapacities of private automobiles.

Marcel Smets: To turn this question around, the governmentcould play a more active role in increasing accessibility topublic spaces. As architect to the Flemish government, Imyself make an effort to raise awareness about makingcollective spaces more accessible. On the other hand, theRoman forum or the Greek agora were also never fullyaccessible and we should be careful not to fall for a myth.The space of infrastructure is usually accessible for all,although not always equally. After all, the space that doesnot belong to anyone is potentially the most public. Thestreet, the anonymous main street, rather than theneighbourhood street, can be seen as public, where beggarsand homeless walk side by side with inhabitants and visitors.Although there are many mechanisms that make claimedspaces such as supermarkets more multivalent, unclaimedspace seems to offer more possibilities. In Brussels 19th-century belt we can find examples of unclaimed space,where a more layered collectivity can take place, not only

shared by equally minded users. This is the kind of urbanitywe should strive for, rather than the increasing cocooning ofprivatised public space, a pseudo-urbanity that has beenfixed ahead of time. For example, walking in Manhattan it issurprising how the New York University compound hasbecome so much more predictable than it used to be. All theingredients of a university campus have been provided, themenu of a nice neighbourhood.

To a certain extent, design is always running behind thefact, but it can also be a confrontation. Not everybody findsthe current developments that interesting; they can becomforting yet not challenging, and in parallel there existmicroworlds that are more interesting. As designers we havethe responsibility to make people imagine and realise thatbeauty can lie in very small things. The scene in the movieAmerican Beauty, where the camera follows a plastic bag flyingin the air, is extremely fascinating yet also very depressing.Our perceptions have become private experiences, while thepublic sphere requires the sharing of experience. As designerswe can draw attention to small, shared experiences of beauty,unexpected, multilayered, accessible. We can work withmicro-interventions and lost spaces that function as implants,teasing and provoking the current state of terrifying banality.How else to operate than in the margin? Large projects aretoday managed by developers who work according to thestereotypical representations and expectancy patterns of theirusers. Nevertheless, architects can challenge theseexpectations and strive for a surprise effect. In the currentboredom of banality, this kind of approach is very much needed.

In several projects presented in the issue, we can identifyattempts of the urban plan to employ landscape as an activeurban force that can give meaning to otherwise loose,neglected voids within the larger low-density environment(for example, in projects such as the Philadelphia UrbanVoids competition, Bonheiden, Belgium, and El Caracol inMexico City). Research projects such as the work of PaolaVigan and Bruno De Meulder suggest that whole geographicregions and landscapes be read as one continuous spacelayered with different systems/networks. Other projects(such as KMar and Mikado) incorporate the landscape feature

Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel, Image Quality Plan, Bonheiden, Belgium, 2005 Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti, Waiting Spaces/Intermittent Cities, Veneto, Italy, 2004

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as an integral part of the urban thinking, and experimentwith the non-built as a generative element.

Temporality and transience, traditionally attributed tonature and ecology, have now become an important aspect ofdesigning public spaces in dispersed environments. Severalprojects propose a non-permanent approach to design,working with users and inhabitants (for example those byMUTOPIA and Claudia Faraone) or provide options for futurechanges (Timescape and the Urban Voids competition).

Can strategies of landscape design offer new approachesfor designing public space in environments of urbandispersal? Is this an indispensable compromise of thedispersed city? Can public space only exist temporarilyand then again disappear?

Marcel Smets: Both landscape and infrastructure are in theprocess of acquiring new roles within the contemporaryurban condition. The flocking together of similar programmesand activities creates a highly developed system ofconnections that can receive a new meaning as public space.Landscape, on the other hand, becomes very much related tothe question of identity. Much of the built space starts to looksimilar, which makes landscape into a place of identity. At thesame time, landscape has become a place of escaping thepredefined. For example, the festival emerged as an attemptto break out of the theatre into the landscape. A promise ofcontinuous change can now be found in the landscape.Landscape offers an unclaimed territory, and thereforepossibly a new type of public space.

Margaret Crawford: Landscape architects, used to dealingwith open spaces, are clearly more adept than architectswho are obsessed with filling space, in working withdispersed urban conditions. Landscape architects can designparks, parking lots, subdivisions and roadsides, all staples ofthe dispersed landscape. In fact, trees, gardens and greenspaces of all kinds are among the suburbs primaryattractions. This suggests that we are urgently in need of anew discourse of landscape suburbanism.

Time as much as space should be a key component of thisnew discourse. As Robert Fishman has argued, life in the newdispersed city depends on time as much as space. Thus,adding a temporal dimension to design in the suburbs shouldnot be viewed as a compromise, but as an amplification ofpossibilities. In the suburbs, public experiences, rather thanexisting as fixed points in spaces, accumulate over the courseof the day and night, week and weekend, winter and summer.The challenge for designers is to weave more of these publicmoments into the built and unbuilt fabric of dispersedurbanism. Again, this would require them to acquire a deeperknowledge of the circuits and cycles that constitute suburbanlives. But I am convinced that paying close attention to thesuccessive events of suburban life can produce new andunexpected ways to experience public life.

Stan Allen: Landscape architecture or what has come to becalled landscape urbanism is an absolutely key term tobring up when you talk about dispersed cities. The attractionof landscape urbanism is that it offers a new set of tools tobe deployed in the design of the void spaces, the so-calledempty spaces, between buildings, roadways, infrastructureand what has been traditionally called landscape, but istoday something beyond the mere design of gardens andparks. These tools new ways of thinking and working areideally suited to this emerging dispersed field. As adiscipline, in part because of its minor status and lack ofhistory, landscape architecture has the potential to become akind of synthetic discipline that incorporates the insights ofecology, infrastructure and urbanism landscapearchitecture is situated at the point of intersection betweenregional ecologies, infrastructure, open space design,architecture and urbanism.

So landscape urbanism has already emerged as a seriousfield of study: it has a 10-year history, a number ofrecognised practitioners, a catalogue of projects, and its ownliterature (at least two well-conceived collections haveappeared recently, for example). This is a very promisingdevelopment, and it opens up a lot of interesting territory. Itdoesnt seem accidental that the rise of landscape urbanism

Vito Acconci, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2003 Martha Rosler, Oleanna/Utopia Station, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2003

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parallels the emergence of the city as a dispersed fieldcondition in the late 20th century.

Recognising that attraction, I just want to point out threeareas that, for me, constitute both the areas of greatestpromise, but, paradoxically, the potential pitfalls of thelandscape urbanism approach. It is possible to identify threekey terms that have to do with the overlap and intersectionbetween the discourses of landscape and architecture:

Connectivity: Its no accident that there is a parallelfascination in architecture and landscape for thesurface. Surface is the territory of landscape, and thereis an idea that the warped surface promises totalconnectivity, doing away with architectures verticaldimension, which has become associated withpartitioned space. This is of course attractive but naive.It becomes easy to fall into a false utopia of totalconnectivity, continuous flows, etc. This suggests closerattention to breaks, discontinuities and separations and their social/programmatic value in both landscapeand architecture.

Indeterminate programme or multi-use: Here, too, thereis this attractive idea that on an open field anything canhappen sports, festivals, demonstrations, concerts,picnics, etc. To my mind, it is something of anabdication of responsibility, a kind of loose thinkingwhere it is possible to say, Dont worry aboutprogramme, there is no need for the architect todetermine anything, because programme take care ofitself. This approach can be seen analogous to thenotion of 1960s universal space a space, in theory,where anything can happen, yet where, as was often thecase, nothing happens. The architects obligation tospecificity and design remains.

Emergence: In both architecture and landscape therehas been a fascination with self-organisation andemergence, the notion that the architect supplies a kindof infrastructure and then you just let things happen

over time. This is based on a loose appeal to ideas ofecological succession. The idea that self-organisation andemergence are associated with lack of specificity andlack of design is itself a misunderstanding. What anecologist will tell you, on the contrary, is thatemergence does not happen all by itself, in a vacuum.Its triggered by differences and imbalances in the initialconditions. In the urban or landscape realm, where weare talking about artificial ecologies, you dont getemergence without very carefully designed initialconditions. The architects obligation to design thoseinitial conditions with a high degree of precision andspecificity remains.

So for me, landscape urbanism is an important emergingfield. What is interesting is that each of these areas has bothan enormous potential and some room for error. Its a youngfield where things are still in flux, ideas are still being workedout. Thats what makes it exciting. It has the potential tochange our notion of urban design by making available a newset of tools and, above all, by foregrounding the question oftime and the question of process. To my mind these are thereal contributions of landscape urbanism. On the other hand,it is possible to look somewhat critically on the actualpractices of landscape urbanism: most practitioners havebeen doing large-scale urban parks, they havent actuallybeen doing urbanism. In part this is because theinstitutional realm those who commission large-scaleprojects have yet to catch up. Landscape urbanism isenormously promising, but we havent yet seen the fullimpact in practice. We are still waiting for projects that showa real synthesis of landscape and urbanism. 4

Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 102(l) Paolo Vigan; p 102(r) Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG; p 103(l) Rui Leo, Carlotta Bruni andManuel Vicente, photo Carlotta Bruni; p 103(r) Dominique Macel, Service duCommunication de Saint Nazaire; p 104(l) Jose Castillo lea, arquitectura911sc; p 104(r) MUTOPIA ApS; p 105(l) Els Verbakel, Elie Derman ofDerman Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 105(r) ClaudiaFaraone and Andrea Sarti; p 106(tl) Acconci Studio; p 106(tr) MarthaRosler; p 106 (bl&br) URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change City ParksAssociation of Philadelphia; p 107(l) Rafi Segal; p 107(r) Zvi Hecker

Rafi Segal, Archipelago of the Negev Desert, Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007 Zvi Hecker, KMar, Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007