Urban design and city regeneration: brief course notes. Public space: considerations on its evolution through time

Abstract

Public space has experienced processes of change along history. Its identity and form are multiple too, depending on the social and cultural context in which they have been created or redesigned. The contemporary nature of public space is associated with concepts like intensity, diversity, complexity and relationship. Such concepts attribute to public spaces different identities and make possible to consider them as places or non places of the cosmopolis. In front of the lack of a precise definition of public space, it appears the necessity to open a field of research and debate from several disciplines. The sociological and anthropological aspects are more and more meaningful in the study of these spaces, and the interest rises mainly for our field of knowledge, urban design, at the moment we analyze their capacity to generate places. And the urban project of contemporary public space, considered from the point of view of the architecture which implicitly produces it and from the point of view of the intensity of uses, has been a field of research in our Department of Urbanism and Regional Planning (DUOT) during the last decades. Besides, it has been included in the teaching programs both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and it has also generated a transfer of knowledge towards the professional sphere, finding in the city of Barcelona a true Laboratory of Urban Projects. The aim of this paper is to set out the topics of the urban project and the public space regeneration throughout history, using the doctrinal statements of Manuel de Solà Morales. Is expected to draw some useful guidelines for the intervention on our cities, learning thanks to lessons from the past, and from the present as well.