CPUD '26 / XII. International City Planning and Urban Design Conference

City and Public Space in the Contemporary Panorama

Between Morphological Evolution and Identity Crisis

Llazar Kumaraku · Assoc. Prof., PhD · Faculty of Planning, Environment and Urban Management�Skender Luarasi · Assoc. Prof., PhD · Faculty of Research and Development�POLIS University of Tirana, Albania

City and Public Space in the Contemporary Panorama

Kumaraku & Luarasi

2 / 20

ABSTRACT

An Inquiry into the Material and Immaterial City

This paper investigates the character of the contemporary city of the third millennium along two intertwined dimensions: the physical (material) and the social flows and relationships (immaterial). In an era in which traditional urban boundaries are dissolving towards a ‘liquid’ and territorial nature, the city today appears amorphous, at best with unstable forms.��The argument traces the transition from the closed, utopian city of modernism to the postmodern global city, where the disappearance of metanarratives has fragmented the community and, with it, urban form. Particular attention is given to the square as the paradigmatic public space, and to its mutation under conditions of globalisation, deglobalisation and digital mediation.

KEYWORDS

Architecture�City�Identity�Form�Square

Source paper

Kumaraku, L. & Luarasi, S.

‘City and Public Space in the Contemporary Panorama: Between Morphological Evolution and Identity Crisis’.

City and Public Space in the Contemporary Panorama

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RESEARCH FRAMEWORK

Aims and Guiding Questions

AIMS

• To examine the morphological condition of the contemporary city and the dissolution of its traditional limits.
• To revisit the historical role of the square and to test the ‘myth’ of the premodern public space as the locus of social cohesion.
• To interpret the displacement of public functions into ‘third places’ and ‘telematic squares’.
• To reframe the architectural value of the square within the global production of iconic architectures.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

Q1. What characterises the city of the third millennium once its physical boundaries dissolve?��Q2. Did the premodern square genuinely engender community, or has the assumption itself become a myth?��Q3. Where do the historical functions of the square reside today?��Q4. What architectural value can the square still claim in the era of global iconic buildings?

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METHODOLOGY

A Theoretical and Historical Reading

The argument is developed through a qualitative, theoretical methodology that interweaves architectural history, urban theory and social philosophy.

01

Historical reading

Revisits canonical urban proposals (Howard, Garnier, Hilberseimer, Le Corbusier) and the radical critique of Archizoom and Superstudio.

02

Theoretical analysis

Engages Bauman, Innerarity, Hardt & Negri, Sennett, Augé and Ostrom on community, common good and non-place.

03

Morphological inquiry

Reads the square through Sitte, Guidoni, Nencini and Purini, distinguishing aesthetic-morphological from social functions.

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PART I · THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

From the Closed City to a Liquid Territory

Throughout the modern era, theorists from Plato and More to Howard, Garnier, Hilberseimer and Le Corbusier conceived the city as a unicum: a closed environment with definite limits, set against the surrounding nature.��Today the city no longer has limits. Leonardo Benevolo (2011) goes so far as to defend the thesis of the end of the city as a finite, walled settlement. The contemporary urban condition is, in Bauman’s vocabulary, liquid: amorphous, expanded to a territorial scale, with unstable form.

“

The city no longer has limits; the very notion of a finite settlement set against nature has dissolved.

— after Benevolo (2011)

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ANALYTICAL FRAME

Three Aspects of the Contemporary City

Social

An open, liquid society in which metanarratives have collapsed and community has dissolved. With no shared ideology, the rationale for designing structures that foster collective life is itself called into question.

Environmental

Since the 1970s the awareness of planetary finitude has produced a protective approach to nature. Sustainability is here read as the assurance of primary human needs, not as a retreat into environmentalism that liquefies architecture.

Mediatic

The contemporary city is communicative: it places spaces, knowledge and habits in common, and must convey safety, well-being and enjoyment. Urban quality becomes a multidisciplinary concern (architects, philosophers, sociologists, economists).

The morphological dimension — intrinsically linked to the social — remains shaped by the pressures of the environmental and mediatic spheres.

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GENEALOGY

From the Closed City to the Postmodern Global City

MODERN CITY

Closed and utopian

• Plato, More, Campanella, Fourier — utopia as a city without injustice.
• Howard’s Garden City, Garnier’s Cité Industrielle, Hilberseimer, Le Corbusier.
• Conceived as a unicum: limit, totality, ideology.
• Architecture as a vehicle for a coherent social project.

POSTMODERN GLOBAL CITY

Open, liquid, territorial

• Disappearance of metanarratives → fragmentation of community.
• First global cities and uncontrolled expansion.
• Urban form becomes amorphous, unstable, indeterminate.
• ‘Common ground’ surfaces as a precarious horizon (Biennale 2012).

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CRITICAL EPISODE

Radical Architecture and the Refusal of Sociability

Pistoia, 4–17 December 1967. Archizoom and Superstudio, both formed by recent graduates of the Florence Faculty of Architecture, denounce the social and economic logic of late capitalism through extreme urban forecasts.

Archizoom

No-Stop City

An endless, isotropic interior in which the urban is reduced to an infinitely repeatable cell. Nature is reproduced on the walls; difference is dissolved; the city becomes pure metabolism.

Superstudio

Twelve Ideal Cities

Twelve scenarios of life inside minimal cells: a hedonic ataraxia inhibits the human mind. Every doubt or dissent is eliminated — a condition that recalls the genesis of tyranny in Plato’s Republic.

Take-away — Social disintegration produces a system worse than dictatorship: cities must therefore be designed to stimulate sociability.

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ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSION

Sustainability without the Liquefaction of Architecture

From the 1970s onwards (Meadows et al., 1972; 2004; Randers, 2012), the awareness of planetary finitude reshapes the urban discipline.

LEGITIMATE ASPIRATION

• Recognition of resource scarcity
• Protective stance towards nature
• Sustainability as ecological responsibility
• Cities designed around people, not cars

ATTENDANT RISK

• Risk of dissolving architecture into other disciplines
• Obsessive environmentalism may erase built form
• Loss of Laugier’s archetype: shelter from inclemency
• Reduction of urban quality to ecological metric

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MEDIATIC DIMENSION

From Information to Common Ground

communicare

Latin

‘to make common’

Today the term denotes the transmission, participation or exchange not only of information and knowledge, but also of material goods and space itself.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CITY

• The city of communication seeks to place spaces, knowledge and habits in common.
• It must communicate safety, well-being and enjoyment — not the mere presence of space.
• Quality becomes a multidisciplinary problem (architects, philosophers, anthropologists, economists, sociologists).
• Venice Biennale 2012 — ‘Common Ground’ (D. Chipperfield): collaboration across disciplines for a better city.

PART II

The Role of the Square

in the Contemporary World

Function, representation and the myth of social cohesion

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HISTORICAL READING

Functions of the Premodern Square

Three traditional functions, anchored in exchange and representation rather than in sociability tout court.

Market square

Place of economic exchange — circulation of goods and merchants.

Religious square

Stage of ritual; the church forecourt as archetype of the Western square (Guidoni).

Civic square

Site of public notices and the promulgation of laws; representation of civil power.

Morphological typology (after Camillo Sitte, The Art of Building Cities)

Squares in depth — focal point on the church, expressing ecclesiastical power. Squares in extension — fronted by the seigneurial building, signifying civil authority.

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CRITICAL ARGUMENT

The Myth of the Premodern Square Re-examined

“

It is historically, rationally and logically doubtful to claim that premodern urban space was qualitatively superior or that it fostered sociability.

After Kumaraku & Luarasi

EVIDENCE AND REASONING

• No documents prove that pre-modern architects designed for community more than today.
• Machiavelli (The Prince) recommends divide et impera: the ruler has no interest in fostering communal bonds.
• Pre-modern outdoor life was a function of necessity, not design intent (no media, no comfort indoors).
• Sanitary conditions were deficient until the mid-nineteenth century — open sewers crossed the city.
• Purini (in Nencini, 2012): the square has often been the theatre of violent events, not of cohesion.

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CONTEMPORARY MUTATION

Where Have the Functions of the Square Migrated?

FORMER FUNCTION

CONTEMPORARY HOST

STATUS

Economic exchange

Shopping centres, coffee bookshops, bars

Open to the public

Religious / ritual

Churches and dedicated buildings

Public, but typological

Civic / political

Media, institutions, online platforms

Mediated, dispersed

Information & encounter

Telematic squares, social networks

Open to public, non-place

Protest & demonstration

Surviving function of the physical square

Still public

Public structures are accessible throughout the day; structures merely open to the public have opening and closing hours (Hardt & Negri, 2003).

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NEW TYPOLOGIES

Third Places and Telematic Squares

Third places

Ray Oldenburg

• Coffee bookshops, gyms, shopping centres — covered, conditioned, commercialised.
• Replace the functional value of the square within new urban interventions (Hardt & Negri, 2003).
• Open to the public, not public: subject to opening hours and access regimes.
• Exchange and consumption replace exchange and representation.

Telematic squares

After Augé — non-place

• Physical hosts of networked information technologies, made available for social interaction.
• Indoors, not in the open air; identification required for access.
• Lack the historical identity that distinguishes a place from a non-place.
• Cannot replace the public square: physically and socially they are an entirely different thing.

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THEORETICAL APPARATUS

The Search for the Common after Postmodernism

Zygmunt Bauman (2009)

Voglia di comunità

The crisis is not only economic and financial, but social and political: individuals seek a community capable of identifying their belonging because contemporary life can no longer guarantee security.

Daniel Innerarity (2008)

Il nuovo spazio pubblico

In the age of migrations and federalisation, the common good cannot be deduced from state logic or national continuity; it follows from political organisation.

Hardt & Negri (2009)

Comune

Globalisation produces a common world. The common spans the material wealth of nature and the immaterial wealth produced by social cooperation: an alternative to public and private.

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ARCHITECTURAL VALUE

The Square in the Era of Globalisation

In a panorama of global emulation, cities compete by producing iconic buildings. The square is the space from which the symbol of the city is contemplated.

Stage

of iconic architectures

The contemporary square retains the same architectural value as before: it is the space from which the most significant building — destined to become the symbol of the city — is displayed and read.

CASE · MAXXI, ROME

Promised collective space, contemplative reality

The space in front of Rome’s MAXXI closes when the museum closes and ceases to function as a collective space, although it had been promised as such. It is conceived in order to contemplate the building itself — confirming the square’s role as a frame for iconic architecture.

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DIAGNOSIS

The Crisis of Public Space as a Crisis of Monumentality

“

The crisis of traditional monumentality is rendered evident by the proliferation of public buildings that resemble any other ordinary construction — the modest architecture of the new public places.

Daniel Innerarity, Il nuovo spazio pubblico (2008: 129)

INTERPRETATION

• The crisis of public space is not the loss of a sociability that, as argued, was never truly present.
• It is the absence of significant buildings — architectures of greater quality than the surrounding fabric — capable of attracting visual attention.
• The square’s identity depends on the architecture that frames it; without that, no community can recognise itself in the space.

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CONCLUSIONS

Towards a Renewed Architecture of the Common

01

A four-fold reading

The contemporary city must be understood through its social, environmental, mediatic and morphological dimensions, jointly considered.

02

Continuity of architectural value

Public space, and especially the square, no longer performs its premodern functional role, yet retains a decisive architectural and symbolic value.

03

The migration of public functions

Many functions migrate into non-spatial and non-public infrastructures, freeing the built public space to take on new, unprescribed roles.

04

The renewed task

Public space may again provide a spatial sense of the collective whole — common ground among urban fragments, expectations and actors, animate and inanimate.

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REFERENCES

Selected works cited in the paper

• Barbiani, L., Abbruzzese, A., Dardi, C. & Guidoni, E. (eds.) (1992) La piazza storica italiana. Venice: Marsilio.
• Augé, M. (1996) Nonluoghi. Milan: Elèuthera.
• Bauman, Z. (2002) Modernità liquida. Bari: Laterza.
• Bauman, Z. (2009) Voglia di comunità. Bari: Laterza.
• Benevolo, L. (2011) La fine della città. Bari: Laterza.
• Gargiani, R. (2007) Archizoom dalla onda Pop alla superficie neutra. Milan: Electa.
• Gargiani, R. & Lampariello, B. (2010) Superstudio. Bari: Laterza.
• Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2003) Impero. Milan: Rizzoli.

• Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009) Comune: oltre il privato e il pubblico. Milan: Rizzoli.
• Innerarity, D. (2008) Il nuovo spazio pubblico. Rome: Meltemi.
• Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L. & Randers, J. (1972) The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books.
• Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L. & Randers, J. (2004) Limits to Growth: the 30-year update. White River Junction: Chelsea Green.
• Nencini, D. (2012) La piazza. Significati e ragioni nell’architettura italiana. Milan: Christian Marinotti.
• Ostrom, E. (2006) Governare i beni comuni. Venice: Marsilio.
• Randers, J. (2012) 2052: a global forecast for the next forty years. White River Junction: Chelsea Green.
• Sennett, R. (2012) Insieme. Rituali, piaceri, politiche della collaborazione. Milan: Feltrinelli.

Thank you for your attention · Questions and comments are warmly welcomed