Managing public spaces of collective use: design and appropriation

Abstract

This article suggests a conceptualization and a methodology for dealing with landscape from the perspective of a public sense of space. This is based on an ongoing management and monitoring process that may help in planning public spaces that are suitable for everyday life and viable in the social dynamics of which they are a part. To achieve this, we reconsider jointly two important themes: - First, we question the intellectual, sensitive, and planning engagement between the architect and the landscape, suggesting that knowledge of landscape can be enhanced by the characteristics of the location. These characteristics should be taken into consideration, based on a balance between what is desirable and what is possible to implement in the plan. We point to a change that implies the renewal of intervention instruments in the space. Traditionally, architecture conceives its practice fundamentally as the project of the object. However, this way of thinking, focused as it is on the production of objects, is not sufficient to face the challenges of the nature of a space, as well as its production and appropriation. - Second, we see disjoined governmental action, its difficulty in interpreting and acting in the space, and in creating less expensive alternatives (that would include and integrate population itself) as a problem to be addressed. Urban life creates local qualities that involve complex questions, which instead of requiring actions aimed at all urban fabric, must be recognized, read, and addressed according to their peculiarities. This ability to see the general and to develop the particular turns out to be indispensable for architectural practice, especially at the level of government organs. What architects do must be associated with" political interstices". Their previous experience and theoretical reflections must be operational in order to reinforce new action strategies and to make way for new initiatives. Since architects base their work on existing features and on the transformation of their processes, their productions both enrich and are enriched by urban changes. These make possible the creation of new instruments and strategies for landscape qualification, not only the production of exceptional objects inserted into the landscape. When we work in the city in an institutional (political) framework, viewing a landscape means finding alternatives for its improvement which intervene in the process of its production. We accept that the management of this process must generate, in the medium term (and with fewer expenses), an impact as significant as that of the greatest architectural and urban works, which aim to create new spatial facts, requiring new ways of production and practice.