Open Public Spaces Are Dispensable
But a City Without Them Wouldn’t Be Viable
There is, apparently, a kind of memories we consider insignificant. However, for whatever reason they materialize, we realize they’ve made an impression in our lives. I’ve recently remembered the day my English teacher Judie asked me if her belly was too pale. I can’t judge her. Judie had three jobs and spent most of the day away from her house: acting with decorum during long hours is challenging.
Think about it. Except for those days when we are sick or mad, we never behave in public the same way we behave at home. For instance, I can’t watch myself in the mirror of public washrooms. I don’t know why. It’s like I avoid self eye contact.
Behavior: that’s how I distinguish public from private spaces.
Let’s leave privacy aside for now and focus on different public spaces. A 15-minutes walk around the city is enough to see a few variants of shapes, functions, and locations.
Streets are the most preeminent public spaces in the city. Like sidewalks, they delineate the flux of drivers and pedestrians. However, streets weave more than our route throughout the city. They define us. They assign postcodes and addresses.
Streets have engendered a number of subcategories. The street dance is the vernacular style of our days. The street food has become so popular that you can have it even at fancy restaurants. Street fashion is so big that comprises styles that go from the Hippie to the Japanese Kawaii. Streets boost our sensibility with its murals and musicians. Cul-de-sacs aside, we could wander the streets weave infinitely.
The roles of streets are clear: transit and urban culture’s cradle. What about other public spaces, like parks and beaches? I call them ‘reanimating zones’. A zone is an area different from other spaces around, designed with particular characteristics for a specific use. Reanimating zones refresh the route throughout the city.
Reanimating Zones
An experience in Charlotte, North Carolina, proved that designed areas with programmed activities improve citizens’ perceptions of government. Meredith L. Sadin, author of the article ‘If You Build It, They Might Not Come: Animating City Spaces’, shares the results of the survey. Although the design made no difference on its own, the launch of activities positively changed the concept neighbors had about the government. They thought it understood their concerns. Also, they were more prone to think that state employees working around the plaza were friendly. Most surprisingly, people were 15% proud to live there. (For more details, you can find the article at CityLab.)
Besides civic trust, public spaces boost cities’ economies. A 2015 UN-Habitat study revealed that cities become great when they develop a public space system. Mobility, safety, and attractiveness stimulate investment, which in turn fosters economic expansion. By enhancing public spaces in different areas authorities can reduce inequalities, too. The study delivers measures for different budgets. For instance, poor cities can charge fees for parking. As for consolidated cities, they can distribute resources from gentrifying neighborhoods to regenerate less central ones.
Healthy public spaces, then, favor what citizens think about their leaders and can even promote economic growth. Those are consequences of ideally-managed public spaces, not their functions. There are other concepts we associate with public spaces: leisure, oxygen, greenery… Still, none seems to explain them within the city’s scheme. To answer what’s the structural role of reanimating zones, I’ve picked Saint Petersburg’s New Holland Island. The Russian venue is neither new nor Dutch nor a natural island but we are not here for linguistic precision.
A Russian Case: New Holland Island
It’s not that I don’t love the concept of ‘sister cities’ (?) but going from one place to another gives me this feeling that cities have rivalries with other cities, especially if they belong to the same country. The conflict can be due to historical, political, economic, and or cultural reasons. The way cities beautify themselves is part of the competition, too. See, for instance, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. About three years ago, the latter opened New Holland Island, a public space that can rival the capital’s Gorky Park.
New Holland Island is a good example of reanimating zones. First, it’s located neither downtown nor in the Google Map’s yellow area.
However, and this takes us to the second reason, visitors can spend quality time without a ball-friend named Wilson. In a way, New Holland Island is a microcosm of Saint Petersburg city. The story of its reconstruction includes a bunch of competitions and firms. Millhouse was the winner in 2010. The 2011 architectural competition gave WorkAC the possibility to transform the island into a multi-use complex. Today, the area is equipped with playgrounds, an herb garden, restaurants, a stage, food kiosks, an info-center, and a pavilion for lectures, exhibitions, and educational programs.
Unlike the case of streets and sidewalks, people plan a visit to reanimating zones such as New Holland Island. Usually, they have opening hours, rules, and a purpose more or less clear to go there for.
Finally, New Holland Island boosts the neighborhood’s flow. Its configuration interrupts the streets-avenues-sidewalks network. That structure ends crossing the bridge over the Admiralteysky Canal, which accesses the island.
Life Between streets
Judie lifted her shirt up to her belly button. That skin was washed-out as pool inflatables at the end of the summer. It was an awkward situation for me but she definitely got the worst part. The answer was irrefutable and kids don’t lie. Yet, a 9-years-old can recognize a trick question. My confusion was unavoidable.
Ditto for reanimating zones. Cities have such areas because their existence is unavoidable. No street grid would be viable without reanimating zones. Not even an OCD patient would fancy living in a city that looks like a checkered notebook. They are apertures where the flow of the streets and sidewalks is regenerated.
The closest experience of an urban layout without these spots is an experience in the suburbs. Have you ever left at the wrong bus stop? Walking towards the correct address seems an interminable task (no matter it lasts 8 minutes in real-time). It’s only you, cars going in both directions, and some pitiful nature specimens. Usually, the weather is harsh. A city built after that model would be so boring and it would feel so unsafe that residents would go away.
Although they belong to two separate categories, continued public spaces and reanimating zones aren’t total opposites. Both shape a supportive network. Cities need streets and streets need reanimating zones. Their existence is inherently attached to the entire city infrastructure. However, when done well, they should be able to be enjoyed on its own.
Common names for reanimating zones are ‘second home’ or ‘third place’. But they respond to the use people make of such areas. Instead, ‘reanimating zones’ reflects its existence from a structural point of view.
My approach is in line with what Vito Acconci wrote in ‘Public Space in a Private Time’. In that journal article at Critical Inquiry (1990), we read: ‘Public space is not space in the city but the city itself’. My goal was to understand reanimating zones as inherent elements of the city layout. Therefore, I didn’t consider questions like what is their importance? or what role do they play? That’d be an analysis of the reanimating zones’ quality. There’s a lot of bibliographies confirming the importance of safe and beautiful such areas in the city. As mentioned before, they promote civic trust and economic growth.
Rather than activities or positive corollaries of reanimating zones, my goal was to comprehend their structural function. In the case of continued public spaces, like sidewalks and streets, that seems to be evident: transit or motion.
Try this exercise. Close your eyes and imagine a city with no streets. People, skyscrapers, cars: all would be floating. Things are different when it comes to reanimating zones. Are they as indispensable as streets? Could we visualize a city with no reanimating zones?
Possibly.
Why, then, do reanimating zones exist? Just because an imaginary city could be possible, it doesn’t mean in reality that’d be viable. No city structure could handle an endless network of streets and sidewalks. If continued public spaces make the urban layout solid, reanimating zones keep it forceful. They are the support of life between streets.