Open Spaces, Public Spaces, Publics, Open-minded Places

In 1993 a double issue of the international architectural review (published in Italy) “Casabella” was dedicated to “The design of open spaces”. Different positions and scholars and diverse point of views explored this complex theme, trying to explain the reasons, the modes and the possibilities of a new strategy in design research and practice. The starting point was the very term “open space”, which doesn’t belong to the classical vocabulary of architectural theory, with no reference to modern town planning manuals. Nowadays the difference between “open space”, as indicated in regulations of urban city spaces, and “public space” has found new declensions related to public life of groups or individuals, taking place in consolidated environments as well as in peripheral areas or in residual spaces up to edge cities, able to give values and functions to neglected or abandoned places. Next to public meeting spaces, such as large congress hall, fair precincts, political or cultural events, shopping centers, and to waiting spaces, such as offices, public institutions, underground stations, airports, many public spaces do not have an architectural connotation: life can be found at the corner of two suburban roads, where spontaneous conversation or some kind of special event slowly starts to layer, indicating a kind of rituality, or in anonymous suburban places where minority ethnic or immigrant groups gather, becoming places of solidarity and sharing. All these expressions, as already Vittorio Gregotti pointed out in his introductory essay on Casabella, articulate in a new way the demands for public space and for its architectural definition.