Speakers
Description
Public space's role in urban quality is widely known: it defines the city's structure, provides material support for community life, and represents civic and religious powers and values. The mechanisms of public space production are manifold: they can be either the result of an urban plan realized by the public entity on public areas, or the result of more complex urban projects promoted by private actors, in compliance with the national laws and policies.
Public space has assumed an even more crucial role in urban transformation processes in Western cities that no longer expand, but regenerate under increasingly frequent conditions of scarce - spatial and economic - resources. Public space is not only the share to be reserved to the public entity to guarantee the urbanization charges due, but it has become an asset that gives value to investments and projects.
Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) are a typology of spaces consolidated in the Anglo-Saxon environment and tradition (Kayden, 2000). Similarly, what we call Privately Managed Public Spaces (PMPS) are also spreading in other countries where public space was traditionally owned (or sold for public use) and managed by the public, multiplying the ways in which private actors conduct the management dimension (Carmona et al. 2008). How this management is done and its implications and effects are still to be investigated.
The paper intends to discuss the first outcomes of ongoing research conducted by an interdisciplinary group of urban studies and administrative law scholars on Privately Managed Public Space in Italy, specifically in Milan. Milan is an interesting case study for several reasons: it is a city in which the real estate market has been quite active in the last few years, carrying out several interventions that have also involved the realization of spaces for public use; there have been several experimentations of public-private agreements of various kinds with different actors and subjects (from the third sector to associations to developers); public space has been placed at the center of the urban strategies of the last urban plan, both at the urban and neighborhood scale.
The paper provides an initial taxonomy of cases in which private entities manage public spaces of different natures, of whom it analyses the legal framework (the covenants, agreements, and contracts that define the public-private partnership on their management). In order to make explicit the nexus between nature, uses, management of spaces, and their publicness and to understand if and how these forms represent an opportunity for local authorities in economically weak conditions to manage better and maintain public space or risk for accessibility and the public dimension and to reflect on what cautionary guidelines are needed to guarantee a broad right to the city (Lefebvre 1968, Fainstein 2010, Gehl 2010)
Understanding the nexus between the nature of the analized public spaces (dimensional characteristics, material qualities, uses and urban role) and their forms of maintenance and management (defined by different legal frameworks) means bringing different disciplinary fields - urban analysis, ethnography, planning, legal studies, and administrative law - into tension in order to understand their mutual interdependency and what is needed to grant their publicness.
References
Carmona M, De Magalhaes C. and Hammond L. (2008) Public Space: The Management Dimension. New York: Routledge Press.
Fainstein S.S. (2010) The Just City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gehl J. (2010) Cities for people. Washington: Island Press.
Kayden J. (2000) Privately Owned Public Space: The New York Experience. London: Wiley & Sons.
Lefebvre H. (1968) Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos.
| Keywords | Privately Managed Public Spaces (PMPS); Public Space; Management; publicness; Milan |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
