Future Here Now: Urban Space Co-creation

Local Learnings

I don’t usually comment on urban design issues — I’m definitely not a design thinker — but this article gets at some of the core issues that I think lead to dysfuntional public spaces. It’s not the best written piece, but the examples are valuable and the author’s framing is useful.

The author’s premise is that urban design initiatives can make a space more exclusive, rather than less, and less beneficial to local residents, despite the benefits they usually promise.

If you’ve been paying attention to gentrification issues worldwide, you understand at least the economic / social side of this — pressures to privatize mean that more seemingly public spaces are actually owned by private organizations. Those private organizations often have objectives that are different from those that govern traditionally “public” spaces, such as projecting a certain image or making their target demographic comfortable. On top of that, public spaces, like streets or urban parks, are increasingly polic…