In the beginning of July UN Habitat and Project for Public Spaces hosted a three-day conference on the Future of Places. The aim of the conference, and the two preceding ones, was to establish a set of key messages on public space making for the HABITAT III conference in 2016. Clear Village was unfortunately not able to participate in the conference, but as a creative regeneration agency, public space is central to our interests. Fortunately, also non-participants were invited to react to the draft key messages, an opportunity we didn’t want to miss!
Reading the draft key messages we agree with many of its points, however we felt that they do not sufficiently recognise newly emerging delivery models of public spaces. In fact, in our view, the key messages, in the first paragraph, assume a rather traditional leading role for local authorities in the planning, design and delivery of public spaces. Although it is still often the case that local authorities are leading the delivery of public spaces, we believe that the key messages overlook new development models and actors that deliver initiatives for developing new and upgrading existing public spaces from the bottom up.
Clear Village itself has been involved in, and indeed to a certain extent exists to support these kinds of initiatives. One example is our Bedfords Park Walled Garden project, which we have developed from a derelict space into a community space used by a variety of local users. We have also just concluded case study research in the context of the pan-European research project Human Cities III: Challenging the City in which we are one of the 13 partners. The research focused on new development models and actors in London, looking at initiatives ranging from developing social cohesion in Haringey’s warehouse community to redeveloping an empty site into a temporary community space in Canning Town.
London seems a particularly fertile place for new development models for public spaces, yet also elsewhere we see an increase in public space initiatives that are developed through new delivery models led by newly emerging actors. Examples range from the informal, low-cost “spot-fixing” done by The Ugly Indian in cities in India, to multi-million dollar projects such as New York’s High Line and +pool. Many of these initiatives seem to lead to a new typology of public spaces – public spaces that are “owned” and managed by local groups and aimed at reinforcing local community life and well-being. One of our key findings from our London research was that these new urban actors promote goals such as community well being and use means such as local collaboration and participatory design that are explicitly and implicitly mentioned in the draft key messages.
New technologies that enable local organisation, crowd-funding, sharing knowledge etc, are often key in developing these initiatives. With these technologies becoming accessible to more and more people in the future, it is likely that the number of initiatives will sharply rise. Yet too often current policies inhibit these initiatives. New policies that support these initiatives and facilitate new development models are urgently needed. For these reasons we believe that newly emerging models that deliver (new typologies of) public space deserve a more explicit place in the key messages. For us, this goes beyond putting people central to planning, as is mentioned in the first paragraph of the draft key messages. We would therefore argue to include in the key messages a more explicit call for the support of politicians and public officers for these new kinds of initiatives and for policies that facilitate their delivery.