Public Space Design: A Service to the Community

Paley Park, Credit: Wikipedia.org, user: Jim.henderson

"Given the interrelationship between living space and human behaviour, those who design buildings, neighbourhoods, public spaces and cities, ought to draw on the various disciplines which help us to understand people’s thought processes, symbolic language and ways of acting. It is not enough to seek the beauty of design. More precious still is the service we offer to another kind of beauty: people’s quality of life, their adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance. Here too, we see how important it is that urban planning always take into consideration the views of those who will live in these areas."

- His Holiness Pope Francis I,  Laudato Si’,  par. 150

We can all think of gadgets that are poorly designed; they just don't quite work like they are supposed to, or their functioning works but is terribly awkward. We can also think of great gadgets that work incredible well. These exceed our expectations while allowing us to fully do what they promise they will allow us to do. Public spaces are just like any gadget, tool, or device, in this sense--they can be well designed or poorly designed. They can be beautiful, and that is important, but they also need to be much more than optical delights. As Pope Francis says, "it is not enough to seek the beauty of design." Public spaces need to be in touch with the needs and wants of the users. Public spaces need to make room for encounters and activities of humans and creatures in that space; they need to allow users to become a cocreative part of a design that's essence, as public space, is defined by their activity in the space. A public space must be appropriately mindful of psychology, histories, ecology and predjudices that, when ignored, can make the public space feel exclusive or be out of touch with the people of the place. In order to design public spaces, we also must be moving towards a set goal for those spaces that centrally focuses on the users, human and animal alike. When this goal is ignored, the aesthetics stop interweaving with a design of integrity, and the space can easily be designed as a decontextualized carbon copy of another idealized form of "design," embodying a vogue aesthetic of the times, rather than, at its heart, working with new or desired aesthetic styles to become a space that serves those that make it a public space in the first place, the community of the area.


Author: Molly Burhans
www.goodlandproject.org