Understanding Public space
As social beings, we engage in several activities throughout our life, we share them with people around us, and public space is the physical environment that surrounds those activities. However, the importance of public space resides in the people who use it.
The activities we decide to engage in variate from place to place, they are an expression of our culture and what we value as a society. How we choose them is determined by many factors: one of them is the physical space in which they occur.
For outdoor activities, public spaces are their scenery: The place where outdoor activities happen and where we get to interact with the people of our community.
There are three main types of outdoor activities, as explained by Danish architect Jan Ghel in his book Life between Buildings:
Necessary activities are the ones that we are more or less required to participate in, these are activities that we would have the need to accomplish, like our everyday tasks; going to work at our office, school, or the market are some examples of these types of activities.
Optional activities, the ones that we engage in when the time and place make them possible. Our decision to engage with them is influenced by the physical space where they happen.
Stopping at a plaza on your way home, or choosing to walk to the market. We include them in our time or schedule or spontaneously happen because we find the possibility, and we also find them comfortable and enjoyable.
Social or resultant activities are activities that depend on the presence of others. The sum of both, necessary and optional activities. These activities occur by people being in the same space, they variate in levels of interactions that go, from personal to passive interactions, like walking by people on a busy street.
And this is where it comes to the importance of quality public space. The more optional activities we participate in, the more opportunities of sociability we’ll have, thus more opportunities to engage in experiences, contact, safeness, and understanding our world we will have.
We often relate public space to the sense of community and identity. It’s about creating bonds with the place and people we are surrounded by; these bonds strengthen our feelings of safeness, security, and civic responsibility.
A successful public space is a place that people use. Public spaces should address basic human needs as comfort, passive and active engagement, discovery, as well as it should be supportive, democratic, and meaningful, creating a sense of belonging and community.
