"Recent Transformations of Urban Public Space"

based on the essay, Recent Transformations of Urban Public Space by Bart Eeckhout and Steven Jacobs

The reading, Recent Transformations of Urban Public Space, is interesting because it is directly related to the ideas that I have for my thesis. One of the things that has worried me recently, which is directly related to my tour of Europe, is the lack of public space in the truest sense of the word here in the United States. This of course is talked about at length in the article. In the article they talk about the privatization of public space and this seems to me to be the main killer of American public space. Shopping malls, movie theaters and even grocery stores have replaced the need for public space.

While I was studying abroad in Florence I decided on a Sunday to take the train to Bologna, just north of Florence. I arrived around 9 to find the city without people. I wandered around for a few hours finally finding their main green space within the city center. Here is where all the people were. People of all ages were doing every activity possible in this relatively small park. I sat there for almost two hours just watching people and thinking about why I had never seen anything like this in America.

The conclusion that I came to was that suburbia killed the American park. It still survives in places like New York and Boston where the density is still high and land is scarce. But in most of the country, and most of the places I have lived, everyone had a front or back yard. This negates any reason for going to a public park. Besides the fact that parents no longer have to keep a close eye on their children because they are only in the backyard, and thus spending less time with them, gone are the opportunities for chance encounters that only happen within the public realm. This has, possibly more than anything else, caused families to be segregated from each other. Now those chance encounters are happening at the supermarkets and shopping malls. But many Americans, including myself, wouldn’t even recognize some of their neighbors if they ran into them at the market. Each house with its white picket fence becomes its own gated community, keeping in the children and keeping out the unwanted. Now the twenty-first century parks are enclosed and surrounded by The Gap, Best Buy and Walmart. This trend cannot last as more and more people are moving to cities.