Imagining new forms. Public space and design practice

The very nature of creating public space is undergoing profound changes. In the contemporary city public space no longer possesses the figurative strength of classical typologies: the piazza, the forum, the boulevard. It assumes new and unprecedented forms, dictated by heterogeneous urban and building programmes that pursue other objectives. Public spaces must now be sought in “other” programmes. Programmes for the urban regeneration of peripheral or semi-central portions of the city, integrated trans-port plans, interconnections and exchanges between forms of mobility, operations to valorise or recover abandoned lands. This profound transformation “at the roots” has generated new morphologies of public space. The character of these spaces is less de-termined in its expression, less coherent. They appear more elementary, filament-like, inexorably conditioned by functions of connecting, linking. A new challenge is presented to theoretical and design research: the search for new forms, new figurative structures that resolve not only the functions and needs underlying a project, but which constitute a balanced paradigm capable of integrating the multiple compo-nents of which it is comprised: contextual conditions, environmental compatibility, conflicts between resources and restrictions, a relationship with Tradition.