Those who participate in street life now carry with them a much greater diversity of historical models and different, possibly conflicting, symbolic expectations of public space. Some fear that the public sphere might become too fragmented to sustain a dynamic yet cohesive street life. Over and above the pressures of absorbing so many multiple interests into urban public space are the challenges that an expanding digital public realm presents to the street as a primary scene of encounter. The permeation of the city by communications technologies – which, in fact, make this mobility between the global and local possible - transforms our sense of place. Contemporary urban theorists suggest that the new role of public space is to reassert a sense of place by expressing local identities in relation to a globalised public domain. What does this prescription for public space mean for architects, who take the front line in making public spaces? Vernacular precedents are valuable models for architects to study how these broad concerns play out in ways that are in fact very material and case-specific. The Porta Portese market, for example, demonstrates how layers of permanent and temporary structures, everyday practices, regulatory policies, and changing economic and cultural conditions can create a vibrant and resilient public space – one that is, in the end, very particular to Rome. Porta Portese also raises questions for how such sites are observed, mapped and, finally, interpreted in an architectural design. Architects might consider what investigative and representational strategies would be appropriate to a public space that, like the Porta Portese market, is best understood as an encounter between a place and its inhabitations – one that is extended through time and embedded in a specific cultural milieu. p Consiglio, Alberto. Magia di Porta Portese . Roma:Canesi. 1965. Franck, Karen A. and Quentin Stevens, eds. Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life . New York: Routledge, 2001. Refer, for example, to: Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 3: Concept vs Context vs Content (2005). Stalker. ‘Osservatorio Nomade/Stalker’. Rome, 2004. www.osservatorionomade.net. April 7 2007. Appadurai, Arjun 1996. Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. 1996. Crang, Mike. ‘Urban Morphology and Shaping of the Transmissable City’ City 4.1 (2000): 303-315. Refer, for example, to: Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ (2003); Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (2000).
onsite 19: street, streets and lanes, the straight and narrow, wide and busy
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