On the Crisis of Public Space in the Twentieth Century

Research on urban space makes attempts to go beyond the current polarizing discussion of its future (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225) that, on one hand, highlights the negative aspects of downtowns' loss of civic purpose, social centrality, surveillance-free spaces, non-commercial festivities, and local cultural establishments while, on the other hand, celebrating an increase in urban diversity, urban uses, everyday appeal, and public optimism with regard to city cores (Breuer 2003b; Selle 2002). To avoid the pitfalls of proclaiming either a devaluation or a renaissance of public spaces (Breuer 2003a), it is worthwhile to bring an empirical, historical, and theoretical analysis to bear on this topic (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225). However, understanding of urban space presupposes forming a consensus over their functions, such as transport and transit accessibility, trade and market infrastructures, political and public representation, and leisure and entertainment qualities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225). It appears, furthermore, that the public space of modern cities, considered from the point of view of cultural and aesthetic experience (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 225-226), is primarily defined by works of Walter Benjamin (1980) and Siegfried Kracauer (1987) that reach back to Baudelaire's city flaneur, Poe's urban crowd, and Simmel's blasé attitude that capture the attraction, tempo, and diversity of urban life.

Among the factors that have historically created urban space in its modern form are the technical innovations behind the gas and, later, electric street lighting that, although predated by similar attempts since the 17th, took hold in the 19th century, when the brightly lit urban nightlife became commonplace (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 226). Through artificial lighting, the nightlife of metropolitan cities has been able to turn its previously less explored darker as well as brighter sides to both experience and representation, as its pleasures (Schloer 1994), fascinations (Benjamin 1988), and insecurities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 226-227) found their depiction in literature and painting. The figure of flaneur stepping unto the urban scene in the 19th century might hark back to comparable periods of flourishing culture and economy (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227), such as Greek city-states where Socrates would entertain a comparable relation to urban space (Benjamin 1980: 247). It is these forms of access to urban space that flaneur typifies that, according to critical accounts of the transformations befalling public spaces of cities, become extinct under the influences of commercialization, privatization, and standardization that make the unfamiliar, foreign and different rare that call for a reorientation of analysis of urban experience (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227).

Even though the notion of public sphere (Habermas 1971: 8) has been ideal-typically connected to the forms of public space characteristic of Greek or Roman antiquity (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227), the advent of democratic forms of governance has obviated any obvious connections between public space (Flierl 2002: 18) and urban society in favour of local and supra-local interest groups that configure the relations between political transparency, public involvement and modern state to bring a fundamental structural change about (Bahrdt 1961). From an historical perspective, an urban public sphere always deviated from its ideal type so that public space has been constituted as much through its inclusive effects on ancient slave-holders, medieval guild-members, independent male citizens, political client groups, totalitarian party-members, and democratically elected parties (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 227-228), as through those of exclusion on correspondingly disenfranchised groups, such as women and workers in the 19th century and homeless, drug-addicts and immigrant youth presently (Siebel 2003: 252). In this respect, exemplary urban projects, such as Humboldt Forum for World Cultures in Berlin, serve as focal points for symbolic struggles among various interest groups for appropriation, instrumentalization and functionalization of public space that characterize urban change, crises, and discontinuities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 228).

In Germany, the 1920s of the Weimar republic saw attempts to re-shape public space into an architectural crowning achievement of the democratic break with the class-divided past standing in stark contrast to socialist conception of community oriented edifices of theatre, library or concert hall that held the urban space around them culturally together (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 228). In Berlin, where such projects failed to materialize during the years of Weimar democracy (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229), the surroundings of the Parliament [Reichstag] building not far from the riverbanks of Spree did continue to inspire visions of how through a public forum construction the relations between exemplary architecture, urban space and democratic government could be changed through their radically new visualization (Nerdinger 1993: 30). The rarity of the success with which urban visions of community oriented public sphere could meet, such as collectively-minded plans for inner yards and urban quarters in Vienna, Berlin or Frankfurt (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229), indicates the limits and crises of architectural re-interpretation of urban space in response to social, cultural and economic problems of metropolitan centers. The political confrontations and economic crises of the Weimar republic also put their stamp on its urban spaces, as the carousing and revelry of big cities neighbored with street fights among political antagonists (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229).

In Nazi-Germany, the exclusion of Jewish citizens from the public sphere was followed by total prevention of their access to urban space that was planned to be transformed around the concept of totalitarian cities (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 229-230) where urban cores, central axes, and open space were aimed to be instrumentalized in accord with imperialist claims to power and domination that where channeled into monumental architecture and overpowering shows, lighting techniques and mass processions, and intensive choreography of public participation (Brockhaus 1997: 58). After the WWII, the reconstruction in East-Germany has developed a relation to city centers and main avenues that, unconstrained by real estate profit considerations, was oriented to the welfare of city dwellers (Durth/Duewel/Gutschow 1998), while borrowing its planing models from Moscow, as a communist forerunner-city (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 230-231). In East-German cities, the city-planning principles pushed mixed use and multiple cores aside in favour of concentrating in city centers the functions of government, culture, and politics within a hierarchical structure of urban space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231). In these cities, along with the satisfaction of functions of work, residence, recreation, and transport, urban spaces had to meet the needs for demonstrations laying a party-controlled claim to city centers and squares that also registered the crises in political relations, such as repressions of people's protest on May 17, 1953 (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231).

West-Berlin, by contrast, seeking to escape the pre-WWII monotony of tenement-construction, oriented itself to models of garden city that shortly gained upper hand in the late 1940s and 1950s, as reconstruction efforts created urban landscapes loosely put together out of open spaces that, as in Berlin's Hansa city-quarter, scattered stand-alone architectural structures across park-like areas north of Tiergarten (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 231-232). In the 1960s, the modernizing transformation of German cities gave way to the imperatives of highway-construction that serving a booming car-owning population (Suedbeck 1993: 171) cut through urban quarters and city squares in a widely criticized turn away from post-war principles of city-planning (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232). As the domination of city structure by transportation lanes started to hurt the revenues of shopping districts, first urban areas reserved for pedestrians started to be established, even though the urban qualities of the historical shopping arcades were lost, as suburbs grew hand in hand with historical restoration in city-centers (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232). However, tendency to put higher value on urban density has led not only to formation of urban spaces in city centers that offered little more than shopping opportunities but also to convergence in urban structures in East and West Germany (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232).

As in the 1970s the re-orientation away from the extensive and large scale urban growth towards inner cities and urban fringes has become increasingly pronounced, the European movement for urban heritage preservation expanded from Bologna, that spear-headed it, to Germany (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 232-233), where the rediscovery of historical urban quarters and architecture has come under criticism for the risk it courted of being generically functionalized for the competitive purposes of unique identity creation, aesthetic image making, and urban spectacle generation (Durth 1987). That urban revitalization hardly ameliorates social polarization, has a checkered success record, and seeks to elide quarters and areas lacking in visual appeal has been in the focus of critical attention since the late 1980s (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 233-234), as sprouting new museums, shopping malls, and postmodern skyscrapers put their spectacular qualities to the functional use of urban memory, history and locality (Durth 1987: 163). The economic crisis that cities seek to offset with festivals and promotion has its roots in the loss of relevance and function of urban cores (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234) that become marginalized through development of transport, communication and decentralization making other forms of planned and arbitrary urbanization possible (Haeussermann 1998: 80).

Booming in Germany, suburban shopping centers attract purchasing power away from smaller retail outlets of inner cities that facing massive emptying out become increasingly protected through regulation against urban sprawl (Popp 2002), receive growing attention in urban development plans, and provide incentives for downtown shopping malls without, however, reversing the trends of profile and identity loss of urban centers (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234). Despite the fears that a growing role of information, globalization and communication would lead to further decline of cities (Cairncross 1997), distance-contracting global networks bring urban deindustrialization and restructuring to bear on the renewed importance of urban space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 234-235) that regains relevance under the changed circumstances of information economy where cities become sites of recentralization that depends on tacit, place-bound, and complex knowledge emergently finding its concentration in metropolitan inner cities (Laepple 2003: 19). A complex and contradictory change that public space goes through demands an analysis that goes beyond descriptive categories of crisis, such as privatization, surveillance and security, for which shopping malls, entertainment centers train terminals and airports serve as prime examples, in order to capture the emergent balance between public and private spaces that defines anew contemporary urban culture (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235).

Indeed, in Germany the oft decried tendency of public space privatization (Ronnenberger, Lanz and Jahn 1999) purportedly deriving from private despoliation or giveaway of cities (Helms 1992) is hardly born out by the empirical reality of net gains in favor of public space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235) stemming from handing over into public hands of dilapidating factory floors spurred by deindustrialization with counter-tendencies being an exception rather than a rule (Breuer 2002: 10). A further threat to public space is reported to come from the spread of surveillance technologies from gated communities, themselves a rapidly growing global trend, to shopping malls and entertainment areas served by private security companies through the disciplining and constraining effect of closed-circuit video cameras (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 235-236). However, social curbs and security provisions against threats to personal integrity, such as rape prevention (Siebel 2003: 253), belong to the basic characteristics of accessibility and anonymity that define public space (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 236). Rather, driven by growing share of the elderly, insufficient integration of immigrants, and increasing social marginalization of city-dwellers, informal social control over metropolitan urban space gives way to its formalization under the weight of correspondingly shifting balance between open access to public space and its protection (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 236-237).

Deriving from developments in the 1970s and 1980s in the US, the thesis of decline of the public sphere via emptying out of downtown areas and tourist oriented museum investment is not born out by developments in Europe that since the 1990s see an explosive growth in forms of appropriation of urban spaces that go beyond the strategies of commercial mobilization of event economy towards urban celebrations, processions, fairs, and concerts as a prevalent trend (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 237). This Europe-wide transformation has increasing opportunities to experience urban space at its core (Gehl 2001), as open air seating at cafes and restaurants allows prolonged and leisurely contact with adjacent urban environments that increasingly gain both in currency and importance for both business operations and municipal regulation, in order to lend to historical urban spaces novel relevance through urban design and street furniture, as piazza development initiatives in Barcelona, Rotterdam, Rome and Lyon show (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 237-238). For this urban change, not least decisive is political will to create interconnected pedestrian areas combined with underground garage facilities, so that a different urban aesthetics of public squares could take root (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238).

In Germany, this trend brings private urban planning initiatives (Raumbureau 2001) into contact with political decision-making on the municipal level (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238) aiming at innovative use of urban spaces to make the most of the aesthetic qualities of geography and architecture of cities. As in Stuttgart, among other urban landmarks city castles came to occupy a special position bearing upon adjoining public squares that develop into locations of overlapping day- and nightlife scenes, of public visibility of multiple groups, and of dominant vistas on downtown quarters eventually becoming embedded into upscale metropolitan redevelopment with the help of ambitious architectural projects (Harlander and Kuhn 2003: 238-239).