Despite the Absence of the Public Sphere: How Common Goods Can Generate Opportunities for the Design of Public Spaces

In the last decades critical trends, such as social interests fragmentation, globalization and institutional subsidiarity, deeply transformed contemporary society, economy and public administration, inducing the modern public sphere to fracture and finally to disappear. Even though the modern project for the public space assumed the existence of the public sphere in order to legitimize its choices and to define its goals and means, this paper hypothesizes that public space projects and their problems can be faced in contemporary cities. Since the substance and quality of public space also depend on contextual conditions, among which material and immaterial common goods, it seems possible to start from here: localized common goods can be produced and cared for, even in the absence of a given public sphere, implying interesting opportunities to define public spaces. Critically drawing on international cases of transformation of public spaces, this paper shows that it is possible to reinterpret contemporary project, by considering the “public” as a contingent and local formation, which is related to collective problems or development opportunities. Even in the absence of the public sphere, it is possible to conceive significant public space projects that can help us to pragmatically experiment the management of common goods according to spatial requirements, to stimulate latent interests and actors, to generate reflective and interactive knowledge and more rarely to regenerate a partial and local “public”.