Contenu du sommaire : L'espace public

At a time when urban centres have been metamorphosed and the private sector has monopolized urban development through the shopping malls found almost everywhere in the world, this text deals with the future of public spaces. Throughout history, public spaces have represented, in addition to their aesthetic value, a social capital which has to be identified to be reinvented. Two suggestions are made to contribute to the coherence and viability of the urban entity. First, the reinvestment of these spaces by the public sector and second, the conceptualisation by geographers and social scientists of the complementary between public spaces, relating to built and natural environments.

Using a quantitative method which closely links space and group behaviour, this article looks at the meetings of the three main political parties (PAN, PRD and PRI) which brought to a close, on the Zócalo, the largest square of Mexico, the electoral campaigns for the Presidency and the government of the Federal District. With the aid of diagrams, it shows how the organisers transformed this space to take account of different cultures. As for the crowds assembled, their behaviour was also different : the meeting of the PRI showed clearly the gap which now exists between a political system and the people, while those of the PAN and PRD ensured these parties of the victories they obtained respectively for the Presidency and the government of the Federal District.

Although often conceived as safe areas, in reality public spaces are associated with certain forms of violence. Having set out this conflictual situation, the article analyses a number of contemporary public places from car parks to retailing centres.

Sportsmen are increasingly investing public spaces and in particular parks, squares, waterfronts and streets. In various ways, they take over places designed for other purposes. At the same time, the peripheral zones of cities and rural areas are both affected by the arrival of recreational sportsmen. An amazing conquest of the country's natural maritime and mountainous areas in taking place, as well as a restructuring of urban and peri-urban sites. This forms part of the development of sporting cultures and creates serious planning and management problems.

In the 1980s, the Docklands, an immense abandoned zone adjacent to the City of London, become the largest site of urban renovation in Europe. Through the impetus of government authorities, this repulsive area became a centre of investment and indeed speculation. Complete freedom was given to the developers : no master plan guided the development and no regulations controlled the height of buildings or the use of land and the isle of Dogs was granted the status of an 'enterprise zone' for ten years. The Canary Wharf Tower, which symbolises the transformation of the Docklands, is the most emblematic construction resulting from the principles which guided the areas redevelopment. The urbanism born of this policy of deregulation raises the question of the role of architective and public places in the creation of urban areas. Taken alone, architecture, irrespective of the quality of the volume built, is shown to be incapable of creating an urban form and especially urbanity. However, public areas, as both places and linking mechanisms of urbanity, appear as the indispensible framework for the creation of an urban fabric and as an essential structural element to produce a lasting sector of the city.

In the 1960s, public areas in European urban centres were disfigured by developments designed to 'adapt the city to the car'. Since the 1980s, restructuring programs have sought to correct these errors. This article shows how the car has progressively lost ground and has been domesticated. the only real measure of the succès of such policies. Different situations are illustrated by reference to Paris, Amiens, Rouen, Berlin and Swiss towns. In France, the return of the tram to cities is shown to accelerate the process of restructuring. However, in peri-urban locations and outside the main urban areas, without an effective policy, the car continues its destructive influence on the environment. The culture of resisting the car is now as the heart of the debate, on the definition of public space in terms of its production, conception and planning.

By redefining the notion of "public space" at its point of origin, namely at the intersection between the fields of urban planning and social sciences, it is possible to question the presumed unity of this conceptual framework in France. Study of these social uses (including scientific analysis) shows that the effect of sens and screening on which the notion is based, are in part built on issues which are specific or common to the fields around which it is mobilised : as criticism of fonctional urbanism in the 1970s, as a subsequent goal of urban research or as means of urban restructuring at Lyon since 1970. Today the situation is paradoxical : the restructuring of urban public space is perhaps the lost example of a long line of technical/ political practices which increase the fragmentation of space (social) but which borrow a concept from the social sciences suggesting the opposite.

Over the last twenty years, architects have sought to become reunited with the values of urban living. However, with rare exceptions, this high- density, spatially continuous and regulated town, has not been developed. The weight of infrastructures and social demand with respect to housing influence, this desire for urbanity. Other architects, recognising these faitures, advocate with realism, cynism or provocation other models of intervention. The debate is not over and this article gives the details.

The human and social sciences discuss the issue of public space at great length. But is such space really seen as a concrete and material object ? In the name of developing democratic exchanges, many philosophers, in debating opinions, eliminate physical space in favour of abstract space. Sociologists adopt a similar form of abstraction. Others are caught up in métaphores. Some economists imitate them. Urban actors with a functionalist perspec- tive transform concrete space into merely a neutral support for other uses. As for geographers, even if they are attached to the notion of space, it is generally studied at a broad scale using maps rather than detailed plans. However, architects know that the technique of the urban plan is efficient for analysing physical space. Might it not be appropriate, therefore, for the human sciences, to adopt this intelligent architect's tool to represent space ?

In contrast to the generally accepted idea that public spaces are associated with urban areas, this article seeks to defend the thesis that new public spaces are emerging without necessarily being defined as such. The creation of these spaces, ranging from the biosphere to by laws regulating the biotope, and including all the different types of parks and reserves, might be seen as recognition that public spaces are not just linked to built-up areas. Natural spaces, in terms of the life they support, which appear to depend more and more on human activities, also require institutions to guarantee their proper common usage. In the past, public spaces were strongly influenced by issues of urban hygiene. Now they are being replaced by much more extensive areas which might be symbolised by the countryside. Current debates on their futures only serve to gradually aclimatise us to the need to take account of living nature in the field of politics.

Having denounced the myth of the concept of public space invented by Jurgen Habermas, this article considers its birth in the context of a reaction against functional urbanism and the development of a new urban culture. In this new context, contradictory developments emerge : certain reduce the role of public spaces while others tend to enhance them, leading to an expansion previously unknown, especially on the fringes of and outside the urban area itself.