Urbanism as public space policy
Introduction
Public space is the space of public (state) property, domain and public use. It is the place where anyone has the right to circulate in peace and harmony, where passage cannot be restricted by private property criteria and intentionally by government reservation.
Public space covers, as a general rule, traffic routes or open circulations such as: streets, squares, highways; as well as large areas of public buildings, such as libraries, schools, hospitals, town halls, stations or gardens, parks and natural spaces, whose land is publicly owned.
Characteristics of public space
On the legal side, modern public space comes from the formal separation between urban private property and public property. Such separation normally implies reserving, from planning, land free of constructions (except collective facilities and public services) for social uses characteristic of urban life (recreation, collective events, transportation, cultural and sometimes commercial activities, etc.). From a legal approach, we can define it as a space subject to specific regulation by the public administration, which owns or has the power to control the land, which guarantees its accessibility to all citizens and sets the conditions for its use and installation of activities.
Regarding use, public space is the scene of daily social interaction, it fulfills material and tangible functions: it is the physical support of activities whose purpose is to satisfy collective urban needs that transcend the limits of individual interests. It is physically characterized by its accessibility, a feature that makes it an element of convergence between the legal dimension and that of use. However, the dynamics of the city and the behavior of its people can create public spaces that are not legally public, or that were not planned as such, open or closed, for example residual or abandoned spaces that can spontaneously be used as public. There are also spaces that are privately owned but for public use, such as shopping centers, which are private spaces with the appearance of public space.
Public space also has a social, cultural and political dimension. It is a place of relationship and identification, of political demonstrations, of contact between people, of urban life and of community expression. In this sense, the quality of public space can be evaluated above all by the intensity and quality of the social relations it facilitates, by its capacity to welcome and mix different groups and behaviors, and by its capacity to stimulate symbolic identification, expression and cultural integration.