The public space for the present city

In 1968 Henry Lefebvre published in Paris Le droit à la ville. In a perspective not far from political and cultural climate of the time he described the ideal city as "a continuous work of the people, whom are movable themselves and became movable for and from that opera" where "the right to the city is manifested as a higher form of rights: the right to liberty, individualization in socialization, to habitat, to inhabit" (Lefebvre, 1968). What then Lefebvre defined in these terms imbued with a powerful ideological charge is nothing more then the city intended, in its whole, as a common good. This vision gives the public space a central role which historically constitutes the essence of the city. But what is the public space that people wants? How does it differ from the public space historically defined? How it overlaps and interposes the structure of the existing city? For whom are the public spaces? The topic today is the center of the debate of anthropologists, architects, sociologists, urban planners. When it is discussed, however, it is difficult to overcome the threshold of vagueness and this often produces reflections on one hand unrealistic and the other unnecessary and tautological. To refocus the meaning and role of public space in the contemporary city therefore is necessary to retrace some essential steps related to recent trends and theories of interpretation. From the second half of the seventies, in the wake of radical interpretive positions represented in particular by the French school, it seemed inevitable a progressive dissolution of the public space. Indeed, the disempowerment of the historical social reflects on the territorial projection of public action, the places are confined to flow to the entity not related material of the compact city, they lose the characteristics that defined them as such, tend to migrate in the category of non-places (Augé, 1993) last drift of legitimization of the urban colective. There are two main reasons. The expansion of the physical city lying on vast territories and consists largely of discrete elements where the superplaces consumption were placing large as isolated monads in a boundless and rarefied galaxy, aided by the system infrastructure. The implementation, unsuspected only a few decades ago, of the system of mass communications that revealed a parallel virtual world on which to pour the relational dimension without the need to get to the physical places. Even if a few years ago, the size of the social media seemed destined to transmigrate in a conventional ball and immaterial, today we are witnessing a renewed interest in the physical relations that materializes and substantiates the existing city and real spaces of collective life in spite of everything that can be recognized and acknowledged as rich deposits of traces of the past can tell stories in the present time. The reasons for this return are multiple and closely interrelated with each others, the paper will attempt to investigate them also looked forward to the possible interpretations of the design theme.