When public spaces are successful … they will increase, opportunities to participate in communal activity.
In the parks, plazas, markets, waterfronts, and natural areas of our cities, people from different cultural groups can come together in a supportive context of mutual enjoyment. As these experiences are repeated, public spaces become vessels to carry positive communal meanings.
‘make sure that our urban public spaces where we all come together, remain public in the sense of providing a place for everyone to relax, learn and recreate, and open so that we have places where interpersonal and intergroup cooperation and conflict can be worked out in a safe and public forum.
The first is that ethical practices in public space are formed precognitively and reflexively rather than rationally or consciously, guided by routines of neurological response and material practice, rather than by acts of human will.
The swirl of the crowd can all too frequently generate social pathologies of avoidance, selfpreservation, intolerance and harm, especially when the space is under-girded by uneven power dynamics and exclusionary practices.There are resonances of situated multiplicity/plenitude that have a significant bearing on the nature of social and civic practice. At least five that merit conceptual and practical attention can be mentioned. The first resonance is that of surplus itself, experienced by humans as a sense of bewilderment, awe and totality in situations that place individuals and groups in minor relation to the space and other bodies within them.
《Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment》
to be updated…
Amin A. Collective culture and urban public space[J]. City, 2008, 12(1): 5-24.