Shaping a city’s identity, inside out
Public spaces are icons for the citizens who live there and also an icon for the outside world. Internally, they are places shared by every citizen, where everyone can access a common experience. Boston’s Hatch Oval offers an open space for concerts and is a gathering place for the annual Independence Day Boston Pop’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue is the place where countless citizens go to shop and dine leisurely. Moscow’s Red Square is a large open space where many citizens have participated in protests. To the local residents, each of these places serves a specific, but rich function.
Sennett’s account of Arendt’s theory captures the equalising and unifying effect of public spaces: “Whatever people’s origins, gender, style of life, class, they should have an equal voice as citizens; private circumstances have no place in the public realm” (Blackwell Reader, 261). Arendt sees the public space as a gathering place where everybody who joins together has set aside their private interests, in favour of the common experience.
Arendt is often correct, especially in apolitical events such as Boston’s 21st-century Independence Day celebration, or day-to-day shopping at Istiklal, in saying that people have come to be part of something greater than themselves. Similarly to the transportation systems that are present in various depictions of the city that we have explored, public spaces form a core of urban poetics because everybody, regardless of their background, can use these spaces and participate in the events hosted there. Having interacted with these public spaces, citizens develop a sense of ownership over them and the spaces contribute to their sense of home in the city.
Given the accumulation of citizens’ emotional connection to this place, it follows naturally that filmmakers and writers who seek to encapsulate a relatable experience of the city highlight these public spaces, using them as the backdrop for protagonists’ interactions or creating a flaneur-esque observation of these very places. Through these works of art and through other externally-published illustrations of the city such as guide maps, public spaces are a rallying point around which the city presents itself to the outside world. The Hatch Oval and Charles River Esplanade, Istiklal Avenue, and the Red Square are top tourist destinations of their respective cities. Public spaces become external-facing icons, marketed to tourists as a key destination, and concretised as a trademark element of the city’s urban poetics.
The Harvard Map Collection archives offer rich visual evidence of the significance, or insignificance, of a public space for local and foreign visitors. A careful reading of each map’s creator and intended audience, as well as the symbology used to indicate the public space’s location and name, can be very telling about the likelihood of locals or tourists to visit this space. For example, a cursory search reveals that these three destinations are often highlighted in colour or with additional icons on tourist guide maps. The visual illustration of map can also help us to evaluate a public space’s significance according to how much area it occupies, and how much of a deviation it is from the density of surrounding neighbourhoods.