Since the 80s Russian cities have gone through a great urban transformation in which we must point out the growing attention to the new public space areas. In some cases we find the extension of the city itself, taking new territory and bringing new elements to the general structure in other cases, public space is found in renewing the inside structure of the town.
The objectives of this study was the identification and interpretation of public space structure in modern cities for the use in urban planning, design and management of the city built environment.
We know about the “transcendence of place”, the “placelessness of place”, cities “without a place”, and how technological revolutions in transportation and communication, it is said, have eliminated the value location and distance on human interaction. Social life now moves through nodes in one or another network, through points of power. The task of this paper is to reveal the riches of a place-making in urban planning and design of built environment. The definition offered here is designed to bring together three scales of spatial units that are now rarely connected. For present purposes, place will have three scales: scale of personal communication, scale of social control and scale of pedestrian proximity. The idea of place have no anthropological ground for classification and the place is represented by incommunicado bits: urban sociology, rural sociology, suburban sociology, home, the environment, neighborhood, workplaces, ecology. To pursue place itself is to ask what these places of varying scale have in common and how they differ. Places are worked by people: we make places and probably invest as much effort in making places of Nature as we do in cities or buildings Social practice happen through the material forms that we design, build, use, and protest. Place is what space becomes through the unique gathering of things, meanings, and values. Place is space filled up by people, practices, objects, and representations. Place has its own (not cartographic) spatial structure that associated with cognitive picture of social practice the “takes place”. Location means clustering of variables in space. Location tract a metropolitan area, the patterns of streets or significance of particular buildings, and the perceptions and understandings of the place by people who might live there or not.
An important feature of the public space as a design object is an idea of the scale of the event and real physical dimensions of space. Public Space is a combination of material form and cultural interpretation. The range of distances affects the way of possible social communication: direct personal interactions span from 1to 7-10 m, social control covers up to 70-100 m and pedestrian proximity in a city is estimated as 100 -1000 meters. That brings us to the idea of three scales for places: micro-, mezzo -, macro- scale and, eventually, three lines of spatial models: micro-, mezzo -, macro- spaces.[1]
The making of places is a combined process of —identifying, designating, designing, building, using, interpreting, remembering. But urban ecologists see cities as the result of a survival of the fittest, shaped by competitions for efficient locations among individuals and corporate actors of diverse means and powers to control the physical terrain in a self-interested way.
Micro-space
Micro-space – is the action place of a person or small group of people. We can presume that the size of micro-space is determined by the dimensions of the invisible bubble well described in “The Silent Language” and other books of E Hall.
Mezo-space
Mezo-space– is an area of several mikro-spaces mixed in one socio-cultural scenario.
Visual proximity combines acts of behavior and processes of social life into scenarios of social practices. These are rules, norms, custom, habits, and the like that encompass or anticipate people's social behavior in closed or interconnected spatial clusters. Though many scenarios of public life can be practiced without thought to others, the association in one spatial cluster also associates with definite cultural status of the site where action takes place.
Macro space
Macrospace – is a portion of the urban territory, embracing several mezo-spaces, united under condition or pedestrian accessibility, proximity or circulation. Examples of macro- spaces are the small isolated settlements, city parks, or nodes of TOD planning structures.
Pedestrian realm of the city is subdivided into closed, open and spongy places : “Enclaves”[2], “Regions” and “Areas”
The combination of three Basic macro-spaces gives the code for another 6 models of merged places : “City blocks”, “Microraion”, “Small-size-city”, “Linear town”, “Medium-size-city”, “Metropole”. Basic pattern for each model gives as an ”ideal” spatial parameters such as location, dimensions, borders, communication structure. Using the characteristics of the basic models places one can design and built spatial models for urbanized areas.
The research on cognitive models of built environment was partially supported by RFBR, research project No. 13-00-00001 a. (2014)
[1] Douglal Porteus. Environment and behavior. 1977.
[2] David Shane Recombinant urbanism. 2005