The formation process of public space: from urban fabric to palaces and squares

Abstract

The formation process of public spaces within the modern city has ancient origins: although generally referenced to the model of the great public spaces of Republican and imperial Rome (forum), the “common” urban space of Italian cities bears a different juridical nature from that of the “public” space of the imperial Rome. The latter was fenced and equipped with gates, it was a personal property of the imperial family, with access governed in time and dedicated to the worship of the imperial family and its tutelary deities. This urban space was therefore not “public” in the sense we understand today. The “common” space (squares) of the Italian cities came into being in the Middle Ages hence the deliberate action of the free “Communes” that decided it to build by subtraction, demolishing residential blocks as in Florence – of factional losers in the struggle for power. It became a space for free civic aggregation, for the meeting and the election of the council and the podestà. There are some earlier squares next to the cathedrals, where meetings where necessary for the election of the archbishop since the tenth century, but the “common” space acquires its complete form and its civic role only since the thirteenth century with the more mature phase of the municipal experience. In these squares, bishopric, municipal (and later ducal and lordly), we can recognize the presence of a market place: the “common space” here takes on the double meaning of place for business and place for civic meetings. This manner of designing public spaces consolidates in the following centuries with several cases in mannerist age and beyond. The birth of the modern theater stood initially in these spaces through wooden stalls mounted temporarily, before knotting in the form of a closed theater building (Strappa, 1995). The design of the public spaces within the city used specific design skills to shape the urban voids in a “theatrical” manner. In parallel with the rise of the bourgeois mansion (Palazzo) and the recast and aggregation of basic building types, often adjacent to the palazzo, an empty space arises assuming the character of a “building without roof”.