An Ontology for Exploring Urban Public Life Today

Michael Brill An O n t o l o g y for E x p l o r i n g Urban Public Life Today There is a common and historic assumption that open space is where public life occurs. But this historic relationship between open space and public life may no longer be so true, and may now be too constraining an assumption to be very useful in thinking fully about public life. Public life has had a 300-year transformation, seen by most social critics as a decline, or worse, a fall. I don't really agree. Rather, I believe we tend not to recognize some of the public life we do have or many emerging forms of public life. Nor do we honor those forms we do recognize, because they are not for purposes that we esteem or not for everybody. In fact, there is a rich component of public life that occurs in spaces that are not pub­ licly owned and are not the classical urban open space of the dense street, the enclosed square, or the park. Examples include the strip, the indoor and outdoor mall, the atrium, the skyway system connecting a second level public world, the vacant lot, the abandoned highway fragment used by skateboarders and sunbathers, community gardens, the board­ walk and the beach. Moreover, there is still a vigorous public life in the discourse about politics, morality, and religion, but in space that isn't a physical place at all: the virtual space of the inter­ active media, of text, image, and voice communications. Nevertheless, the literature generally accepts the idea that there has been substantial loss of public life. This supposed loss generates strong nostalgia for an image of a dense, diverse, classless, and democratic public life lived in our streets, squares and parks, an image diat was probably never true for us here in America. The literature that couples public life with public space often contains a conde­ scending attitude: if we Americans want to see how public life and public place is done really well, we must go to Europe's historic urban centers (always, i t seems, to the Piazza D i San Marco, the Piazza Navona, or Milan's Galleria) and, i f we would only P L A C E S