'A Final Statement'

The city fascinates us. Mainly because of its enormous diversity and complexity. But what do we refer to when we are talking about the city? Can we still describe the city with the language and research methods we have created for describing the city? The first thing that comes to mind when we think of the city is the spatial arrangement of a highly dense building environment. Cities established as the clustering of a place to trade and developed many supporting services as the settlements grew into cities. But surely, the cities we live in today, and especially the metropolises, have reached an incredible complexity with innumerable layers of history, stacked over time. The city is a time box in which over time snapshots of its contemporary situations have been collected, from the establishment of the settlement until the city it has become today. The city carries the memory of its own development.

Within the city the public sphere has always played an important role, because of its potential for communication, confrontation and connectivity. We refer to it as a sphere because there is not one public layer or dimension but many, one nothing less important than the other. They are all realities that all together form the Public City. To develop our notion of this complex theme in a city of incomprehensible scale, we have chosen for a threefold approach: firstly we have observed the public sphere in Sao Paulo and documented our experiences in pictures, sketches, diagrams and texts; secondly we have started to develop an ‘urban vocabulary’ that relates to the concept of the city in general. The next step has been to link the urban alphabet with our experiences of public Sao Paulo, as a tool to render the publicness of Sao Paulo in a broader context. By interlinking the words and images we could discover different realities or layers of publicness that cover the contemporary situation of Public Sao Paulo best. Important to understand is that many more layers can be found within this public sphere of the city, but as we have not intended to decompose the city’s complexity into a few defined layers that form a complete representation of the city’s publicness, these are the ones that describe our notion of Public Sao Paulo best.

The final step would be to find out how these different realities relate to one another. As can be seen in the public web and the diagrams, the different layers are not isolated but are connected and influence eachother. The informal city meets the infrastructural city where the infrastructural network congests and traffic jams grow, making it the perfect spot for entrepreneurs to sell their goods or services to the awaiting mass. The formal city meets the universal city when people want to recreate, to represent themselves and confront others in a representational environment, when people want to disconnect from their private situations and plug themselves into the public. Within these overlaps we find potential. The potential to trigger something new, not for the benefit of one group of users but for more.

The question is not how can we decompose the complex city into fragments and into a language that we understand? Not how to make the notion of the city graspable. Because it is this ‘ungraspability’ that makes the city so fascinating. And perhaps, our own language would not suffice in taking on this task and therefore could not represent the Reality. Neither have we intended to confine the public sphere of Sao Paulo and the city in general since the public sphere has an inexhaustible capability to grow, adapt and transform itself. The quality of the public realm lies within its freedom for different interpretations. Let the people have their own interpretations, their own realities, multiple realities.
The question is how can we as architects, urban planners and municipality develop a tool or strategy to leave space for these different interpretations and design public spaces that in fact are public, that have the potential to transform into something more. In stead of confining the public realm, excluding undesired visitors, determine and control the user’s behaviour within our pretty ‘public’ spaces we design for profit and consumption today. At the same time, this is nothing new because ever since the first public places, like the Agora in Athens, undesired guests were not welcome to participate. Still, here a little more passiveness would be in place. While at the same time, temporarily or locally, the city is left unguarded and abandoned when a more proactive approach is needed. Within this quest valuable lessons can be learned from the flexible, adaptable informal city, always in a process of development into something appropriate.