Skanderbeg Square is in the centre of Tirana, the capital of Albania. And it is rather more than a square since it is a kind of mirror which reflects the history of the country and also one where Albanian society can see itself.
Interview with Erion Veilaj, Mayor of Tirana, and Johan Anrys, architect and author of the winning work of the European Prize for Urban Public Space 2018.
Interview with Raquel Rolnik
Professor Rolnik warns of the dangers of losing public space in cities governed by the logic of privatisation.
At the award-giving ceremony for the 2018 Prize, held in the evening of 20 June, the six winning projects were announced and diplomas presented.
"At the basis of the European Prize for Urban Public Space lies the conviction that a well-designed and well-intended public space is conducive to bettering the lives of people and the health of society at large"
Masha Gessen highlights the fundamental role of public space in democracy
The well-known gender theorist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley offers her views on public space today and on the dwindling freedom of assembly.
With the threat of climate change and the exponential growth of cities, Michael Kimmelman, art and architecture critic of The New York Times , calls for a twenty-first-century model of the city that is more responsible with its environs and towards the people who inhabit it.
The list of the 25 finalist works of the tenth edition of the European Prize for Urban Public Space is now available for consultation on this website.
Entries for the 2018 Prize combine to offer an outstanding representation of cities which endorse public space as an essential aspect of urban improvement.
After two decades of work, an old mining operation which was closed at the end of the twentieth century and subsequently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site is now a large park combining industrial archaeology, green landscape, leisure installations, and cultural facilities.
Several cultural groups of musicians, poets, and visual artists organise to carry out a temporary renovation of a Stalinist-era amphitheatre in the city’s central park by means of crowdfunding, collaborative design, and “self-construction” teamwork.
A new underground tunnel, more than a hundred metres long and decorated with Delft Blue tiles representing fragments of Dutch naval history, provides cyclists and pedestrians with a connection from the old city centre to quays on the IJ River waterfront.
The main square of Tirana has been renovated with multi-coloured paving made with stones from different parts of the country.
Somewhere between a closed building and open space, an old psychiatric hospital pavilion has been partially saved from demolition to offer a peaceful refuge for patients, their families, and people walking in the public park surrounding it.
A series of tactical urbanism operations has pedestrianised a “superblock”—nine blocks in the grid-designed Eixample district—in a pilot test of a future large-scale strategy for reclaiming public space from private vehicles and making it available for public transport, bicycles and pedestrians.
Montalegre, 5 - 08001 Barcelona
Tel. 93 306 41 00 - Fax 93 306 41 01
publicspace@cccb.org
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