Commoning the City: From Consumption to Care

• Maria Shéhérazade Giudici

The plague of 1347 marked the end of the Siena communal experiment. Can the current pandemic encourage us to rethink cities as spaces of care?

The Pandemic, Southern Urbanisms and Collective Life

in the massifying cities of the global south, where most urban people in the world live, ‘social distancing’ as prescribed by northern health protocols is just about impossible. 

Public space’s normality

• Hans Ibelings

What are the responses of designers and architects to the crisis of the pandemic with regard to public spaces? The architecture critic Hans Ebeling observes that the debate about the spatial implications of confinement has mostly focused on the home and workplace, while public space has only been...

"Domi manere convenit felicibus": Notes on the Health Crisis and Public Space

• Xavier Monteys

Xavier Monteys reflects on the overvaluation of public space and speaks out in favour of stigmatised domestic space. Our home, inviolable and guardian of our privacy, is our true space of freedom. 

“We need to revive the possibility of infiltrating greenness into our cities”

• Carme Ribas

The dense cities are in the spotlight due to the impact of the pandemics COVID-19. In this interview, Carme Ribas, a Barcelona architect and president of the 2014 award of the European Prize for Urban Public Space discusses the future prospects of cities.

Dietmar Steiner, An Old Friend of the Prize

• David Bravo i Bordas

We mourn the death of Dietmar Steiner, director of the Architekturzentrum Wien from 1993 until 2016 and an old friend of the European Prize for Urban Public Space. This sensitive architect, aware of the complexity of the urban fact was the most veteran member of the international jury of the Prize.

Exterior: Empty

Public space is what keeps city life going, claims Ibelings, and the pandemic underlines how essential it is for our social life. The lockdowns have robbed us of those casual encounters in public space, and the part of our social life that simply happens every day, unplanned, accidentally, and...

Cities in the Pandemic

La pandemia nos obliga a plantearnos problemas de las ciudades que perdurarán después de la crisis, afirma Richard Sennett. En este artículo, el autor analiza temas claves como la oportunidad que la pandemia ofrece a los poderes reguladores, la importancia de encontrar maneras de contrarrestar la...

Container Riff

• Michael Sorkin

Published in the exhibition catalogue Present and Futures. Architecture in Cities. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 1996