Embracing Urban complexity: The experience of the AESOP Thematic Group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures

Abstract

The complexity of capturing the multiple, overlapping, and interconnected aspects that animate a city is well known. This is true if we think for instance of cities’ morphological evolution, numerous networks and diverse actors participating or being systematically excluded from urban decision-making processes. Another relevant issue is the co-existence in our cities of innovative forms of spaces’ liberation, reclaiming public spaces from underused or abandoned places, with market-led and extractive initiatives of privatisation of public spaces. Additionally, there are the direct and indirect impacts of health, environmental and geopolitical crises that the world is facing by undergoing continuous and increasingly complex transformations. At the urban scale, the binomial public space – urban cultures combines various interrelated perspectives that could address and explain this complexity, and explore relational dynamics between spaces within urban transformations, cultural phenomena, and interactions with those who inhabit the spaces. This article is a reflection on AESOP’s Thematic Group on Public Spaces and Urban Cultures (TG PSUC), its development since 2010, modus operandi, and the events organised within selected themes, which considered the binomial both as subject and method, to explore, and actively engage with current and future perspectives on public spaces.