Public Space: Lens

I am viewing public space through the lens of Hannah Arendts view of public space. ie spatial qualities of architecture that allow for the free exchange of ideas in the face to face meeting of individuals. My overall arguement is that physical public space is no longer analogous to that idea do to the mobilized network allowing for users to interact via thier social networks. By creating an open source public space to faciltate the network, this can break the privacy of the virtual social network as well as try to re-engage the sphere of architecture as a means of public activism rather than a background for it.


"The second feature stressed by Arendt has to do with the spatial quality of public life, with the fact that political activities are located in a public space where citizens are able to meet one another, exchange their opinions and debate their differences, and search for some collective solution to their problems. Politics, for Arendt, is a matter of people sharing a common world and a common space of appearance so that public concerns can emerge and be articulated from different perspectives. In her view, it is not enough to have a collection of private individuals voting separately and anonymously according to their private opinions. Rather, these individuals must be able to see and talk to one another in public, to meet in a public-political space, so that their differences as well as their commonalities can emerge and become the subject of democratic debate.

This notion of a common public space helps us to understand how political opinions can be formed which are neither reducible to private, idiosyncratic preferences, on the one hand, nor to a unanimous collective opinion, on the other. Arendt herself distrusted the term “public opinion,” since it suggested the mindless unanimity of mass society. In her view representative opinions could arise only when citizens actually confronted one another in a public space, so that they could examine an issue from a number of different perspectives, modify their views, and enlarge their standpoint to incorporate that of others. Political opinions, she claimed, can never be formed in private; rather, they are formed, tested, and enlarged only within a public context of argumentation and debate."


*excerpt taken from the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosphy, and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, CA 94305