Had I but plenty of money,
money enough to spare
the house for me, no doubt,
were a house in the city square.
Ah, such a life, such a life,
as one leads at the window there.

Robert Browning, "Up at a Villa Down in the City," Men and Women

Every new century begins with a kind of soul-searching. As North Americans, the entrée into the twenty-first century compels us to confront the critical place where most of us live—the metropolis. Several broad trends that ushered the close of the last century—globalization, privatization, and simulation—will continue to define the debates about urban form and function in the new millennium. The increasing globalization of urban development decisions raises concerns about the loss of local control over urban design. The continuing shift toward the privatization of urban space suggests that the already diminished importance of "public interest" in city planning may be further weakened. Meanwhile, the digital revolution has had a huge impact on the daily life of urban citizens, implying even greater distancing from the physical space of the city, from its design, and from previous historic eras that emphasized the creation of livable spaces for pedestrians. The postindustrial age has brought a new practice to the making of urban landscapes: the creation of artificial or simulated spaces—shopping malls, festival pavilions, video arcades—as the primary places where urban dwellers meet. The computer and its spin-off technologies, such as the Internet, pose radically different forms of urban interaction—cybercommunities and Internet cafés, for example.

Some urbanists have come to accept these changes by theorizing that they are logical outcomes for the postindustrial society that America has become. Writers claim, for example, that current trends were set in the nineteenth century, with the building of the first suburban towns, which initially appeared as well designed "garden cities." They argue that America evolved as a frenzied, entrepreneurial nation of people who preferred fast transit and suburban houses with backyards. Dispersed morphologies were therefore inevitable, a product of American inventiveness in creating the technological means (highways, automobiles) to use peripheral locations. Others argue that these trends are part and parcel of the shift in American urbanism toward a postmodern condition, caused by the changing nature of urban economies, social dynamics, culture and spatial form. Still others celebrate the advantages of virtual communities and cyberspace.

Postmodernity in urbanism came into its own in the 1990s. Postmodernists brilliantly captured the essence of American cities at the close of the millennium—from the dispersed islands of gated communities to "edge cities," spaces built by global investors. They argued that these new trends called for a different set of filters through which to understand the new urbanism. Postmodern theory, they offered, emphasized multiple rather than singular ways of seeing the city, diversity as opposed to homogeneity, and local governance rather than centralized authority. Postmodernity transcended the limitations of modernist planning, which had failed to embrace the political complexity of urban life in the twentieth century. Postmodernists were critical of an increasingly privatized planning process that favored a "user pay" mentality and greater roles for private consultants, lobbyists, or public relation firms in urban planning, in the midst of increasing corporate interests in the education process.

Yet, postmodern analyses of the city still leave us with a vacuum. Postmodern theory may help us understand how to critically view the urban condition. But what do postmodernists offer as solutions to the urban crisis? In one of the best works on the subject, case studies are drawn from Las Vegas, Tijuana, Mexico, and the Hollywood film industry. Are these prototypes of where cities should be heading? Where are the innovative design visions of the urban future? Where are the great twenty-first-century urbanists to replace Lewis Mumford or Daniel Burnham? What paradigms of urban design and planning will flourish in the new millennium?

In the spirit of the ancient Greek skeptikos, one wonders whether postmodern interpretations of the city should be accepted as inevitable. At the same time, we ought not imagine a romantic return to the preindustrial city—the medieval fortress town, or the Baroque streetscape. Neither should we pretend American cities will ever have the density and historic traditions of European urban centers. However, there is a clear need for an alternative vision of American urban space, one that embraces the traditions that defined America's urban evolution, while incorporating the best elements of inherited European urbanism. I believe those elements have lingered on the edges of our urban experience, but for political and historical reasons we have ignored them. Further, I would argue that the connection to Europe for American urbanism lies south of the border at the gateway to our Latin neighbors—that is, it lies in Mexico, and in Mexico's connection to Europe through Spain.

Mexico has been an intimate part of North American urbanism beginning with the early settlement of this continent, although our history books and our scholarship do not always recognize this. Pre-Columbian cities were the first planned settlements of North America. Mexico's modern connection to the United States is driven by its geographical proximity, and by the millions of Latino immigrants who helped shape the regional economy of the southwestern United States and who increasingly populate much of the continent today. Mexico's urbanism was shaped by indigenous forces, but the greatest influence on city building was exerted by Spain, which colonized and built most of urban Mexico over the three centuries from 1500 to 1800.

One of the central elements of Latin city building has been public space—town squares, plazas, markets, gardens, courtyards, and commercial streets. These elements have been important not only as physical design markers that anchor urban space but also as cultural and political forces that suggest a way of thinking about urban life, and about the trade-offs between private rights and the public interest. Using the experiences of Spain and Mexico as filters, I will argue in this book for an urban design perspective that embraces the value of public space in American urbanism. Further, I will contend that politicians and policy makers need to make the creation and preservation of public space a much higher priority in planning for redevelopment and growth in the American metropolis of the twenty-first century.

This book is organized as a set of studies of the politics of public space and urban change in two Spanish-speaking regions of the world—Spain and Mexico. As I suggest above, the role of Spanish and Latino culture in American urbanism must be better understood. Mexico is an essential part of North America, both as a neighboring nation to the United States and as the largest contributor to its immigrant community. Moreover, Mexico is one of the United States' key trade partners, under the NAFTA agreement. This partnership guarantees a future of increasing Mexico-U.S. economic, cultural, and environmental integration. Americans need to know more about the cultural dimensions of Mexican urbanism as part of their understanding of urban space in North America; among other things, this will help strengthen the commitment to public space in the planning of U.S. metropolitan areas.

Contemporary Urbanism and Public Space

A salient feature of contemporary American urbanism is the fact that basic forms of public space—pedestrian streets, squares, plazas, promenades—are rapidly becoming either obsolete or unrecognizable. Most scholars generally agree that as the city has shifted from an era of decentralization to one of "despatialization," public life is reconfiguring itself in very different forms. Speaking of "cyburbia," and the "end of public space," one author contends that it is not that buildings or places are absent from the city fabric, but that the spaces in between are missing. Traditional public spaces have lost their attraction, if not their role, in American cities.

We have entered an era in which the city as a physical place is being deconstructed into an array of forms that conform to the postmodern, antigeographical needs of a global society. Urban dwellers still travel through space, but they are increasingly less aware or less dependent on noticing its content. Today, it is often only the spectacular spaces, the places with images that mirror those in the electronic space of television, that remain in the mental maps of urban dwellers. Technology buffers urbanites from real space, both for reasons of global marketing and security. The result is that people are mainly engaged by public spaces that simulate something, rather than those that are historically or culturally embedded in the urban fabric. Contemporary urbanism—a world of shopping malls, skyways (aboveground street networks between tall buildings), freeways, TV screens, historic districts created by local chambers of commerce, and high-tech exurbs like Silicon Valley—has become ephemeral.

Yet, even as the traditional fabric of cities fragments into a mosaic of serviceable techno-residential suburbs and functional economic districts, the demand for public life remains high. This demand is expressed in the form of some 30,000 shopping malls in urban America, or by the proliferation of festival marketplaces, regional fairs, parks, theme parks, and other forms of public entertainment. Are these disparate spaces the only alternatives we have left to construct a public life in our cities in the twenty-first century? Are they the last building blocks we have to create livable inner-city communities? It is my contention that we can better respond to these questions by taking a detour through the public spaces of two urban cultures, Mexico and Spain.

As one explores the public spaces of Spain and Mexico, inevitably the historic importance of a specific form of public space—the plaza—must be confronted. "La plaza" is an indigenous element of Mediterranean urbanism. It was imposed forcibly on Mexico (and the rest of Latin America) either through oligarchic precolonial societies or via the colonial Spanish imperial political system. The etymology of the word plaza is worth considering: its origins lie in the ancient Latin word platea, which referred to a broad way or open space. By the medieval period, the Latin word had evolved to placea, or in Middle English plaece. Today the word place is commonly understood to refer to "a particular part of space, of defined or undefined extent, but of definite situation," but that definition is listed as only the third most important in the Oxford English Dictionary; the first definition given is "an open space in a city, a square or marketplace."

This implies that the first openings in the fabric of cities—dating back at least to ancient Greek and Roman cities, and to the early medieval period—the first sites where the street grid gave way to some form of open space (probably a marketplace or gathering place), became the spaces that would distinguish one subarea from another within a city, the spaces that gave urban districts their original identity. In the twentieth century, the term place became a generic word used to distinguish one part of the urban fabric from another; it appears that this distinguishing element began as a public plaza.

Cities and the Sense of Place

One category of work in planning and urban design in the second half of the twentieth century involved the search for ways to rescue the "sense of place" in cities, since this treasured quality was being eclipsed by technological change. Some urban design scholars sought to analyze the physical and symbolic landscape cues that make cities more understandable to residents. One popular approach identified five defining structural elements, three of which define urban places (the district, the landmark, the node), one that frames their boundaries (the edge), and one that defines the experience of moving through them (the path). Indeed, the field of environmental psychology tries to capture the experience of place and find uniform ways of measuring it (cognitive mapping, for example). More recently, the field of environmental simulation has utilized technology to simulate unique places for the purposes of preserving them in the midst of urban development.

But "sense of place" is, at best, a vague notion, difficult to measure, and highly subjective. Yet, seemingly everyone would agree that cities with meaningful spaces are more stimulating than those that are homogeneous. One can point to the importance of individual sensibility as a factor in creating a sense of place. Two states of mind have been suggested for city dwellers. "Ordinary perception" is the stream of consciousness that shuts out place and surroundings; it is the conscious state of typical city residents during their daily routines of moving around the city. On the other hand, "simultaneous perception" is a way of taking in one's surroundings and experiencing a place more completely. The latter tends mainly to occur in the places with the richest built environment, such as a glittery theater district or a beautiful landscape. A goal of urban designers should be to create urban spaces where users are jolted out of their ordinary state of perception into a state of simultaneous experience of the urban landscape.

History is one of the central pillars upon which sense of place is based. Cities are cascaded sets of landscapes created at different moments of history. The strongest sense of place may thus occur in places that are able to preserve these different layers. But culture may also play a role. For example, the built environment of a non-Western city like Tokyo enhances the perception of place. The Western system of street addresses and gridded street layouts would be useless there. Most streets are nameless and individual houses do not have marked addresses. To become oriented in Tokyo, one must learn the ethnography of the city, by walking its streets, by talking with people—that is, by experiencing it, and learning its contents through habitual exposure. The meaning of urban space shifted from the medieval period, when it was a means for promotion of human contact, to the Renaissance, when it conveyed aesthetic beauty, to the industrial period, when space lost earlier meanings and became merely a domain for circulation.

Indeed, a pivotal shift in the field of urban design occurred in the early 1970s, with the advent of postmodern design theory, which imagined new meanings for urban space. During the 1960s, critics of modernist cities argued that skyscrapers and freeways were destroying the sense of place in the city. A decade later, a highly publicized book on Las Vegas argued that traditional notions of space and place were not the only means to achieve exciting landscapes. Perhaps urbanists, the authors argued, were too obsessed with traditional enclosed spaces (like the Italian piazza), and too quick to dismiss the virtues of the highway and even of urban sprawl. For example, the urban highway strip was embellished with signs and symbols that creatively sculpted a new urban tableau tuned to the scale and needs of the automobile. Urban space and time boundaries were being redefined, moving the urban experience out of the ordered, hierarchical grid of modernism to a more anarchic, chaotic, inventive postmodern urban structure.

Time, Public Space, and Urban Social Tension

Change in the nature of public places can be tracked across time and through different political contexts. The two defining eras are the preindustrial period and the industrial/modern period (the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries). The transition from the former to the latter led to a crisis of public space.

Preindustrial cities have been characterized as having an "appearential order," a system where strangers identified one another based on visual appearance—clothing, hairstyle, and so forth. Public spaces had multiple functions—water collection, news gathering, political expression. Daily use of public space brought strangers together in a space where appearance defined order. In industrial cities, the new order was "spatial"; territory became conditioned by social class. Strangers were defined in public space—their social rank indicated which zones of the city they could travel in. During the industrial era, urban property was defended with zoning laws; public space was managed by municipal codes, which prevented homeless citizens from loitering or sleeping in certain public areas. These laws created bizarre forms of order in public space; for example, in 1920s London a vast army of poor, homeless men were not allowed to remain for any length of time in any public space—local municipal codes literally kept them moving until 6 p.m., when charitable lodging houses opened for the evening. But even then, the homeless were allowed to stay for only one night, and then put back on the streets. This kind of behavior made public spaces places of tension in the modern era, a world where urban strangers find it increasingly difficult to cope with one another.

One scholarly history of civic life argues that urban public space reached its height in the seventeenth century, began its decline in the eighteenth century, and has come crashing down ever since. Public space, in the post-Renaissance centuries, was theater—a place where personal identity was acted out in civic locales. In European cities public plazas were the spaces where citizens experienced their identity by engaging in politics, entertainment, or social gossip. The gradual decline of urban public life unfolded in three stages. First, in the late eighteenth century egocentric public places were created to celebrate kings and royal families, or to provide privatized squares for the rich. Public life also moved indoors, to cafés and theaters, or it shifted toward the isolation of the new parks. Second, in the nineteenth century people began to turn inward and obsess with self and personality, while public life became passive rather than active. Urban dwellers preferred to be spectators, for example, by sitting in cafés and looking out at the city. Third, public life significantly declined in the twentieth century; people failed to find meaning in increasingly alien public places and retreated further into the family space. They saw little chance for active public lives and further retreated into private spaces by the lure of electronic communication and entertainment in their homes and offices.

This transformation of city life from public to private, between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, still left open the question for contemporary urban policy makers: what role should public spaces play within the metropolis? Several schools of thought emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. On one side were those who defended public life and the model of the pedestrian city. They attacked the failures of modernist freeway cities and called for more high-density urban places like New York City. Their arguments were based on ethnographic observations of the quality of life associated with high-density streets and sidewalks, which they saw as the vital spaces of the modern city.

By the 1980s, however, others argued that the sheer force of technology, particularly communications technology, makes it less possible to plan for pedestrian-oriented cities. They believe the nostalgia for European-like cities is misplaced in the United States, a society of individual-oriented living spaces, where public life can be experienced in "virtual spaces," such as interactive media, radio talk shows, and cable television. Futurist urbanists cast shopping malls as the new downtown business districts, and the new public spaces of contemporary North America. They argue that since the format has caught on, developers and merchandisers will now become more innovative in making the shopping malls respond to the larger public life needs (recreation, public discourse) of city dwellers. Yet, many are critical of such a view, noting that such retail environments are artificial public spaces, in that they are controlled by private capital and principally designed for marketing and not for residence.

It is possible to imagine two forms of public space: first, as a physical, material form, say a town square, with actual physical dimensions, and an architectural form. But that space is more than simply a physical space, it has a second form—a historically determined and politically created context. The town square can symbolize a democratic society, one in which people can freely gather in public spaces, as opposed to say a totalitarian society, where access to those spaces is highly controlled, and where certain behaviors are disallowed. This second form of space may be the most crucial to defend, since reliance on private interests for access to gathering spaces in the public sphere may end up being dangerous to a free society.

Culture and Public Space

There is little question that the contemporary city is facing an urban design crisis wrapped in a larger social dilemma: how to reinvent an urban public life that promotes a sense of community and a feeling of identity with the urban environment? One critical dimension of this dilemma has not received the attention it deserves—the role of culture.

There is a strong culturally derived theme of antiurbanism embedded in American urban life. Its roots lie in the nation's history, but its expression appears in both subtle and less subtle antiurban messages and subtexts that permeate contemporary urban life. For example, the print and visual media tend to portray the urban street as a negative place. Such terms as "street person" imply that the street is a dangerous locale, as opposed to the safe nested environment of privatized space like a shopping mall. Ironically, in much of the world, especially in the Mediterranean region, writers, designers, and urban dwellers view the street as "the river of life in the city." Yet, the American mass media often project an antiurban message: the street is the space where spectacular and dangerous events unfold. But not everyone accepts this. It has been observed, for example, that although the public may perceive homeless people as "undesirables," most members of this population segment are typically not dangerous, and can make positive contributions to urban life.

Nonetheless, streets are dominated by narratives that define them as stages for gang activity or other threatening behaviors. Streets and open spaces encapsulate the public's "fear of crime" in contemporary American culture. They have increasingly been portrayed in American culture as "mean streets." This perception has undoubtedly contributed to the growing privatization of space in American cities, the walling off of people into secure consumer spaces and gated residential communities. Underlying these changes may be an emerging, deep-seated cultural fear of strangers.

The cultural/historical strain of antiurbanism in the United States is distinguished by an especially hostile view of informal public life. Other world cultures have signature "third places"—public gathering sites that have become celebrated cultural icons—for example, the Spanish plaza, the English pub, the French café, the Viennese coffeehouse, or the German beer garden. But such places are disappearing in American urban culture. In their place the private home has become the dominant place of gathering.

This antiurban bias in U.S. culture reveals itself in the American attitude toward parks and green spaces in cities. In Europe parks evolved as part of a collective way to design convivial, community spaces for leisure. The English "pleasure garden," for example, was part of a movement to invent innovative places for such purposes. These included promenades, shopping streets, or town squares. The idea was that the city was a microcosm of the world. This was the intention of early park designers in the United States, such as Frederick Law Olmsted. Yet, in the end, a more antiurban view of parks has prevailed, one in which they are seen as an escape from the evil of cities, even an escape to the country.

Historically, the connection between public space and place, can be traced to the public plaza, whose evolution over the centuries reveals varying cultural expressions at different points in time of the need for public life in cities. It is generally agreed that the first important urban societies—in India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt—did not utilize the public square as part of the design and social fabric of their settlements. The first significant urban public places were found in ancient Greek cities, specifically in the form of the "agora," the civic embodiment of political life. The agora was a place of assembly, at first for political gatherings, and later as a location for the Greek market. While the "acropolis"—the sacred, religious locale—was walled and closed off, the agora was an open, accessible space, and was seen as the symbol of the "polis," the locus of self-government of early Greek democratic city-states. At its best, the agora was a rallying point for speech and open-air citizens' meetings. In fact, the agora's origins are said to trace back to the practice of Greek warriors gathering in a circle periodically to discuss matters of common concern. The circle became a place of free speech. "Agora" meant assembly. As one scholar noted: "[B]y having access to this circular space known as the agora, citizens became part of a political system based on balance, symmetry, reciprocity."

In its earliest form, around the sixth century BC, the agora was said to be an open-air space, spontaneous and richly adorned with public life. In the later Greek/Hellenistic period, after the third century BC, Greek cities were more ordered, and the agoras were rectangular in shape, surrounded by buildings and closed off to traffic. This signified a less spontaneous and rich public life. As fancy gates and porticoes began to appear around the agoras, and as traffic was shut out, they reflected the weakening of collective power, and a corresponding decline of the Greek city-state.

If the agora symbolized democracy in ancient Greek city-states, the Roman forum stood for power. The forum, in fact, is said to have evolved from the morphology of Etruscan towns and later Roman military encampments, where the geographical center was the axis of power. In Roman cities the main streets (cardo and decumanus) crossed here, and the most important institutions and buildings were on this central site (especially the "basilica," or combined court of justice and market hall).

The Roman model of urban form emphasized the creation of a central space—limited in size to give it more meaning. It is not surprising that the forum, or town square, was born along the Mediterranean, considering the degree to which both Greek and Roman urbanism embraced it. There is evidence that, aside from its origins as a space of power, the forum played many roles in Roman cities: as a site of commerce, political discourse, the administration of justice, and dissemination of news. Commerce occurred around the forum in the market halls of the basilica. Shops were set up on the forum to teach language and rhetoric as part of commercial life, while the central storerooms for weights and measures were also located here. There were public-speaking daises on the Roman squares for engaging in political discussion. Public controversy could be aired here; its resolution might then move into the halls of the basilica. Meanwhile, much information was dispensed in the forum: election posters, sale contracts, wills, adoption notices. It was, in short, a media center.

The idea of a town square, as developed in Greece and Rome, began to assert itself in the medieval towns of Europe, and would find specific, more elaborate expressions in the Renaissance period. From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, European towns were either concentrated, walled spaces built around castles and monasteries, or fortress compounds (such as the French bastide). Within these towns of crowded, crooked, and narrow streets, the plaza or square was a space that organically appeared to facilitate certain functions: the gathering of water, the collection of church taxes, buying and selling goods, exchanging information, or entertaining. Many of the early squares were market squares, and typically they formed outside the walls of the town, at the gate. While market squares were the most common form of medieval plaza, there were also spaces that formed in front of churches or town halls, which were used for either celebrations (tournaments, processions, etc.) or civic purposes (judicial proceedings). Limited technology forced the public into medieval squares on a daily basis, and a sense of collective destiny and community prevailed in public life. After the Middle Ages, some public life would move from the plaza to the indoor world of theaters, cafés, stores, or the royal court.

The Renaissance period, particularly in Italy, formalized the design of the town square. The Renaissance brought the discovery of perspective, scale, and proportion to the design of the Italian piazza. One is struck by the sense of order and uniformity that accompanies the arcade-enclosed squares of the sixteenth century in Italy. Some have suggested that the conscious, formal designs of the period mark the beginning of city planning, expressed through a connection between design and power. In any case, the pure geometric forms of the 1500s gave way to ornate, theatric piazzas in the Baroque period that followed. The squares became showpieces for royal families; the superiority of royal power was expressed through architecture that was both monumental and beautiful. The piazzas of Rome, especially those designed by Bernini, typify the theatricality of the Baroque era. This "academic classicism" is repeated in the plazas of seventeenth-century France, and it later inspired designs of public spaces in another great European city of the time, London.

The plaza was born and nurtured along the Mediterranean—in Greece, Italy, Spain, and later France. After labyrinthine streets and medieval towns, the plaza was embraced—as part of a higher, cosmic order—by the royal families of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. In Versailles in 1700 the royal architects found the ideal design of space, in which a town, palace, and gardens could be woven together into an abstract construction of power. The plazas of Renaissance and Baroque Italy, France, and Spain became monumental spaces of royal control. They set the tone for plazas built all over Europe as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century—from Trafalgar Square in London to Red Square in Moscow.

But, as one author wrote, "as progress spread, the piazza died." By the nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution began to restructure urban space, traditional public spaces dramatically changed. Some were simply abandoned; others would play different roles in the changing ecology of the modern city. With the emergence of stores and storefront design as part of the urban landscape, strolling along streets became a new kind of public experience, and commercial street corridors begin to replace the town square as the gathering spaces of an industrializing society.

While these changes were transforming the grand traditions of public space in Europe, in the United States the industrial revolution arrived in a nation with a very young urban design legacy. The pioneers who settled the United States had brought the memory of European public spaces, and these found expressions in the colonial era in the form of fenced grazing areas or "commons" in the middle of New England towns, military parade grounds, or church squares. As American cities formed at the end of the eighteenth century, and through the nineteenth century, it was clear that private land speculation, rather than civic planning, was the driving force. For the immigrant population streets, rather than squares, became the dominant public areas of urban life. By the second half of the nineteenth century parks were where people enjoyed leisure in the city, drawing on the new trend of the beer garden and pleasure grounds of cosmopolitan Europe. The idea of the park as a work of art and as an urban social outlet flourished through the design and promotion of the ideas and park designs of Frederick Law Olmsted and his colleagues.

These parks meant that while an urban citizen could find a pleasant experience with nature, public squares where people met spontaneously and interacted would be absent from most U.S. cities. As a result, there are few truly monumental open-air public squares in the United States. This fact does not necessarily bother American designers today. Indeed, one writer's comment about U.S. architects probably sums up the opinion of many: "[A]rchitects have been bewitched by a single element in the Italian landscape: the piazza. . . . They have been brought up on space, and enclosed space is easiest to handle." It has been argued that centralized public space does not constitute part of the American form of "psychosocial expression"—individual, freestanding buildings at reduced densities, rather than collective spaces in high-density settings. Privatized gathering space as opposed to community space is stronger in the United States than in Europe or Spanish America.

Yet, it may be that the urban plaza is misunderstood in the United States because it is seen as a physical environment or stage set, rather than a metaphor for playing out individual and community relations, as well as manifesting the local social order in space. Thus, there is a need for spaces where the role of individuals in the community can be made visible. It may not take the form of a pure public square, but it needs an expression in the urban built environment.

These ideas have been put to work in the fervent decade of public space revival that evolved in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. In one study of the design and uses of public space in New York City, rigorous field observation and measurements were used to determine specific strategies for making public spaces function even in a high-density metropolitan setting. Meanwhile, landscape architects and urban designers began to look at public spaces more carefully. Some argued for better control and management of these public plazas; others suggested studying not only the public spaces but also their relation to immediate surrounding land uses. Many different kinds of public spaces were carefully analyzed, including miniparks, "vest pocket" parks, neighborhood parks, college campus spaces, and day care spaces.

Absent a richer historic tradition, the emphasis in the United States has been on innovative public spaces. For example, in large urban centers, like New York City, new plazas were created around corporate buildings, like IBM, Seagram's, and the Chase Manhattan headquarters. Equally, new public spaces were connected to large-scale civic development projects, like Lincoln Center. There are few well-preserved historic plazas in New York City—perhaps Rockefeller Plaza, completed during the Depression years, is an exception. Many believe that public space can continue to thrive because it provides stimulation to users; a sense of belonging, discovery, and meaning; a symbolic connection to the larger society; and a sense of the local character of place. How these elements can be collectively preserved in cities remains one of the important tasks for public space planning in twenty-first-century America.

The Architecture Profession and Public Space

One of the dilemmas of the contemporary architecture profession is that, too often, it fails adequately to address the design problems of spaces between and around buildings. Architecture embraces the building as the supreme measure of professional achievement. The global celebration of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, is an example of how the world came to worship one building. The media's virtual obsession with the museum came at the expense of any discourse about the spaces around it. We heard almost nothing about the city of Bilbao during the period of fervor over the appearance of Gehry's titanium-walled building/sculpture on the shores of northern Spain.

A narrow focus on buildings has not always been the essence of the architecture profession. Indeed, the rise of modernist architecture in the early twentieth century, under the leadership of prominent figures like Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, was distinguished by its attention to the connection between buildings and the well-being of the larger city. Modernist architecture was notable for its grand social vision, its excitement about the ways architects could contribute to building a better, more equitable society. Many of the modernist designers wrote and thought about the larger city, and about the spaces around their buildings.

But at some point in the late twentieth century, U.S. architects began to doubt whether architecture could really solve the larger problems of cities—crime, poverty, the decline of inner-city neighborhoods, social inequality. By the 1970s the architecture profession had retreated from the modernist "grand social vision" model of design to a concern with "form making at the scale of buildings alone."

This shift was especially noticeable in universities, where close ties between architecture and environmental studies/city planning began to loosen in the 1970s. New intellectual and institutional alignments emerged: architecture and design, elevated to the status of high art, on one side; urban planning and policy, tied to politics, government, economy, and social issues, on the other. This realignment led to a very different role for the architect than during the height of modernism. Since the 1970s, as one commentator has suggested, "[t]he expression and comment of an individual architect became more important in the design of buildings than perceiving the city as a whole, and architecture as collective, connective or shared."

In the heyday of modernism, in "Professional Practice" classes in architecture schools, students were taught that the architect's role, both ethical and legal, when there was a dispute with a client or a general contractor, was that of "an impartial arbiter whose prime responsibility was to the quality of the environment, natural as well as man-made." But this changed. "Today, an architect's sole responsibility in the U.S. and elsewhere, is clearly to the client—to the person who pays the bills. And much of the quality of our cities, our suburbs and our countryside has suffered dramatically as a result."

While the shift in the professional conscience of architects may be the most important explanation of their subsequent declining interest in public spaces around buildings, there is another consideration as well. In architecture there has been a persistent tradition of viewing the architect as, first and foremost, an artist, a designer of spaces, who must rise above all other forces—zoning, politics, and so forth—that might neutralize his or her creativity. The myth of the "architect as artist" contributes to the isolation of architecture from urban policy and from the practical concerns about urban spaces around buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright often spoke of the "hand maidens of architecture—music, painting, sculpture." This reinforced the ideology of the architect as a master craftsman and artist, his/her role elevated above the mundane matters of street maintenance, traffic control, or city planning.

Perhaps one reason for skepticism about the role of architecture in shaping cities is that some of the early attempts at urban planning by master architects were either embarrassing or substantively ill-advised. Le Corbusier, often called the "father of modern architecture," was a visionary when it came to understanding how to harness industrial materials to create light, modern, functional structures. But Le Corbusier's foray into urban planning theory was not so stellar. His 1930 book La Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) envisioned a city denuded of its historic buildings, wiped clean of its neighborhoods with their traditions and sense of place, and replaced by a grid of high-rise buildings surrounded by open space and an interlocking system of freeways. Walkable streets were to be erased, superceded by the modernist geometry of a "machine age city." Le Corbusier theorized that neighborhood life could be translated into a new kind of futuristic architecture: vertical high-rise structures, in which each of the neighborhood amenities that formerly were aligned along the street would now be assigned to floors in a tower—the supermarket on one floor, the school on another, the bank on yet another, the community park and swimming pool on the roof.

Le Corbusier actually wanted to implement this plan for the center of Paris, surgically removing all of its historic buildings, its narrow alleyways, old stores and cafés, and the entire infrastructure of place, replacing these with high-rise towers. This could have destroyed one of the world's most valuable historic urban districts. As one critic noted, "The one thing nobody in La Ville Radieuse could expect to have was the 'esprit de quartier,' the sense of variety, surprise and pleasant random encounter that once made living in Paris one of the supreme experiences of urban man."

Fortunately, Parisians, much as they loved Le Corbusier, the master builder, did not accept his urban design prescriptions for their city. Le Corbusier was reportedly immensely disappointed throughout his life that he was never able to actually implement his vision of cities, in Paris, but his disappointment "could not have begun to compare with the misery and social dislocation the Radiant City would have inflicted on its inhabitants had it ever been built."

While the father of modern architecture in Europe was failing to produce an acceptable urban design model for the future, across the Atlantic Ocean America's greatest twentieth-century architect suffered a similar fate. To his credit, Frank Lloyd Wright, like his European counterpart, wanted not only to design individual buildings but also to create design solutions aimed at solving the larger problems of cities. For example, Wright invented a new kind of prefabricated, futuristic housing system—the "Usonian City." He wondered "how to mitigate the horror of human life caught helpless or unaware in the machine that is the city."

In the 1930s Wright crafted a model for the future of cities—he called it "Broadacre City." The model predicted that growth would eventually cause cities to spread out and become horizontal, not vertical. Broadacre City envisioned multilevel highways serving dispersed settlements in farmlike settings. Gasoline service stations were assigned central roles as urban activity nodes. Wright believed automobiles would dominate and define the city of the future; thus, places where automobiles were serviced logically should become community and social service centers. Meanwhile, he celebrated new electronic technologies that would allow city dwellers to enjoy the consumption of social experiences—movies, opera, theater, concerts—in their own homes, experiences that previously would have brought them out into the public realm of the city.

Wright never discussed whether this kind of home-oriented urbanism could destroy the spontaneity and stimulus that urban citizens had experienced in public spaces for centuries. Indeed, in Broadacre City, public life—the meeting of strangers in spontaneous, pedestrian-scale spaces—would disappear, replaced by home-based consumption of culture and information, or by automobile-oriented errands centered around gasoline service station nodes. Wright also speculated on new technologies that would dominate future cities—including bizarre vehicles that looked like a cross between a tractor and a minivan, and family helicopters called "aerators" that could hop about from place to place. He also predicted there would be drive-in churches.

Was Broadacre City, in the end, an urban design model that could be taken seriously? Or was it "the embarrassing foible of an aging master"? For one, Wright supremely underestimated the size of future suburban towns. Today, many millions of residents live in the suburban and exurban rings around cities, and with that, millions of cars circulate in these sprawling metropolitan regions. Wright's romantic Broadacre City model assumed a population in each town of only 7,000! He clearly did not anticipate the scale of suburbanization and the ensuing crisis of transport unleashed when so many cars are wedged into one urban region, and when there is no reasonable, large-scale transit alternative to move people across low-density spaces.

Wright's failure to predict the scale of peripheral suburban growth personally affected him. In the Phoenix metropolitan area, Wright bought land as far from the suburban town of Tempe as he could imagine. He believed this land, on which he built the architectural community school called Taliesin West, was well beyond the fringes of any future urbanization in the Phoenix metropolitan region. Wright was wrong. Today, all of the land around Taliesin West is either already urbanized, or slated for growth in the near future.

Broadacre City, from a public space perspective, failed to acknowledge the importance of pedestrian-scale, spontaneous public life. Wright seemed willing to abandon the aesthetic of the flaneur, the nineteenth-century urban dweller role introduced by the Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire. The flaneur is the urban stroller, who wanders through the city and enjoys the serendipity of meeting people or bumping into stores, bookstalls, food vendors, previously unseen art, or any number of hundreds of unexpected stimuli that are embedded in the spontaneous urban landscape. Wright ignored the importance of density in older city spaces, the way a tight-knit fabric allows for social interaction, the aesthetic pleasures of cafés, restaurants, and street life. Broadacre City does not acknowledge the social, economic, and cultural advantages of the high-density downtown. It failed to predict that city dwellers would respond to suburban sprawl by creating movements to revitalize pedestrian-scale urban districts, and empower public places like streets, promenades, town squares, street markets, alleys, and other public spaces.

The evolution of architecture toward a discourse that emphasizes buildings rather than the urban spaces around them is reinforced by the social tendency in Western culture to focus on objects. Objects are vehicles for consumption in a consumerist society, and they thus become the focus of a culture of advertising, media, and obsession with gratification through ownership of things. Things or "goods" are connected with people's self-image in a global consumerist world. This forms part of a "culture-ideology of consumerism." As architecture shifted its emphasis to buildings after the 1970s, the mass media absorbed and reinforced this message. The role of the architecture critic was often reduced to viewing buildings as if they were subjects of high art—physical sculptures arrayed across the urban landscape.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the view of architecture as high art corresponded with the evolution of the postmodern architecture movement in the 1970s. Modernist architecture was criticized precisely because its concern with the larger issues of urban well-being came at the expense of the aesthetics of building facades. For some observers, modern architecture had become plagued by an impersonal, cold, purely functional approach. It was not sympathetic to historic context. It was not playful. Postmodern architecture evolved as a response to this imagined gap in the urban landscape. It emphasized the visual meanings and metaphors that buildings could evoke, celebrating the idea of the visual poetry possible in the urban cultural landscape, as well as the way that new buildings could still speak to past architectural styles.

Meanwhile, the question of urban space, and the larger importance of architecture's role in the built environment, would be all but forgotten. Postmodern architectural discourse morphed into a high-level dialogue among intellectuals, writers, and architects about culture, history, metaphor, and symbolism in the urban landscape. In the end, however, the reinvention of architecture as a debate about art and the symbolism of building facades was unsatisfying and even dangerous to the responsibility of master designers who create spaces that people ultimately must live in. As one critic noted, "[T]he space of art is the ideal one of fiction. In it things are not used and they never decay; one cannot walk in a painting, as one walks along a street or through a building. Architecture and design . . . have everything to do with the body."

People must live in the space of buildings and in the spaces around them. However, only a minority of architects and their critics began to see the importance of this point. Yet, there is an angst among this group, a need to worry about the spaces beyond their own buildings, and the future of urban spaces at a time in history when technological and cultural forces threaten to further anesthetize urban dwellers to the importance of the living spaces that surround them. When an architect or an architecture critic writes a guide to a city, it is refreshing to see that not only buildings are reviewed, but urban spaces as well. For example, in one architectural guide to New York City, public squares, parks, and other spaces appear as part of the city's important architecture.

Indeed, some books on modern architecture have devoted entire sections to topics like "Public Places." In these works, authors explore everything from parks built over freeways to giant civic centers. One study highlights the construction of the new Brazilian capital of Brasília, as a laboratory for exploring the problems of modernism and its inattention to spontaneous public life in a city. Brasília, it argues, is "an expensive and ugly testimony to the fact that, when men think in terms of abstract space rather than real place, of single rather than multiple meanings, and of political aspirations instead of human needs, they tend to produce miles of jerry-built nowhere, infested with Volkswagens."

Like art, architecture in Western culture has tended to follow the dictates of cycles and "trends." In affluent societies, especially in status-conscious American culture, style and marketability create value. Marketing in the United States demands that products and professions have a "cutting edge," something different that will elevate them to high status in the public eye. Fashion trends tend to be cyclical and are typically labeled and classified into neat categories and then promoted through the mass media. To maximize attention, catchy names and hip phrases are utilized.

So, in the last three decades, it has been fashionable in architecture to be "postmodern," to reject the values of the modernist paradigm, replacing these with concepts like flexibility, multitasking, and playfulness, which emerge as the new rules of postmodern design. Buildings have to be colorful, playful, historical, and metaphorical in their message. This has had the effect of creating a new set of global architectural icons, celebrated postmodern designs like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. These icons rise to the level of global stardom, like Hollywood actors or famous sports heroes. Along the way, questions of public life, the nature of urban space, and social change are forgotten.

A more recent example of trendiness in urbanism lies in the celebration of cyberspace and cyberarchitecture. Architects and writers speak of a parallel universe that connects the physical city and the electronic space of networked computers—an emerging harmony between the space of the Internet and the space of streets, town squares, downtown pedestrian zones, boardwalks, or festival marketplaces. This new discourse argues for a new kind of digital urbanism, in which the calling card is summed up in these words: "the network is the urban site before us, an invitation to design and construct the City of Bits." In the end, these postmodern works reduce urbanism to a game of words, metaphor, and double meanings.

The digital revolution has had a huge impact on urbanism, and on the way people live in cities. But architecture and urbanism are still about people and built environments set in physical, material space; this is a distinctly different world from that of cyberspace. Both will continue to exist, and there will be significant interaction between these worlds; but in the end, they remain distinct domains—one electronic, the other material.

It is very clever for a scholar to write "My name is wjm@mit.edu, and I am an electronic flaneur. I hang out on the network." But this form of narrative implies a false premise—the idea that somehow the Internet world is a place that will have its own architecture and city planning. This is not the case. Electronics remain electronic—bits of data that can be recorded, transferred electronically and reproduced on a TV screen, a computer monitor, a PDA, or a laptop. Beyond that, they do not exist in physical space. Whatever the future of cyberspace, there will still be material space to contend with. The confusion in this literature is that it seeks to impose a science that is sociospatial and material (architecture/urban planning) onto an electronic space that is neither. As one critic has frequently stated about cyberspace, "[T]he last time I woke up in the morning, there were still four walls, a floor and a ceiling. Physical space still matters." You do not sleep in cyberspace, you cannot make love there, you cannot hike there, and you cannot drink coffee there (the idea of the cybercafé notwithstanding).

Cybercity advocates like to imagine how electronic media will reinvent urban life, yet they are often just speculating. For example, a book written in the mid-1990s suggested that several elements would digitally reorder urban space. They included the virtual university, videoconferencing, and online art museums. A decade later, none of these key elements had significantly altered urban life, nor did they show signs of permanently displacing the original urban physical space experiences of university life, business meetings, and museums. The virtual university, once thought by some to represent the future of university education, has not taken off as fast as predicted. University administrators are learning that many elements of on-site teaching cannot be duplicated online. Students are learning that real classrooms have an intangible aspect that can never be replaced on a computer or in simulation.

Videoconferencing has proven to be a good tool for disseminating information and curtailing traveling costs, but many professions still value live interaction between people and professionals. The online art museum is an ancillary source of promotion of the work of museums, but it has not seriously interrupted the existence or growth of museums anywhere in the world. Indeed, the twenty-first-century trend is toward hiring top architects to create new and exciting physical spaces that will become global attractions to visitors. The most significant twenty-first-century trend in art museums is not the online museum, but the visceral material space of new iconic structures like the Guggenheim, which has attracted millions of tourists to the virtually unknown city of Bilbao in northern Spain, to the real physical space of this exceptional place. Unquestionably the Internet has helped promote the museum, but in no sense is it a substitute for the in-person physical experience.

Have "cyber-apologists" overromanticized the rise of computer technology, using clever narratives to create the metaphor of a new digital city? Is the digital city a real alternative to the physical city, or is it a different space—a space of electronic processes that allows for communication and exchange of information and ideas? To compare the information superhighway with actual physical systems of transportation is, in the end, an act of poetry, but not of science. One would hope that the science and logic of urban space is given more credit for its uniqueness and for the power of its inherently spatial and material form, its inherent organic ecosystem defined by the earth and its resources, and its inherent people-space dynamic.

There are, of course, subfields of architecture and scores of individual practitioners who embrace the people-land and people-space relationship. Architectural history is one important anchor for this. While some historians may place too much emphasis on the history of buildings as objects of art, others understand the importance of architecture and urbanism as measures, at different moments in time, of how people transform both the spaces and the landscapes that physically surrounded them.

In this regard, one of the most important trends in architecture as a profession was the development of the field of "landscape architecture." Landscape architecture, by its very definition, has allowed one subset of trained designers to go beyond the building, focusing their energies on the land and space around it. Indeed, the "landscape architecture" is defined as "the art of arranging land, together with spaces and objects on it, for safe, efficient, healthful, pleasant use."

The landscape architecture profession was conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted, America's towering figure in the nineteenth-century design of parks and open spaces. Olmsted coined the term "landscape architecture" in the late 1800s. This was important because it marked a point in history when attention for designers was deliberately turned away from buildings and back toward the urban environment—in other words, "the portion of the landscape developed or shaped by man, beyond buildings."

Landscape architecture is frequently misunderstood by outsiders, who superficially believe it to be concerned merely with plants and vegetation. But, in fact, it is a practice that covers everything from site planning to parks, housing, natural resources, gardens, soils, and geology. It is, in essence, architecture's attempt to reconnect the urban landscape to people. Within the larger architecture field, however, landscape architecture as a profession carries much lower status.

Globalization and Public Space

In the study of cities and regions, globalization has become an important paradigm for understanding the breakdown in the traditional hegemony of the nation-state as the dominant force in the restructuring of cities. Scholars argue that the national has been eclipsed by what are termed "transnational practices," an amalgam of forms of control exerted by global corporations over societies at different scales.

Consider how global companies manipulate consumer behavior through the design of consumer products. For example, products like fast food, soft drinks, and coffee are produced as uniform packages consumed in almost the same form across the planet. Once these products become cultural icons, global investors can control consumption through advertising. The homogenization of consumer products has been termed the "culture ideology of consumerism," and has garnered considerable attention from scholars of globalism.

My argument is that global corporate interests seek to homogenize and package not only physical consumer products but also the larger spaces within which those products are consumed—stores, hotels, restaurants, malls, and so forth. This homogenization and globalization of the built environment is reproduced in the changing landscape of public spaces in modern cities. It includes:

• shopping malls that are routinely enclosed and decorated in homogeneous styles—with color, comfort, and a feeling of safety and removal from the surrounding city
• simulated streets and festival marketplaces that offer "walkable streets" protected from the automobile
• artificial, air-conditioned interior spaces, such as the inside of giant hotel complexes, with monumental glass atria, stores, discotheques, restaurants, stately fountains, all allowing the city dweller to move off the streets of the real city
• recreational spaces such as theme parks, designed around fantasy motifs entirely removed from any real urban context, that tend to spill back into the real city, allowing the "theme park" concept to begin to seep into city building more generally.

In this book one of my objectives is to explore the impact of globalization on selected cities in Spain and Mexico. I am curious how global forces manifest in urban public spaces, and how cities are responding to these forces.

In Spain, the lessons of Madrid and Barcelona are instructive. Madrid, the national capital, has hitched its future to global trade and Spain's membership in the European Union. This is evident in the degree to which some political interests want to reinvent the historic core as either a tertiary (service) center, a giant office zone serving transnational corporations, or a global tourist center. Under these scenarios, traditional public spaces suffer and residential communities struggle to survive.

Barcelona's destiny is equally tied to the global economy, but it has made different decisions about the role of urban design and the downtown. Barcelona chose a different path—it decided that its image as a global center for investment could be enhanced by revitalizing its public spaces as part of a complete overhaul of its historic center.

In Mexico, the national capital, Mexico City, is an important place to explore the impact of globalization. Following the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, Mexico City quickly established itself as the command center for capital investment in the Americas. Since political power is centralized here, much of the nation's wealth is also concentrated here, and this serves as a magnet for global investors. Mexico City encapsulates what we might call the yin/yang of globalization—it houses both the best and the worst of a global urban future. Its elite neighborhoods are among the most impressively designed urban communities in the Americas; its poverty is severe. Wealthy enclaves, from Polanco to San Angel, are set against a backdrop of smog, daily traffic gridlock, and increasing fear of crime in public spaces.

Oddly, despite these limitations, Mexico City continues to have a rich public life. Its streets and plazas are convivial. The core of the urban region continues to be filled with hundreds of thousands of people per day. Even major traffic arteries, such as Paseo de la Reforma, retain a strong degree of walkability, and are surrounded by pedestrian-scale neighborhoods. These neighborhoods—Colonia Roma, Condesa, Polanco—retain a vital sense of place and identity, in part anchored by their lively streets, plazas, parks, and gardens.

Mexico City's historic center, filled with some of the most important public places in all of Mexico—including plazas, gardens and courtyards—presents the greatest challenge to the nation's ability to preserve good public spaces. Yet, the hyperactive growth around the inner core is increasing the pressure on the center. Traffic and commerce are all converging around the center. Its functional nucleus—the great Zócalo—appears as if ready to burst open, like a gaping wound. Cars, buses, people, and pedicabs can no longer comfortably share the narrow gridded streets around the Zócalo. The center cannot hold.

Yet, in medium-sized cities like Querétaro, Mexico, the center is making a comeback. The story of Querétaro is like that of Barcelona, on a smaller scale. Querétaro's downtown charm and public life has accompanied its transformation as one of the important cities on the "NAFTA corridor," home to high-technology firms located along the highway from Mexico City to the Texas border.

Farther north, along the Mexico-U.S. border, we find a laboratory for understanding globalization. Booming cities on both sides of the international boundary are joined across the border through common transnational economic interests in factories, tourism, and trade. The cities along this frontier present an opportunity to explore how culture differentially impacts public space.

Public Space Reborn in the New Millennium

It is clear that traditional plazas and public spaces cannot survive everywhere in their original forms, given the nature of the postmodern metropolis. Even in European cities many traditional plazas have been turned into traffic circles. Profit-driven demands on land make it more and more difficult to renovate historic squares. Often there is pressure from business interests to convert historic spaces to more profitable use. Meanwhile, existing, underutilized public spaces often have been taken over by drug dealers or criminals. Some public spaces, such as streets or transit lines, have become too fast moving and hostile to serve as functional public gathering spaces. Other commercial streets and promenades, when well designed, are suitable as community nodes. Some cities have redesigned streets for pedestrians. Corporate plazas are viewed by many as too privatized and lacking in spontaneity.

In the midst of the chaos of postmodern cities, new kinds of spaces are being created to attract capital back into cities, spaces that are fitted to the communications age of high technology and a preoccupation with instantaneity. The new spaces seek to reinsert the celebration of urban life in high-density settings, often in the form of what have been termed "spectacle spaces," including such places as Baltimore's Harborplace, Boston's Fanueil Hall, New York City's South Street Seaport, and San Antonio's River Walk. As the twenty-first century begins, a new kind of public square is reemerging. It is a bizarre twist, a repetition of history, since almost exactly a century ago, in Vienna, Austrian modernists were calling for a new kind of city. Meanwhile, traditionalists were warning not only that sacred spaces like plazas and squares should be preserved, but that they should be central to urban planning in the face of the fragmentation that modernist influences would bring in the twentieth century. Today, in different parts of the world, public spaces are being prioritized in delimiting a design for the twenty-first-century metropolis.

For example, the city of Frankfurt, Germany, decided to anchor its neighborhood rehabilitation plans around a set of upgraded public spaces. The city hired an American filmmaker to study public spaces. In one case, it was thought that the main railroad station was becoming a high crime area due to its use as a loitering place by foreign workers. The filmmaker took more than 60,000 photos and found that foreigners were not loitering in the train station; they were lonely and simply used it as a place to meet friends. This realization led to reorganizing the downtown to allow the train station to become a more dynamic gathering place.

In London, England, planners believe the future design of the United Kingdom's capital city must be centered around a plan that protects and connects its major green spaces and public squares. Designers have emphasized this point, using the example of Trafalgar Square, which they argue is made less usable by its inaccessibility to pedestrians, and its poor connection to other public spaces and to the waterfront. In New York City, for more than two decades, various interest groups supported the completion of studies directed at understanding how to create functional public spaces. These studies led to the creation of a system of well-designed small public spaces in Manhattan, and of a group, the Project for Public Spaces, devoted to management of similar spaces for other cities.

As we shall see in this book, in Mexico and in Spain, governments have built their urban redevelopment strategy around traditional squares and public spaces. In Mexico, three examples of cities with a system of public plazas and pedestrian streets are Guadalajara, Puebla, and Querétaro. Monterrey, the country's northernmost industrial urban center, created a downtown redevelopment scheme anchored by a grand public space called the "Macroplaza." Mexico City planners are beginning to look at existing public spaces as the potential anchors for downtown economic redevelopment.

Spain has asserted itself as a world leader in recognizing the importance of public space in the economic and cultural vitality of urban life. Barcelona, as mentioned above, may be the best example of all. In the mid-1970s Barcelona was becoming a sprawling jumble of high-density apartment block complexes. The city had evolved into an undistinguished mass of modernist high-rise towers and was losing its sense of place. Following the 1975 death of Franco, the city hired Oriol Bohigas, a designer from the Catalonia region, to direct its planning program. Bohigas pushed for a project-oriented redevelopment strategy that tied neighborhood rehabilitation to the concept of identity. Public spaces would anchor the redevelopment plan, and over the next ten years, some 160 civil projects of plaza redesign, monument building, or creation of green spaces were carried out, from the historic core neighborhood in the Gothic Quarter to the apartment block suburbs.

The above suggests that public space is a phenomenon that is attended to in distinct ways in different cultural settings, from Italy, France, and Spain to the United States. I propose that there is a connection between the original form of public space—the plaza or the agora—and its surrounding context, or place. This plaza-place connection is most deeply rooted in a connection between plaza and culture, since the traditions of public space were often maintained locally, particularly before the industrial revolution. Even in the modern period, there are distinct traditions and cultural modes embedded in the shaping of urban space. Public space, so largely tied to its context, must therefore be understood by examining its evolution and connections to surrounding neighborhoods.

The nexus between Mediterranean/Iberian Europe and the Americas, when it comes to public space, begins with Spain. By 1500, as Spain began colonizing the Americas, it had very distinct urban design traditions, many of which were exported systematically to the New World through strict rules on town building, passed down by the king to the colonists of Spanish America. Today, not only are Spanish cities like Barcelona considered fundamental cultural centers for understanding public space, Mexico's plazas and gardens continue to serve vital urban functions. The Laws of the Indies, which formally transplanted the Spanish vision of the city to the Americas, are one of the few examples of the institutionalization of European spatial design ideas in North America. In Mexico, vibrant public space is a product both of Spanish planning and local conditions. In the words of one scholar, the Mexican plaza "can be seen as a distillation of the national character—its love of conviviality and spectacle, its ability to make the everyday seem special, its energy and fatalism, the tight bonds that link friends and family."

An important distinction can be made between what we might term "Mediterranean/Latin" city space and "Anglo-European" city space. Latino/Mediterranean urban space is structured so that the settlement space comprises the main setting for life, with the dwelling representing one element within a larger whole. In the Anglo-European city, however, the inverse is true: the dwelling is the main setting for life, while the settlement space is merely a connective tissue allowing passage from one location to another. These contrasting cultural notions of urban form imply dramatically different roles for public space. One could argue that Spain's historic influence on urban design in Mexico, and Mexico's subsequent cultural integration with the United States in the twentieth century, will strengthen the connection between European and North American urbanism in the future. It is timely, therefore, to reexamine the Mediterranean/Latin case, if for no other reason than to imagine that, in a globalizing world, this form of urbanism has arrived at the doorstep of North America via Mexico.