Rethinking Public Squares: Athens, Berlin, Copenhagen

Abstract: Since ancient times, public squares have played a significant role in the social and political life of towns and cities. They were designed as open spaces for public use, allowing people to meet, communicate, and demonstrate, and as centers for commercial and civic culture that reflected historical transformations. However, nowadays, public squares are often nearly abandoned urban voids, rather than centers of social interaction and fermentation. Capitalistic development, the rapidly increasing privatization and individualism, the continuous densification of the built environment, and the lack of co-presence have weakened the use of open public space. As a result, urban squares are often used as open parking lots by individuals, metro stations, extension-spaces for food service, or they mainly keep a symbolic, past-mongering character. Monumental fountains and sculptures, unsustainable materials, rough surfaces, lack of trees, poor lighting, and other problematic elements create an old-fashioned and unfriendly experience for users of public space. This project presents the redesign of three public squares in Athens, Berlin, and Copenhagen. The redesigns were informed by extensive critical analysis, typological categorizations, and observations of historical public squares in the aforementioned European cities. Participatory planning methods, such as questionnaires and interviews, were also used in the design process to encourage the social aspects of urban planning. The central intention of the project is to holistically reconsider the design of public squares and suggest a socially sustainable planning approach that takes into account people's common needs, as well as different design requirements based on site-specific characteristics such as cultural identity, surrounding functions, microclimate, topography, etc.