Public space in the polycrisis era

Abstract

We are living in an era of successive global crises: climate and environmental crisis, financial crisis, COVID-19 crisis, cost of living crisis, war. Each of them may be expressed in different time periods and in different regions. However, they are not independent. Every crisis is superimposed on, interacts with and reshapes the other, composing what has been termed, the “polycrisis” (Lawrence, Janzwood and Homer-Dixon, 2022). Polycrisis is not a new term, but it has recently become common in both scientific literature and public discourse. Different terms like permacrisis, multicrisis, reflect, with small nuances, the general understanding of our current urban condition as exposed to and affected by a series of successive unpredictable and unsettling events of different nature. Nevertheless, the term “crisis”, it has been argued, needs to be further studied, not only to better define it, but most importantly to agree on its appropriate use (Hupkens, Neuhold, and Vanhoonacker, 2023). This condition of multidimensional crisis decisively affects people’s everyday life and therefore every aspect of social life and urban development. In this context, cities transform and change, each time trying to cope, recover or harmonize with the new condition. After all, the condition of crisis tends to constitute the new normality (Andreou, 2022). Furthermore, in many cases a crisis is operationalized as the trigger for further investment activity (Klein, 2008), inevitably reshaping public space.

Public space is a critical terrain on which economic, environmental and social changes are produced, reproduced, reflected, and confronted. During a crisis, it can be transformed to a field of conflict or contestation, a field of reconciliation and solidarity or a space of risk and insecurity. In the last 15 years, typical crises that have been dynamically expressed in public space are: during economic crisis, public space became a place of protest and in the same time a place of disinvestment and investment; during COVID-19 crisis, parks and squares became a critical place to exist; in recent expressions of climate crisis, public space becomes a refuge in situations of emergency (Diane, 2020), but also the place where emergency occurs. However, in many cases of crisis outbreaks, there is a detected gap between crisis/polycrisis -specifically in long-term challenges- and the planning and management of public space (Duivenvoorden, 2021). It is important to understand in what ways polycrisis affects public space and what is the role of public space in crisis management. Thus, we can begin to explore ways in which public space can be planned and managed taking the new normality of polycrisis in to account. 

This paper discusses the relationship between polycrisis and public space. On the one hand, the paper concerns the ways polycrisis affects public space. On the other hand, it focuses on the ways, in which it is understood to the management and improvement of the polycrisis. First, we embark on a literature review concerning (poly)crisis to dig deeper into the discussed term. Then, the role of public space in planning responses to successive crises, will be examined. Finally, Greece, as a country deeply affected by successive crises, during the last 15 years, will be used as case study. Planning responses to these crises will be reviewed and charted with respect to i) the varied ways in which they define, operationalize and address each crisis ii) to their understanding of the role of public space.