FROM THE LEXICON - CUDC Quarterly 2:1 - Fall 2001

Public Realm

In a well known formulation, Hannah Arendt defined the public realm as "the space of appearances". She drew on classical Greek models and idealized a strict distinction between private concerns–having to do with the material business of making a living and sustaining life–and public activity centered on the political work of deliberating shared purposes and taking action on them. What she got from the Greeks was the sense that a fully human life could only take place through this public activity. That is, a human being only fulfilled what is uniquely human by sharing speech and action with others, and being seen and heard doing so.

Arendt raised this rather lofty image in the 1950’s as a reproach to a model of the world, provided by planners and social scientists, in which the public sphere could be reduced to the statistically regularized interactions of social groups. She wanted to re-assert the value of public life as experience, as the face-to-face interaction of individuals, and this point is also a reproach to urban designers. Too often the "public realm" is conceived in purely formal terms, as if the shape of public space is what matters most, as if the tidy village greens of new urbanist suburbs  are somehow inherently more conducive to "civic life" than all the other places where citizens interact. Simply labelling something "public" or "civic" in a drawing doesn’t necessarily imply that it will be lived as a public space.

Here perhaps, Arendt’s influential account of the "public realm" bears some of the blame. Her extreme separation between the public realm of speech and action and the private realm of economic activity can lead to an awfully sterile ideal. The public realm may now be something more everyday that includes activities of making and exchange as components of a "space of appearances" which is defined by the ongoing negotiations that make a city.