Jan Gehl a few decades back encouraged us to think more about “the space between buildings”, as we pondered how we want our cities to look and function. And within this broader frame, most of us have been pretty comfortable thinking about this between-building space as either public space or private space. But real life in a city is a lot more complicated than that, and in July of 2011 in Stuttgart a couple of hundred of us from some forty countries, North and South, East and West, got together for a few days under the aegis of the 2011 Cities for Mobility Congress to take apart and discuss from many points of view the third dimension, namely that of social space.
Since we presently these days are in the process of laying the base for the 2012 Congress, which this year will be looking into The Challenges of Safe Streets (click here for more general background on this topic), I have been asked by several people to post my keynote presentation to my opening keynote last July in which I tried to set the stage for the extremely interesting discussions that followed.
* Click here for presentation – stuttgart-2011-social space-4jul11-final
But there was a lot more ot it than those few opening words so permit me invite you to click here to profit from all of the presentations made in the plenary sessions — and here – for the workshop presentations and reports. It was a very creative couple of days as you will see.
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The Safe Streets Challenge: 2012 