Understanding Public Squares Project Brief:
The Place Diagram:
As a final year architecture student at DAAP, I have begun to realize a growing interest in exploring scales larger than architecture, particularly those of urban public squares. Growing up in India has made me accustomed to settings of high-density cities, such that I have begun to enjoy studying the complex dynamics of urban life.
“Imagine that the center circle on the diagram is a specific place that you know: a street corner, a playground, a plaza outside a building. You can evaluate that place according to four criteria in the blue ring. In the green ring outside these main criteria are a number of intuitive or qualitative aspects by which to judge a place; the next outer yellow ring shows the quantitative aspects that can be measured by statistics or research.�
A school trip to Europe in August, 2014 then presented the perfect platform for me to engage in this Independent Study, that has allowed me to launch my research and documentation of public spaces in some high-density cities visited during this trip, particularly New York City, Paris, Rome and Istanbul. My main source of preparation for this research came from the resources of Project for Public Spaces, a New York-based NGO that is actively involved in planning and improving urban spaces throughout the world. With the help of an assessment tool developed by the NGO called The Place Diagram, I studied the Accessibility, Sociability, Activity and Comfort and Image components in different case studies. The challenge then was to observe and document the ways in which some of the most successful public squares in these cities incorporated these attributes in their own context and to begin to understand the ways in which these spaces were benefiting their surroundings.
Juhi Goel B.Sc Architecture University of Cincinnati Class of 2015
More at pps.org