EQUALITY
Public space has a socio-cultural dimension. It is a place where people relate with each other and a space of identification, of contact between people, of urban animation, and sometimes community expression.
Public spaces are essentially spaces reserved for people. They are spaces which cannot be built upon. They belong to the city. A good public space, is one that affords and provides sociability, activity, access and linkage and comfort. They provide an equal platform for each person irrespective of their standard, class, color or citizenship. Public spaces must ideally provide equality.
Todays urban landscape dominated with bill boards.
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These serve consumerism, by advertising goods, services, even housing as another luxury. There is a price tag on freedom of expression. Every important message is not necessarily profitable and thus never meets the public eye, through eye catching, attention grabbing advertisements.
Public spaces have a huge potential for social regeneration through providing a feeling of equality. Equality lies not only in equal opportunities or benefits, but also in sharing the equal space of comfort and beauty.
Dignity of Labor means, every job is equally important and respectable. Hierarchy we have formed in the status of performing one job over another, has led to the feeling of inequality.
Having a space of equal status as people step outside the workplace would satisfy them and boost a feeling of equality. Integration can come through rethinking of public spaces, as places of unity.
‘Equality’
Shweta Manikshetti Citizenship and Public Space Master’s in Design Innovation Glasgow School of Art