Squares / Heart

Square

[skwe (r)] noun

1. An open area in a town, usually with four sides, surrounded by buildings

Abbreviation Sq.

Urban design guru Kevin Lynch questioned the identity of public spaces long ago asking: how open are our open spaces? Are they physically as well as mentally accessible? Are they largely available and accessible by the user? In an urban area, are they shared evenly or equitably? If they are not, are they all genuinely democratic or public?

Back in ancient times, squares were used to represent gathering spaces with mainly practical and political purposes. Today, open spaces might operate as urban acupuncture (a term created by Barcelonan architect and urbanist Manuel de Sola Morales), easing tightness in a specific area.

Numerous activities, such as cultural, religious, recreational, touristic, commercial, social, artistic, and so on, can be adapted to one open space in the best interests of its users. As a result, squares, and open spaces play an important role in the formation of city character and the revitalization of cultural values.

We should always intend them as destination places. From an architectural standpoint, squares are the buildings’ parterre, and as such someone should see them to ultimately design them better. Synergistically, squares and buildings must work together to bring actual quality to the urban environment.

Open spaces are the heart of a city while buildings provide them with a vital flow of people that keep them pumping with vibrant activities. A holistic design should always interlock buildings and their relative public spaces with shared strategies.

TThe central square forms the heart of the urban center, the gathering place where the city’s arteries and significant landmarks converge. However, nowadays, the great distances between people, events, and functions have created a new geography.

Automobile-based transportation has contributed to the decrease of “outdoor activities” that happen in public spaces (Jan Gehl). These activities are influenced by the quality of the square: the higher it is, the more time people will spend carrying out necessary tasks and the more optional activities will occur.

However, “Life Between Buildings” has been decreasing over time due to several reasons, transforming places from meeting sites to empty rooms. The significance of the social role of the square, from Roman times to the Renaissance and beyond, is now obsolete in modern cities, where gathering functions have moved elsewhere.

Although the physical setting does not have a direct link to the quality and intensity of social contacts, designers are responsible for improving or worsening the conditions that influence encounters.

Cities need livable and inviting spaces: green infrastructure’s contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation, generating shade, reducing heat, and surface temperatures, is proving crucial in this changing era. Families leaving the city demonstrate this need: they seek contact with nature, which, in many cases, the squares - the hearts of our cities and neighborhoods - have neglected.

Designing or redesigning with nature then becomes a key action to bring squares back to the center, to restore vitality to the beating hearts that pump and circulate life in our cities.

IIn public space, the goal is often to pump life from all ancillary paths and channel them into squares and piazzas - the gathering centers of public spaces. This requires a deep understanding of fluxes and traffic flows in and out of public squares to ensure safe and efficient access under different crowding scenarios.

Thanks to emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and particularly in the context of Big Data, urban data scientists are able to capture, code, and process movements in public spaces at a scale and with a granularity that could not be tracked at any point in history before.

In urban public squares, the possibility to gather continuous and ubiquitous mobility data using advanced sensors and cameras allows for the identification of previously undetected mobility patterns across time and space.

As with the human heart, health and proper functioning of public squares depend a lot on the management and coordination of ‘blood’ flow through the main arteries and veins connecting this vital muscle to the rest of the body.

These patterns can, in turn, guide urban design strategies to ensure that the squares function well under different conditions and in emergency situations. Ultimately, the aim is to ensure that the hearts of public space remain open, accessible, and inclusive gathering spaces with healthy connections to the rest of the city.

Cities could be seen as systems of practical tools to support the relationships between buildings.

Buildings are indeed background “flat” scenographies to the public space, but they are essential for the city to exist. They are the main carriers of functions, and they are the place where things happen.

As we do not always perceive our skin, so we often take buildings for granted. It is a tricky “chicken and egg” situation. Is the infrastructure that allows buildings to exist or vice-versa?

If we look at buildings from the eyes of a casual passerby, they can be identified as background flat surfaces that interact with the urban environment to form an aesthetic and from an energetic point of view.

Focusing on the latter aspect, designing the buildings of the future means creating the precondition for them to be as efficient as possible.

We should look to façades as thermoregulator devices with the task to reduce as much as possible the heat island effect due to the mechanical fixtures necessary to run the building themselves. But only on a very oversimplified level architecture is just a sequence of turned-off screens to the city.

BBuildings are the shaping element of public spaces. They are the solids that make the voids stand out, creating the “open-air rooms” where outdoor life happens.

These rooms are defined by the imprint of the buildings, with facades separating the interior from public space. In this sense, building facades are the “skin” of the organism-city, the place where interactions happen, where our senses come into contact with the outside world, touching surfaces, or detecting the external temperature.

Just as open spaces create discontinuities within the texture of the urban fabric, similarly, buildings should also be configured as porous elements that can allow nature to flow into and onto them.

Adherence to themes such as biodiversity, green roofs and facades, and nature-based solutions that incorporate vegetation into the built environment is a condition for designing today. These applications help purify the air, regulate and reduce the temperature of the surrounding environment, and promote biodiversity in the city.

We should never forget that buildings are the true activators of public spaces. The infrastructure of a city is key for the system to work properly, but without a functional strategy nested inside buildings, the public space is doomed to fail.

Indeed, buildings are increasingly called upon to respond to urban challenges related to emissions reduction and climate change mitigation. Their envelopes should become the skin of the city, with thermoregulation and protection against the harmful effects of UV radiation being just two of the functions that the epidermis performs for the human body.

IIn a very literal sense, buildings make up the outer skin layer of public space, i.e., the boundaries of the public space body. They are the structures around which and between which public space takes its physical form. As such, they have a very prominent role in defining the morphological shape of public space and, by extension, its users.

From a mobility perspective, the physical distance between buildings is an a priori factor determining where different modes can move.

These spaces tend to act as great hosts for pedestrians and soft mobility travelers who benefit from the intimacy of the humanscale environment, resulting in a completely different urban character of that public space.

In addition to its passive role as a boundary, the skin of public space also has an active role in shaping mobility through its impact on the local thermal environment. As the largest organ in the human body, the skin has a prominent role in thermoregulation via insulation and secretion.

In much the same way, the continuous building skyline that forms the outer envelope of public space has a prominent role in regulating thermal conditions for users of the public space.

Beyond the capabilities of any standalone shading devices, including trees and canopies, the building skin forms the largest shading and cooling feature stretched out across the city.

Despite largely being a byproduct of the system, walkability in cities is very much influenced by the silhouette of the building skin, dynamically shaped and reshaped by the intricate dance between building morphology, geographic location, seasonal climate fluctuation, and diurnal rhythms.