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O. Schürer:
"The Mediatized Decomposition of Public Space";
Talk: MIT - Public Space 2.0 / Senseable City Symposium, Massachusetts/ Boston/ USA (invited); 2012-02-21 - 2012-02-24.

The cultural idea of public space was driven by a bourgeois value of a homogeneous society with relatively small differences (Jürgen Habermas,1962). But differences in society got made visible by counter cultures like workers movement, women´s liberation, youth movements, social reform, and the development of a consumer-and-leisure-culture. Hence homogeneity as bourgeois connotation to public space got eroded. The idea of public space additionally puts strong emphasis on its duality to the private, which got nearly obsolete. Besides an opposition to the private, public space does not talk about the conditions of dominance and opposition, the possibilities of coherence of a society despite ruptures, and the modes of action allowing for the cross linking of social networks. As a matter of fact today public space is said to shrink away. This development of an ongoing downsize in importance got enhanced by the fact that some of its communicative functions got moved into different kinds of digital media. Architecture communicates its issues of space production, from the first idea to technical realization via all kinds of representations. Also public space in Architecture is conceived, designed, planned and realized by representational means. Any relations that are to become materialized, will get represented among whatever is considered important to a specific architectural object, its surroundings and its context. What fails to be represented is what can´t get materialized in the process. This does not only prevent the full use of contemporary digital technologies for analysis, concept, design and planning but moreover builds up a mere vague basis for Architecture to deal with digital media that mainly serves the purpose of communication. Hence architecture fails to cultivate this process of socio-technological transformation in the social realm still called public space. Are there any common bases or specific ways by which communication is realized by means of architecture and urbanistic methods in public spaces? In my lecture, I will try to re-conceptualize the notion of public space by the notion of "media territory" to develop a basis for a new toolbox of methods in ...

public space is conceived of by representational means; architecture fails to cultivate socio-technological transformation in public space; reconceptualizing notion of public space by proposing the notion of media territory

http://www.strategies-research.ufg.ac.at/public_space/?page_id=918