Every new century begins with a kind of soul-searching. As North Americans, the entrée into the twenty-first century compels us to confront the critical place where most of us live—the metropolis. Several broad trends that ushered the close of the last century—globalization, privatization, and simulation—will continue to define the debates about urban form and function in the new millennium. The increasing globalization of urban development decisions raises concerns about the loss of local control over urban design. The continuing shift toward the privatization of urban space suggests that the already diminished importance of “public interest” in city...

I am walking through the narrow streets of downtown Madrid, a few blocks from the Plaza Mayor. It is a cool, late afternoon in early December. The sun has already slipped behind the wall of six-story buildings, and this particular street is nearly dark. As I cross the street and head up the sidewalk, I am on the lookout for a small alley leading to a bookstore. An elderly woman has crossed in front of me and stopped at the portal to her apartment building. The street is empty, but for the two of us. She is busy fumbling for...

Urban design was inspired by the modern architecture movement in post–World War II European cities. That movement, for all its aspirations of urban social improvement through design, left behind a legacy of placeless communities. Modern architecture’s great flaw may ultimately lie in its embrace of a contradiction between space and place.¹ The father of the modern architecture movement, Le Corbusier, was a strong believer in the Bauhaus school’s principle that art should function according to the laws of physics. The center of attention for the designer was the building as an object. Bauhaus advocates believed that solutions to twentieth-century...

Two decades ago the city of Barcelona was in a state of disarray. Freeways choked the downtown with traffic, while rows of high-rise block apartments and factories blanketed the placeless suburbs in a manner similar to the Madrid experience described in the previous chapter. The Gothic Quarter and nearby historic districts were in a sad state of deterioration. The waterfront, lined with abandoned warehouses and factories, was cut off from the city and lay virtually in ruin. One prominent city planner reported that in the 1980s he drove his car down toward the Mediterranean Sea near the old port; when...

In the early sixteenth century Spain was the most powerful nation in the world; the king of Spain, Carlos V, crafted an imperial strategy for colonizing the territories of the Americas. One of his representatives, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, landed his fleets on the eastern coast of present-day Mexico, swept across the vast mountain chain rising to the central plateau, and stormed into the Valley of Mexico. By 1521, when Cortés lay siege to the great city of Tenochtitlán—center of power of the postclassic Aztec Empire—two completely different cultures, from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, were...

During the twentieth century traditional Mexican public spaces were bombarded by the political and economic forces of modernization. Yet plazas, gardens, parks, and promenades were still capable of becoming powerful cultural anchors. Mexicans embrace their past; the modern Mexican political system built its power base in part around nationalism and the celebration of history and culture. Public spaces served well as symbolic places to implement the national government agenda.

In Mexico, as well as in the Mediterranean region (and most of Latin America), traditional public space forms survive, although they continue to face challenges to their existence. The public plaza...

Globalization will significantly alter Mexico’s city-building practices in the twenty-first century. The question is: How will global forces reconfigure urban public spaces? In the new century, Mexico’s cities will also be partly defined by their interactions with the culture, economy, and built environment of the United States, its all-important global economic partner. As the twentieth century ended Mexico emerged from its century-long era of nationalism and protectionism and began seriously to embrace its northern neighbor. The 1993 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a tangible and climactic expression of this shift in foreign policy. NAFTA opened...

Even in cultures with deeply entrenched traditions of public life—like those of Spain and Mexico—conditions in the new millennium will not be favorable to the preservation of historic public space. City life will increasingly become more nonspatial and virtual. Some public spaces—like the plazas, promenades, and town squares examined in this book—will either fall into a state of decline, disappear, or be substantially altered.

Scholars, members of the design community, planners, and policy makers will need to rethink the termpublic space.To begin with, it will be necessary to critically evaluate the categories of “public”...