Making Cosmopolitan Spaces: Urban Design, Ideology and Power

Abstract

AbstractThere is a growing scholarly consensus over the transformation of the urban public place from a challenging, conflicting and negotiated one to a festive and convivial place. Decades of gentrification, renewals and city branding have fostered an urban form made of well-regulated and controlled islands of publicness in a sea of privatopias. Beyond structural forces, urban policies and the action of households and citizens, a key role has been played by global architecture and design. With this chapter, we will address this issue looking precisely at the practices of conceiving and designing the public places by urban designers. How the ideals of a cosmopolis, urban and democratic, is put in place by professionals dealing with neoliberal constraints, post-democratic states and refined middle-class users? What is the contemporary meaning of cosmopolitanism, when related to the urban core? Cosmopolitanism for whom, under which conditions? The chapter will provide a case-study detailed analysis of the perspective of urban designers towards projects and urbanism, with a specific attention to public space design.