“Public space embodies a sense of belonging to the wider political community through an architecture of sympathy, it conveys a sense of safety in the crowd. Security is a “thick” public good, the most basic instrument to the preservation of liberté, egalité et fraternité. In this age of terrorist threats and sometimes unjustified fears, institutions know how to protect their cities better. But the political meaning of cities remains extraordinarily powerful: the repertoires of people trying modestly to get along in their neighbourhoods have never been more important. They join and co-produce solutions together with their differences, as the Brooklynites of Paul Auster’s books and films often do.”
“The crime problems and insecurity issues that New Yorkers still face are spatially concentrated in specific neighbourhoods and call for solutions that reflect the unique problems in those neighbourhoods. Also, one cannot have a conversation on crime in New York City, or any other American city for that matter or in London as I understand developments there, without talking about race. The efforts of legal institutions in the city to control crime created a racial breach which is quite severe. There is a deep distrust for the police and lack of willingness to cooperate in investigations among minority populations.”
“There is simply no proven connection between former Mayor Guiliani’s theatrics of security and the decline in crime in New York. That would suggest that the choice of repression versus security is indeed a false dilemma. When we look at the role of design, in this context of great indeterminacy, two positions can be taken. We can demand the designers to design for security, to create designs that respond physically to threats. But we can also go also back to the most old fashioned of ideas for design and that is to design for delight. That is the default position for design, and appropriately so.”
“We see a new kind of rhetoric, the word gentrification e.g. was clearly negative ten years ago and in places like this conference it is very noticeable that it is now used with clearly positive connotations. City centre is reduced to film screening, music, shopping, and fashion... We see a systematic laundering of the urban condition in the name of these four categories. Increasingly, the design of urban space has become a hyper-nostalgic celebration of its absence, another form of its denial.”
“[it has been said] that cityness as historically understood and produced is simply no longer operative. But it is quite possible that cityness continues to be a dimension. It is a particular kind of space in a geographic terrain where there are also other spaces and they are overlapping and so we do indeed need to rethink our tools for analysis, for representation. I believe that cityness is still there, it is just how do we capture it; and then comes a question of design and architecture.”
