Generazioni di spazi pubblici a confronto

Which can be the public space for the contemporary city today? Which is the collective space for a society that has exceeded any possible limit of secularization? The transformation of the public space today has undergone a real metamorphosis creating a thin line between the public and private space, between the physical and virtual space, between the formal and informal. The Liquid society, as it has been de ned by Zygmunt Bauman, causes a crisis of the idea of the public space, traditionally intended in the past as open space: agorà, forum, medieval, renaissance and 19th century square. Today, the same elements are composing di erent categories of the public space in the city: street, square, gallery, park, boulevard, gardens - becoming a subject of reconsideration:elementsthatarede ning,until the 80ies, a valid and acceptable template of useful tools for architectural and urban design of public space. Tools that are generated from the public space elements, which are not only physical, but also cultural, inherited from the tradition of the historical European city, that now requires an hermeneutic action according to the new paradigms of use.