Many of today's cities are plagued by the dichotomy of public versus private mentality. Many still believe that if something is privately owned, it must serve the private interest only, and vice versa. As a result, the current architectural standards for offices and housing offer little to accommodate the public.

From the perspective of most public advocacy groups, the modern city has little to offer the public. The street is the only public space that is open and egalitarian. In Manhattan's financial district, for instance, less than 1% of the total floor area in the city is serving the general public. In this estimate, the sidewalks around the blocks are the only public area to be used for the calculation. The roadways are not included as public spaces since they are uninhabitable by people and no interactions are possible between people in the cars

A typical 10’ wide sidewalk wrapping around an average 600’ by 250’ city block is to be used as a modular unit for the financial district. With this model, we'd have the area of the sidewalks surrounding this particular block = 17,400 sq ft. Divide 17,400 by 150,000 (the area of the block) = 17,400/150,000 = 0.116 or 11% taken at ground level only.

In a high-density district with at least 20-stories buildings (on the average) we will have 17,400/150,000x20 = 0.0058 or 0.58 percent ratio of public to private spaces. With this said, the overloaded city sidewalk becomes the only place that belongs to the public, yet its ratio to the total city floor area is rapidly approaching zero.

Fortunately however, things are not quite as clear-cut as the formal doctrine of public /private seems to suggest. The city blocks, although formally private-owned, do have many pockets of informal public spaces such as street cafes, laundromat, grocery stores, $1 Chinese restaurants, and fresh market stands - all of which serve people from many different of social classes. In San Francisco Chinatown, for example, the entire district is laced with networks of private alleyways where most public activities are concentrated. The boundary between public and private is the space of great importance; more so than the picturesque public parks and greenways that usually remain unused most of the time. Urban Planners should plan less and learn more from the informality of spaces that allow for the natural emergence of activities.

One practical approach for increasing such in-between-space typology is to create privately owned pedestrian streets and distribute them vertically. That is, to distribute the streets vertically across the surface of buildings (see prototype). The vertical space has never been utilized for the public in the same way as the horizontal space.

The resulting vertical grid network would be open 24 hours to the public (Figure II) , and unlike the shopping malls’ model (Figure I), would never need a guard at the front gate. The integrated approach of mixing housing, offices, and shops together would create a network of bystanders who would watch over their own private interests – looking after the sidewalk in front of their house or shop for instance. As a result, the common space is looked after by the invisible eyes of the bystanders.  This approach would maximize public exposure to businesses in buildings. More public access paths would lead to more interaction among people and ideas. For the businesses, however, this could simply mean more income generated per day. For the residences, it could mean zero commuting time with walking distance to work. Shops and offices can be accessed through many linked pathways. This is the antithesis of shopping malls’ and office towers’ typology where access is restricted to a few entrance openings. In a centralized close-system like the shopping malls or office towers, networking can only be done inside an enclosed space with limited access (Figure I). In a decentralized open-system (Figure II) however, all the pedestrian streets and elevators on each building are linked together to form a vertical grid network (a map) with many possible routes of access.

Amartya Sen observes in his new book The Argumentative Indian that the roots of true democracy come from the tradition of discussion and argument, which is a function of the public realm. However, we find that the form of representative democracy we have today requires only a few seconds of participation – namely voting. In Bangkok, people called this mockingly as “4 Seconds Democracy”! (The time it takes to fill out the ballot)

This is because the real political space is the informal space in between the streets and the buildings (not the space in between the ballots). Such spaces are the veins and nerves of participatory democracy. Besides creating more business opportunities for micro-entrepreneurs, such informal spaces also provide room for argument, debate, gossips, news, political gathering - all of which are important ingredients for building a strong civil society.

A city that has a low ratio of public to private space tends to inhibit accidental interactions and discussion between different people. These accidental interactions are vital to the creative life of the city because they act as weak link to new ideas outside of one's close-knitted social group. Creating a modular building type - one which could be so produced and copied by individual developer - for people to live, work, trade, and interact is a viable solution for a high density city where public space is scarce. > continue

 

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