The course is organized around the concept of public space with its multiple meanings and contents (material space, space of representation, space of public accessibility, claims and participation). This diversity of meanings forms an important object of planning and design, as well as a political claim with complex connotations. The main objective of the course is to re-examine these issues from the perspective of gender, unveiling the importance of gender for the production of space and, conversely, the importance of space in the constitution of gender and gendered identities.
Nowadays, public space is increasingly a site of intense debate and claims, as many functions and institutions of the public sphere are privatized, rights and freedoms related to it shrink, while urban public space is under pressure both by market forces and by practices of policing and ever more severe control or “normalization” in the name of security. In this context, challenging established concepts and ideas, as well as problematising methods and analytical tools through which we approach urban space become quite pressing and significant.
The course aims to contribute to the familiarization with a complex ensemble of theoretical and practical formulations about the changing content of the concept “public”, the various meanings and uses of public space, its representations and symbolisms, practices and institutions which form “familiar spaces”, “safe itineraries”, but also “strangers” in the city. A key hypothesis is that institutions, social practices, everydayness, public space cannot be comprehended without taking on board gender and its intersections with other sociocultural categories, such as sexuality, ethnicity/race, class, but also age, able-bodiedness, geographical origins – categories which form a complex web of differences.