New urban privatopias. Citizenship strategies of public space

Abstract

As closed enclaves located far from cities and typified by a very specific profile of residents, exurban “privatopias” have been the most extreme case of denial of urban style of life and some of its key features: compactness, mixture, otheNew ueban privatopias. Citizenship strategies of public space  rness, contact. The socio-spatial “privatopic” model is therefore hardly compatible with the urban style of life. Nevertheless, during the last decades and particularly from the last years of the 20th century, we can find proposals and practices of urban planning that, with different intensity, have applied many elements of classical “privatopic” models in a priority intervention area: the public space. And all this with the aggravating circumstance that those models are supported by a pro-citizenship rhetoric that have an impact on political, collective and, ultimately, public dimension of that space. Paradoxically, that rhetoric calls into question the public dimension of the social space. In this paper we propose an interpretative analysis of that process.