Massimo Santanicchia (IAA)
The Production of Public Space
The lecture focuses on the public space of the city of Reykjavik. It illustrates lessons that have been learned from the course called “Integrating Man and the Environment” that has been running at the IAA since 2005. The object of the lecture is to observe, describe and understand the evolution of our city with primary focus its public space and streets in particular. We believe that the street is the public space par excellence. The value of the streets of Reykjavik as a public collective space has been spectacularly underestimated by the planning authorities, which have prioritised values related to mobility and traffic capacity instead. Streets therefore have been addressed as traffic lanes instead as potential places of aggregation. In our course we have been trying to demonstrate the multiple values that streets cover hoping to inform and influence the city making of Reykjavik.