The idea of public space in human geography: towards a contemporary (critical) conceptualization

The concept of "public space" has become widely used as a result of some of the urban processes that have taken place in the contemporary city. However, this discursive inflation has come hand in hand with a certain destabilization of the geographic conceptualization of public space. From modern thinking we inherited certain methodologies constricted to a predictable, boring network of binary oppositions, and their exhaustion prevented new, original findings or descriptions. On the other hand, out of some rare ontological debate has emerged another more creative and experimental epistemology which will lead to new paradigms -e.g. the consideration that any research about public space must be addressed from a perspective based on a multiplicity of relationships that refuses to take public space for granted and questions the more normative approaches.