Emerging Ethics of the Urban: Sustainability in the Margins

In cities, public space serves as a common interface where diverse elements interact, encompassing both the dialogue between physical forms and the intangible dimensions of urban life. As an interface, public space is multifaceted, complex, and evocative: nurtured by its surroundings and similarly capable of influencing the urban milieu. Thus, public space possesses both centripetal and centrifugal forces of transformation, making it a mediator and a catalyst for change. Furthermore, in all its plural configurations – squares, streets, buildings, parks – public space acts as a vital system of arteries that foster connections, mediate conflicts, and cultivate a sense of collective identity also through its morphological aspects, which play a pivotal role in either inhibiting or facilitating interactions. This allows for seizing widespread opportunities for repair and innovation through the design of public spaces, especially in contemporary cities characterized by fragmentation and discontinuity. Particularly in marginal areas of social and environmental fragility, the realm of interactions that public space supports and encourages can be reframed by considering not only physical aspects but also their symbolic and functional purpose. By leveraging their extensive reach throughout the city and their nature committed to the wellbeing of all, public spaces can serve as the ideal arenas for advancing transformation processes that restore the necessary ecological conditions for future livability and equity. It means approaching public space as the privileged ground for architecture and urbanism to develop ethics of care in urban contexts. Integrating the ethical dimension into urban development highlights the political relevance of designing public spaces and it is an approach that comes from crucial shifts linking political ecology and urban design: addressing current challenges as a pressing collective endeavor and conceptualizing public spaces as tools for fostering sustainable habitats. The political significance of urban space is well established in critical urban theory. As early as the late 1960s, Lefebvre articulated the concept of the right to the city, emphasizing the collective capacity to actively participate in the production and transformation of a just and equitable urban environment. In this framework, public spaces emerge as critical arenas with the potential to serve as sites for negotiating pluralistic voices and power relations, with the overarching opportunity of advancing the common good through more inclusive and democratic urban practices. What is good and proper for urban life is certainly a controversial aspect of defining ethics. Nevertheless, an ethical lens allows spatial practitioners and researchers to rethink the relationship of architecture and urbanism to the city by placing the mediation between (all) humans and the world’s critical environmental conditions at the core of design choices. In fact, the urgencies posed by the current Anthropocene era, such as the environmental crisis and the scarcity of resources, together with the projections of an unsustainable population growth in urban areas, require immediate action to move towards universal interests of survival and wellbeing, a goal that is also demanded by the European Commission.