Promoting the Role of Public Spaces

The declining process of public spaces role, during the last decades, particularly on Latin American cities, was followed by an increase of private sphere importance. Many of the functions traditionally developed on public spaces are now being intensely promoted by private spaces. This process of public spaces transformation and neglecting is promoting more spatial fragmentation in the cities, which leads us to a challenge: how can we improve public spaces in order to decrease this fragmentation tendency? This book explores public spaces role on the context of Fortaleza, in Brazil. This city, on the last 100 years, had a huge and uncontrolled spatial and population growth, determining fast changes on its urban structure. However, public space structure was one of the city elements which did not follow the pace of urban transformations, losing its quality and its capacity to support urban development. This book debates the role of public spaces as an element to integrate the physical structures and the flows of the city, presenting alternatives to develop public spaces quality and exploring the potentialities of these spaces to support the city development and its life quality.