Post-it city: The Other European Public Spaces

// Giovanni La Varra

The landscape of public life in the European city is changing. The public space of contemporary Europe has its
own icons: it is ample, sharply defined, with raw, precious, sparkling materials, fashioned in diverse ways, with
a sophisticated composition of green spaces and trees, "hard" and "soft" spaces. The successful articulation of
this genre is found in the great, hyper-defined open spaces of the new European plazas, where distinctive firstclass businesses move in.
Alongside such spaces are other "public space" that punctuate the urban territory. In the city center or on the
edges, at the heart of the nineteenth-century tissue or in the great external zones, they compose an infinite
catalogue of informal spaces, with innumerable articulations: street vendors, veritable bars on wheels that
bring together young people and prostitutes, policemen and bums, at night in Milan, specially equipped vans
serving as discotheques in the streets of London suburbs, the vacant lots of Berlin described by Wenders,
improvised raves bringing together thousands of party-goers together in the industrial wastelands of small and
mid-sized cities in the heart of Europe, scattered, spontaneous shops on the streets and squares of Belgrade
during the embargo, literally occupying the urban public space whose meaning and value they transfigure.
These dynamics carry out a temporary rewriting of the urban space they fill - traditional but also provisional
spaces, which are mobilized as a function of events, of the evolution of the city, of the specific individual or
group initiatives, constituting a fragile and fragmentary network which filters into the tightly woven structures of
urban public space. Post-It City is a functional apparatus of the contemporary city. It is particularly involved with
the dynamics of public life, with the behavior of individuals, their modes of encounter, of gathering, of bonding,
of recognition, and of distinction, which all leave the traditional paths behind. Equally and more radically, Post-It
City is a form of resistance against virtual modes of encounter and the normalization of "public behavior" in the
contemporary city - where as Ed Soja reminds us, "even if you dont want to, you have to respect the role
assigned to you."
The Post-It metaphor actually concerns a rather narrow spectrum of urban phenomena. But traditional public
space, as its representational use value changes, is obliged to take the complexity and heterogeneity of the
cultural and social mutations conveyed by these phenomena into account. New collective spaces are joining
the network of public places that connote the historical city, and the network of public places that punctuate the
density of the contemporary city, which is characterized by a planned diffusion, an extension of relations, an
attachment to communication networks. This new reality shifts the traditional dynamics of public life into new
conditions. What emerges from these temporary spaces is above all non-codification. Unlike the simulated
public spaces whose mechanisms of "controlled reaction" offer inhabitants, tourists and suburbanites very
specific chances to meet and exchange, the Post-It spaces have no predominant codification: they are vacant
lots, residual spaces around the communications systems, kinds of dikes around urbanized zones-spaces the
planner's gaze has left untouched. Their residual character, their indifference to the traditional network, their
tangential position to the major flows leaves them at the fringes: on the fringes of the complex stratification of
images produced by architecture and urbanism, on the fringes of the tradition of these disciplines, whose
projects are closed, limited in time, precisely shaped according to contingent needs.
The second characteristic of the Post-It phenomena is that they are temporary. They unfold in a particular timespan with the presence of temporary participants. During the day, for example, it is quite impossible to
recognize any sign of the night-time uses of a shopping-center parking lot. The Post-It spaces occupy a short
slice of time in the sequence of a city-dweller's day. In almost every case, it is a narrow interval of space and
time that slips in between a series of hypercodified environments. Inserted between the family framework of
the home and the mega-interior of the discotheque or multiplex, the teenager's night-time meeting-place is a
typical example. It is an individual reappropriation of the modes and times of collective exchange, freeing them
from the particular rules of the family framework and from the invasive, normalizing rules of the "architecture of
entertainment," to rediscover individualized and intimate interpersonal relations.
Intensification is the third characteristic of Post-It City - the intensification of anonymous, unsuspected spaces
and places, "no-man's lands" which are astonishingly available for collective practices. But it is also an
intensification of the signifiers fixed in the materiality of the space. Intimate, emotional places for sharing the

practices of encounter, which allow themselves neither to be modeled or obstructed. Or personal and collective
activities, desires, projections, which occupy spaces without any ambition to lay foundations, to root their
presence, and without promoting any antagonism over the use of the space. The "unpolitical" nature of such
collective practices cannot be measured by absolute demands or perspectives of radical transformation. In this
respect what predominates is above all the disarming effect of Post-It City. Architectural reflection has a hard
time translating the nature of these phenomena into its own terms, in order to incorporate them into a project.
But Post-It City, if we broaden the meaning of the expression, definitely is the bearer of a distinct and singular
project. With Post-It City we want to make an un-predetermined, temporary use of a space which is open like a
public space, and subject to perpetual resignification.
Post-It City is like a thread or an invisible watermark that runs through the contemporary city. Invisible at first,
the phenomena of Post-It City are not ostensible, even if their nature greatly depends on the dimensions of the
territory. It is often a matter of "exposed" places where it is possible to see the city, the landscape, and the
territory crossed by the flows of mobility. These places are characterized by what Stefano Boeri has called a
"territorial intimacy," which continually brings their residual nature, their marginality into a state of tension. PostIt City is also an implicit critique of the strategies and instruments that preside over the practices of
architectural and urban design. The critique is "implicit" because it does not give rise to specific demands.
Occupying a space which belongs to no one, doing so temporarily but repeatedly, giving it another meaning
inside a small group without modifying its spatial and material nature, is not an attitude which prefigures any
particular demand: for example the demand for "inhabitable space," or any other environmental condition, or
nay new services.
Post-It City rediscovers the dimension of "do it yourself," as Colin Ward says, a dimension which is above all
creative and abounds in its own proposals and reflection. This "do it yourself" denounces the hidden,
spasmodic will to impose a practice of collective space, it is foreign to the preordained and preconstituted
models of habitat.
But Post-It City is obviously not an anarchic phenomenon. On the contrary, it is progressive and exploratory in
its adaptation to a new framework. It is an innovative form of sociality that takes place in specific places and
develops partial, temporary, fleeting emotions. There is only the slightest of links between its places of
aggregation and their appearances. And these links cannot be interpreted in a single way. Sometimes a tie is
made between totally marginal places, constructed by superimposition, intermittence, and gradual
accumulations of objects without reciprocal relations, these places can be used for encounters and exchanges
of a particular "population." A vacant lot, a strip along the edges of transportation infrastructures, a void that
opens up temporarily in a zone of dense construction: chance will define it, by the sum total of stratifications (or
subtractions) which, in the course of time, have produced an uncertain, undefinable result, at least in the
technical terminology that habitually characterizes the city.
But at the other extreme, Post-It City also extends to places whose formal definition is completely univocal and
strongly determined: this is the case of the shopping center-parking lots evoked above, which at night or on
holidays become gathering points. The proximity of the major road infrastructures makes them a possible
interval, a stopover on a car trip. You suddenly leave the flow, but remain in direct visual communication with it.
The automobile becomes a complementary element of this temporary occupation: it marks off a space and
signals a momentary presence.
Post-It City seems to stress the extremes of what formally characterizes the city today. It is above all under the
conditions of maximum uncertainty and ultimate reduction that it is easiest to reveal the depth of the
phenomenon. In this constellation of spaces, which continually "light up" and "go dark," the public life of the
European city seems to find the energy of regeneration.
Post-It City is one of the case studies of the USE Project. USE - Uncertain States of Europe by Stefano Boeri