The plurality of public space: a cognitive analysis within the historic centre of Palermo

Abstract

The literature about modern and postmodern urban development, from Michel Foucault to Henri Lefebvre, has introduced a debate on the classic concept of openness/accessibility of public space, stressing aspects such as spatial exclusion, surveillance and social control, the matter of the “right to the city”. We face a progressive reduction or substitution of public space – privatized, fortified, commercialized – which the weakest and most marginal people are particularly affected from. Sometimes new forms of social production of space emerge, for instance through informal re-appropriation of “waste places”. The research work has focused on an area within the historic centre of Palermo, characterized by a return of medium-high social bands, relatively young, coming side by side of the autochthonous population, resident for generations, and of a substantial number of immigrants. Some behavioural maps have come out, in relation to the uses of space, both according to law and illegal, making arise the need for new strategies of accessibility to the historic city