On Building Public Places

January 10th, 2006

A very informative post from Jay Walljasper on building public places:

“But while it’s easy to know great public space when you see it, it’s often quite difficult to know how to build a new one. Many projects setting out to establish a congenial spot for people to congregate—whether a park, shopping district, plaza, waterfront development, civic building, mall, or revitalized downtown—wind up as miserable failures, places that appear hostile to very [sic] idea of people enjoying themselves there.”

The library as the center of the community is something that I’m very interested in these days and will be studying for a long time to come. Libraries should be considered when building any type of “public place” in any type of environment. The questions we need to ask are:

1) Why aren’t they?
2) Why should they?
3) How can we make sure they are?
4) Who do we talk to?

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