April 2025
Tali Hatuka | Andrea Mubi Brighenti
Routledge
A New Index for Public Space explores the condition of contemporary publicness, with a focus on public space in urban settings. It contributes to a renewed understanding of publicness by revisiting and reworking the vocabulary used to discuss it. A New Index argues that publicness cannot be dissociated from a series of acts of imagination – hence, also, the vocabulary and categories through which it is read.
A New Index for Public Space is organized into three parts: Part I (“Thinking through Indexes”) provides a theoretical introduction to the idea of public space and publicness; Part II (“Sensing and Imagining the Public Domain”) offers a new index of terms and ideas, including Affects, Alignments, Atmosphere, Conviviality, Diagrams, Documenting, Elements, Flow, Memories, Refuge, Statements, and Syncs; Part III (“Walking through the Index”) applies the proposed lexicon with a ‘random walk’ approach, inviting the reader to figure out what is happening to publicness through the lens of nonlinear evolutionary dynamics, as a means for envisioning the future of public space.
A New Index for Public Space is the outcome of a conversation across disciplines – specifically, urban design and social theory – revolving around the recognition that public space is inherently messy, conflicted, and varying.
