Designing for New Publicness: Learning from Tokyo and St. Petersburg.

Our paper explores how transdisciplinary approaches to urban design can result in a renewed interest in urban public space and foster a sense of "togetherness". The design of public spaces plays a crucial role in shaping how individuals experience and interact with the urban environment — through the movement of bodies, the texture of surfaces, and aesthetic senses that infuse them. Such design ought to combine insights from sociology, politics, architecture, and decision-making processes. Specifically, our paper builds on the experiences and results of two interdisciplinary practical workshops in participatory urban design, one conducted in Tokyo and the other in St. Petersburg. In Tokyo, a city traditionally characterized by small-scale urban fabric, recent developments reflect competing trends: large, monolithic private projects alongside an emerging collective understanding of the sociopolitical significance of public spaces. In contrast, St. Petersburg's public spaces also undergo a renaissance, which is nevertheless associated with a very different political agenda away from democratic, participatory publicness. Both non-European cases can provide an insight into what is public about the public space, as well as the potential of social urban design to redress segregation.