The importance of Public Spaces..

As told by Blair Kamin, Pulitzer Prize winning architechture critic for the Chicago Tribune.

----------------------------------------------------------
Not long ago, some big thinkers pronounced public space dead and fingered the computer as the culprit.

There was no point in waxing nostalgic about old-fashioned parks and plazas, they argued, when the Internet was allowing people to gather in the virtual realm of chat rooms irrespective of where they lived. "The real public space is invisible to the eye," the renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas proclaimed at a 1999 Harvard symposium.

No one must have conveyed this spurious bit of analysis to the hundreds of thousands of people who poured into Chicago's Federal Plaza, Washington's National Mall and other places around the nation in recent weeks to protest proposed federal laws that would crack down on illegal immigrants. They could not have been more visible.
------------------------------------------------------------


read more here...