Convivial urban spaces: Creating effective public places Henry Shaftoe

摘要

Two welcome books address the perennial issue of how to create humane and habitable places in our western cities: two perspectives presented from the two sides of the Atlantic by dedicated and experienced authors: two entertaining but unashamedly didactic and fascinatingly diverse explorations of an essentially identical question. With our accumulated wisdom, wealth and knowledge, why have we not been able to provide the alluring spaces and places, which were a vital part of the life of innumerable European towns and villages, many founded as long as 1000 years ago? After a lifetime of extensive work and research, observations of his own adopted hometown of Bristol as well as both the delightful and the desolate aspects of many UK cities, Henry Shaftoe writes that his book is '...primarily British-focused, Eurocentric influenced...'. From West Coast USA, architect Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard and psychologist-social researcher the late Henry Lennard lived for a time in the early 1970s in Venice and were inspired by the way European squares functioned as '...a powerful catalyst for community life.' In the following decades, time and again they observed and documented life in these squares and believed that the creation of such places in North America would '...in some measure help to rebuild community and civic engagement, ease the pain of social isolation...'.