Attending a talk given by Richard Sennett last Monday evening, I was thinking about possible recipes to obtain a contemporary Agora.

Definitely, is not a matter for planning or design, I think.

Sennett proposes a distinction between two kind of public spaces: the Agora is a place where many things happen synchronically and it’s opposed to that public place where the same thing happens many times along a linear sequence (i.e. public statements on political matter). I think that the Agora features mostly depends on human behaviour, and then on people belonging to the (public) space.

The space outside St Paul Cathedral is not nearly an Agora, but during the Occupy London it worked like an Agora, I think. It was a practical demonstration that debating, talking, eating, sleeping, drinking, dreaming, loving, and then living together is still possible for people.

Not a matter of space, but something about time.

It’s a problem for Sociology. But are planners, designers, and architects without sin?

When Sennet talked about the liminary zone around the Agora, that filter space so functional for the Agorà dynamics, I thought that such a concept should be extended to workplaces, houses, retails, and so on.

The social networks, giving the illusion of synchronicity, make blur the boundaries between the private and the public dimension, and because of devices’ portability, this uncertain limit is always and everywhere standing.

Houses, workplaces, schools, commercial spaces are places without time (always perfectly well-lighted) and season (20° all the year round).

If you browse the Internet, you find that the current aesthetic ideal in interior design is a white space.

How is it possible to reanimate the Agora with people living in a such alienating, anaesthetic, Space-Odyssey-like environment?

So, I think, to design well-working public spaces we have to begin from interior and inner being.