Squares
Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Cristina Mattiucci & Andrea Pavoni
eng. For a long time, urban life has flourished around squares: the place where the community meets, the site of daily or weekly markets, the stage of commemorations, celebrations or cultural events, the locus of assemblies, parades, speeches, demonstrations and other political forms of expression. Carefully designed, decorated and monumentalised, or amorphous clearings emerging from the density of the built environment; pedestrianised areas where to stroll, sit down and socialise, or congested roundabouts circled by continuous traffic – squares can take multiple forms, varying significantly across history and geography.
In many cases, contemporary urbanisation has reshaped urban squares into something significantly different from their original role, meaning and function. On the one hand, relentless gentrification and touristification have displaced traditional activities as well as inhabitants from historic squares. While often restructured and beautified, they have essentially turned into tourist attractions, monumental spaces populated by expensive bars, department stores and souvenir shops that hardly attract local inhabitants. The securitisation of squares via surveillance technologies, police presence and quality of life regulations has complemented this transformation, inevitably decreasing the longstanding capacity of squares to host all kinds of informal interactions, performances and transactions.
A precise moral imaginary, after all, has accompanied squares since the emergence of urban modernity. Already in the late nineteenth century, inspired by medieval and Renaissance urban design, the Austrian theorist Camillo Sitte, envisioned a good square as a protected space, aesthetically attractive, curated, inhabited, important – a space of familiar warmth [Gemüt]. Contemporary squares are often inspired, implicitly or explicitly, by this moral aesthetics, implemented through law, design and police, with the unsurprising consequence of having disproportionately negative effects on those people perceived as unfamiliar, for reasons of class, ethnicity, sexual orientation and so on. The formalisation of this vision, at its artificial extreme, can be found in the hyper-controlled and sterilised atmospheres of private squares – an oxymoron indeed – such as shopping malls’ piazzas. On the other hand, however, many squares remain loci of informal activities and improvisations of all kinds, places of excitement and confusion, meeting points for romantic or shady exchanges, empty stretches of land traversed by countless everyday trajectories, open air gyms for exercising or dancing collectively, dark nighttime spaces of respite or fear, as well as key sites when it comes to people taking the street, as testified by the resonance that names such as Tiananmen, Tahrir, Taksim, or Maidan still carry.
Invested by vastly different and often contested spatial, temporal and socio-political meanings, squares naturally lend themselves to interdisciplinary readings and explorations, from the analysis of their plan and the investigation of their historical trajectory to the observation of their rhythms and atmospheres, including the hidden stories, daily routines, invisible ruins and unapparent conflicts they harbour. In this issue of lo Squaderno we wish to address this multifaceted, socio-material complexity across historical periods and geographies. We invite contributors to analyse, narrate, explore, and express urban squares theoretically and empirically.
| Deadline for Contributions | 30 January 2026
| Articles’ expected length | around 2,000 words
| Information about the Journal | http://www.losquaderno.net/?page_id=2
| Information about the Editorial Process + Author’s Submission Checklist | http://www.losquaderno.net/?page_id=1082
