ABSTRACT
The Modern Movement, from the mid 1920s onwards, in its quest to provide growing urban populations with cleaner and healthier cities and accommodations, dramatically downgraded the importance of traditional public spaces. Streets and squares were declared unhealthy and unwanted, and activities in such places were severely criticized as being shady, unbeneficial and, to a wide extent, amoral. Parkland settings for housing, with trees and lawns as meeting places instead of streets and squares, would be the new answer to the calamities of the traditional townscapes. The CIAM Athens charter of city planning (1933) laid down the new rules and stated that residences, work, recreation and transport should be strictly separated in the modern city. This dramatic ideological condemnation of traditional forms of public space and public life would, for several decades, effectively stop any development of the townscape as well as research and discussions concerning public life.
