ABSTRACT
‘Public realm’, ‘public sphere’ and its various other permutations have become commonplace in our day-to-day language. It helps us imagine the social environment in which we can freely express ourselves as well as the spatial environment in which we can interact through meeting, trading, rallying, celebrating or simply moving through (Figure 1). The Romans understood the public realm to stand for everything formal and official, and it became synonymous with governance and state interests. According to the academic Richard Sennett, the public realm represented ‘those bonds of association and mutual commitment which exist between people who are not joined together by ties of family or intimate association… the bond of a crowd, of a people, of a polity, rather than the bonds of family and friends’ (Sennett, 1976).
