¶ … conception and function of public space change as historical shifts influence the delineation between public and personal rights and property. Boyer states that there is an underlying tension in the application of reference to historical styles present in the creation of public spaces, representing nostalgic yearning for past times remembered as greater than the articulation of the present. Boyer also references Walter Benjamin's theory that "all history writer in a story of triumph of bourgeois values and represents the posthumous reconstruction of fragmented events according to a completely fabricated structure (5). One may conclude, then, that the use of historical motifs, styles, and events in public spaces favors the commemoration of a privileged historical canon and pre-modern public space designation did not have populist intentions. A public space constructed with historical references under the heavily economically stratified era of the pre-modern era served to cement the historical canon of the elite through the perceived permanence of public architecture.
The conception of the public space shifted in the early modern era, around the beginning of the twentieth century, when populist revolts in rapidly expanding cities against conspicuous wealth resulted in greater investment in civic resources, including housing and public buildings (8). Boyer quotes a New York City Municipal Art Society Committee Report from 1905 which typifies the ideology that thoughtful infrastructural development was important to inducing patriotism in a populace with increasing democratic...
Popular conceptions of bloated spending, corruption, and excessive taxation and regulation have soured the perception of public spending in recent years (9-10). Contemporary urban architects, Boyer concludes, have attempted to "retie 'knots' in the unraveling city fabric, reintroducing a human scale, a sense of place and traditions that the modern city destroyed (18)." The perception and construction of public space is, indeed, shaped by public sentiment, which is itself heavily informed by the sociopolitical and economic factors which influences a population's view of itself in relation to the space it inhabits.
Isfahan Square
The Isfahan Square built in city center by Shah Abbas I of Persia between 1599 and 1627 can be viewed as an example of public space from the pre-modern era built to solidify a historical canon privileging the perspective of a ruling majority, Benjamin's "bourgeois." The Maidan-i-Shah Square in Isfahan is a tribute to the emerging dominance of this area of the Middle East in transcontinental trade -- ranging from Western Europe to China -- in textiles and gold. The square represented the primacy of Isfahan as a center of economic proto-globalization in the seventeenth century, evident through…
