The Charter of Public Space

The need for a shared definition of public space emerged during the last years and the Biennial of Public Space accepted this challenge, adopting the Charter in 2013.

A strong debate and a specific roadmap led to draft the Charter of Public Space (2013) presented during the Second Biennial of Public Space in Rome: a dedicated workshop took place, and the Charter was adopted. Specifically, the drafting process was developed by the editorial group (1) in several steps, which included: a framework for the first draft; national and international literature reviews (references, case studies, analysis of other documents, etc.); a 1.0 draft version; sharing of this version with the Second Biennial’s coordinators (Biennial Work Groups, Scientific Committee, competitions, calls, and workshops coordinators), including UN-Habitat; review of the draft version on the basis of the feedback and comments from the 2013 Biennial’s collaborators; finally the publication on the Biennial web site to get more feedback to be added to the version presented during the workshop at the final event of the 2013 Biennial of Public Space.

The workshop has been realized using the “Habitat Method” of “real-time editing”, selected for its utility in international contexts in building participated and shared documents.

The preliminary version of the “Charter of Public Space”, in English and Italian, has been projected on a screen to allow to everyone to be part of real-time editing.

Everybody was invited to propose and present amendments to single paragraphs, emerged prior or during the real time reading process.

The amendments generally approved by the assembly were inserted in the final version, that has been printed and published in both languages and finally presented during the plenary session of the Biennial, during which the Charter has been adopted by acclamation.

The Charter of Public Space has been adopted in Rome, during the final session of the II Biennial of Public Space, 18th May 2013.

The document constitutes the contribution of the Biennial of Public Space to a process of further definition of the same subject area that will be conducted at the global level in collaboration with the United Nations Programme on Human Settlements (UN-HABITAT), in order to make a significant contribution to the Third Conference of the United Nations on Human Settlements (Habitat III) to be held in 2016.

You can download the Charter of Public Space in three languages: