There is perhaps no concept so generic and comprehensive, yet at once so impersonal and difficult to reach consensus on, as that of the environment (focusing on the United Nations Conference's own definition of environment—the environment as the set of physical, chemical, biological, and social components capable of causing direct or indirect effects, in the short or long term, on living beings and human activities—we immediately find that establishing a stable, common, and assertive conceptual foundation is highly difficult to achieve, let alone universally recognize...)
In mathematical terms, we might say that the environment is a simple addition of two parts: the natural environment and the built environment—an addition that always yields an objective, stable result. However, we are not dealing here with an exact science, but rather with a concept that is shaped and flexed by context and time, space and people. And if this concept of the environment is the intersection of the natural and built environments contextualized in time and space, it finds its greatest, most visible, and most significant common denominator in public space.
Understanding public space as the place where the community expresses itself, as “a space of common remembrance”[1] where “actors constitute themselves as subjects insofar as they articulate a space of remembrance and forgetting, a history they can consider common...”[2] it is subject to different analytical, argumentative, and indeed ideological visions, wavering at its extremes between atavistic conservatism and unbridled liberalism.
