Shared Space

Somewhere between the ‘Public’ and the ‘Private’ lies the ‘Commons’. Shared space, controlled within both legal and social contexts, open yet contested. This is the space of connection and convening, of protest and marketplace, of shared identity and imposed power.

Our modern urban environments hold common space within both arcane structures of property ownership, planning law and leasehold, as well as within contemporary contexts of co-working, folklore of community, and free WiFi.

Our shared spaces may be spaces of transit (buses and coaches, railway platforms and the trains that pass through them, elevators, ports, airport arrivals, or departure lounges), of commerce (shops and malls, markets), of eating and entertainment (cafes and restaurants, pubs and clubs, fairgrounds, cinemas, theatres, parks, swimming pools and snooker halls), or of course they may be natural (beaches and forests, mountains and heaths).

Certain shared and common spaces is intertidal, liminal, washed clean, refreshed, renewed, rejuvenated, reinvented, twice a day. Whilst other is abandoned, derelict, unclaimed, contested, or illegally fenced off.

Within each of these shared spaces, and within the many types of space I have not listed, diverse rule sets apply. Some held within social convention and ‘norms’, whilst at other time it’s codified into printed and signposted rules, to ‘park here’ or ‘keep clear’, to ‘queue’, or not to ‘loiter’. 

In similar fashion, our Organisations are entities of both private and shared space, transit space and purposeful working space, with the addition of layers of structural power, and yet more cultural norms, and learnt-yet-unwritten rules.

I find myself wondering today (whilst wandering around Poundbury, a newly ‘invented’ town space, a purposefully planned rambling space) how our shared spaces will evolve in the near future: as our conventions of work continue to evolve (from legacy centralised versions, through transitional ‘remote’ ones, and into something altogether new?), and as our parallel systems of education (away from campus based?), and commerce (hybridised online), healthcare (distributed, individualised, community based?), and even religion (Zoom church, or ‘culture as religion’).

Our social context evolves within the accreted (and concreted) legacy structures, themselves formed around outdated social connection, management wisdom, and cultural norms. We live on our ancient foundations.

As space becomes a primarily narrative feature – held within our online communities – as opposed to a geolocated physical one – everything feels in motion – compounded by what can often be our lived experience of neglect of civic space, and dereliction of outmoded architectural monoliths (like department stores, or ice rinks).

Indeed, perhaps within some of our retained and shared social space we should be convening more broad ranging conversations about the space we wish – to be civic, to be social, to forge community – tomorrow.