Culture
What Public Squares Mean for Cities
A new essay collection offers 18 perspectives on how these open spaces function.
In their most basic function, public squares are cuts of negative space between buildings. But they are also arteries through which the life and history of a city flow and are suspended: inside a square, the past and present, the personal and political, merge.
City Squares, edited by Catie Marron, brings together 18 writers on the nature of these ubiquitous public spaces—some, like Red Square in Moscow, notorious; others, like Place des Vosges in Paris, a little more obscure.