Ciudades 26, 2023
Open spaces for public use as a system: complexity and contradiction
One of the many disturbing scenes left by the pandemic was that of parks, first closed and then ruled by circles for different groups of coexistence to be distanced from each other. In an opposite sense, this compressed time has also accelerated and amplified the environmental appreciation of these spaces. The compatibility or not between both visions can synthesize what we are looking for in the call for issue 26 of Ciudades. Can we speak of a health-enhancing open space system? To what extent and how can this system trigger or drive urban regeneration, or, on the contrary, adapt itself to the status quo, with greenwashing as a reinforcer of gentrification and socio-spatial inequality processes?