Searching happiness within the city: finding alternative public spaces to become a healing place.

Temporary Public Space Illustration.

Public space has been one of the most demanding products to be launched in urban areas and is recently facing depreciation based on land scarcity and continuous development. Once in the modern era, it was one of the essential areas for people to gather publicly and do their activities. However, most stakeholders, including societies, have already discussed improving both the quantity and quality of their own public space and still need to figure out how to reduce the backlog of it.

Contradictively, public space is incredibly costly yet supposed to be one of the cheapest goods taxpayers should have. But, unfortunately, the “return on investment” scale to build a public space, including parks and open spaces, communal buildings and facilities, and other recreational precincts, is on a forbearing level, meaning it will take a long time to see outcomes and impact the development. Also, the more populated area, the more challenging for stakeholders to establish public spaces. If government did not have an asset within the dense urban area, the land acquisition process would be a budget expenditure burden.

Fortunately, there are many unseen potential idle spaces in the urban area. And while it remains vacant, the idea of creating a temporary civic space emerges as a contemporary trend to be one of the practical solutions for cities that don’t have many vacant lots. The utilization of semi-unutilized space has evolved since the beginning of the 20th century in European towns when they were starting to control and restrain the volume of vehicles to slow down the effect of the industrial revolution and to bring more shared space. A decade later, Jane Jacob, in the 60s, got the idea of creating public spaces from streets and vehicular systems, which is also public space per se, to restrict the development of 5th avenue in New York City. From this point forward, many cities have adopted this method of creating public spaces, from Bogota in Colombia to Jakarta in Indonesia. There are varieties of temporary public areas, according to Projexity, interim public plazas, open streets, and pop-ups, and the precedents above leaner towards open street temporary spaces typology.

Adapting the occasional public space-free vehicles establishes a dramatic quantity in public space. It has been fantastic for public workers to achieve their KPI in terms of fulfilment of providing public spaces. Although it did not stop here, there is also a quality aspect to creating a comprehensive civic space for people to enjoy, one of which is how the precinct could bring joyous and happy experiences. Happiness may seem difficult to measure, especially for spatial objects like public spaces but believe it or not, we can. Hence, stakeholders should consider measuring the intangible as a proper consensus result of an impact on society.

So close, yet so far, is how we acknowledge happiness, similar to public space in the city. Being happy is affordable to feel but hard to find. You may know the famous Aristotle and his logical and objective philosophies. He also coined how to establish spatial happiness, which evolved into a more prominent and complex theory. Agora is the result of how to generate pleasure based on his idea. As a centrum of modern-greek cities, philosophically, the agora was designed based on the human state as a social being. In agora, we could find a variety of activities, such as social and economic interactions, political affairs, and leisure, to manage public happiness within the city.

A theory of happiness is the combination of eudaimonia and hedonic concepts. Eudaimonia (feel good), which comes from the word daimon, is a spiritual form of power in humans for being good. At the same time, hedonic or hedonia (feel purpose) is built upon the idea that hedonism is a tangible form of human logic where we can feel physically and react immediately based on live experiences, which Epicurus famously presented as a complementary balancing subject to the eudaimonia notion. Both concepts, hedonic and eudaimonia, should later be analyzed with more tangible aspects, for instance, how people recognize the place, how long they feel comfortable, how many situations people get threatened, and how easy to navigate from to the location.

Diagram of Happiness. Image Source: Hayborn (2003), with alterations.

There are four quadrants of happiness based on theory and how we interpret it in space (Hayborn, 2003) :

1. The Void Life: The space gave them almost no impression, making them feel empty and meaningless to be in the moment in the situation.
2. The Dry Life: The space is not enjoyable at present, but it creates a fraction of memory even though it is not good enough.
3. The Sweet Life: The space might bring an “aw” to the visitors, whether the scenery or surrounding objects, but not memorable.
4. The Fulfilled Life: The space is memorable and satisfies visitors physically. While it may not be good, it looks chaotic, like a market or crowds, visitors enjoy the fullest and fond as a memorable experience.

Based on the happiness concept and measurement aspects, what matters is not only the place and how to arrange it, especially for temporary spaces with many limitations. Temporary space is not designable because it has a primary purpose, whether a road or services building. It is how the stakeholders choose the best location for people to get multiple experiences, whether as a principal use or as a secondary space and how we maximize the experience of public spaces by stimulating human senses. For example, we should avoid picking the busiest road and turning it into a temporary space if it has only a lineup of commercials and office buildings, even though it has highrises. Meanwhile, a street on the city’s fringe with many functions and attractions, like historic buildings, parks, public buildings, and scenery, could be the better option. It is because there is an experience that people might perceive differently from when they’re driving or walking freely as a public space that could be an attached moment of their lives.

It might be easier to say than do what the government already provide by establishing public space temporarily, and we must appreciate that. And as a reminder, happiness is also a subjective matter that is difficult to calculate, even though there are methods to build an objective consensus. I am trying to make a point about some ways to create a real place that people will like, even though it is not designated to be. The city has a lot to offer in every corner of it, and creating happiness in temporary public space might be an idea that is not impossible at all.