Genius of the European Square: How Europe’s traditional multi-functional squares suport social life and civic engagement: A guide for city officials, planners, architects and community leaders in North America and Europe

Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard and Henry L. Lennard

2008. Gondolier Press, International Making Cities Livable Council. 232 pp. $49

Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard and the late Henry L. Lennard’s Genius of the European Square is a heartfelt tribute to a medieval innovation in urban space — “the most important invention of city-making.” {15} While beautiful, the book is no substitute for being there. And while fervently expressed, it’s no substitute for a more systematic consideration of this embattled and perhaps endangered architectural form.

“The key to a livable city,” the authors write, “is its public realm…. If we want to understand how to make public places that reduce social isolation, teach children social skills, foster community and civic engagement, we must look at the traditional, multi-functional European square. From its first appearance in Ancient Athens as the ‘agora’ until the present, the traditional European square has functioned as a catalyst for democracy and civic engagement because of its power to draw people together and generate social life.” {7} Of course, these places need not be geometrically square, and many aren’t.

The book condenses thirty years of observant travel into 28 chapters arranged in three sections:

• “Genius of the European Square,” which takes up such square-related themes as community, democracy, building uses, urban fabric, and transportation policy;

• “Celebrating European Squares” (by far the largest part of the book) with chapters on five squares in Italy, three each in Germany and the Czech Republic, two each in the Low Countries and France, and one each in Spain and Poland; and

• “Evaluating the Square Today,” where the authors attempt to distill the lessons learned into 41 principles for designing multifunctional European-style squares in the United States.

The authors’ architectural and urban design recommendations in the final section are familiar and hard to fault: mix uses that serve residents, exclude motorized vehicles within reason, no single-use areas, and no stylistically jarring or out-of-scale buildings to destroy the sense of being in a comfortable and well-proportioned outdoor room. They emphasize the importance of key retailers, namely “bakeries, pharmacies, groceries, delicatessens, and newspaper stalls.” {51} In fact, although they strongly favor squares’ having both civic and commercial uses, they acknowledge the supremacy of the farmers’ market: “It is more powerful than any other activity on the square, more potent than the square’s design characteristics, and even more influential than surrounding buildings and building uses.” {68}

Although it could be viewed as a bit off-topic, the authors also squeeze in their uncompromising verdict on new urbanist developments as so far practiced: “The lack of true urban fabric and the emphasis on formal design rather than multi-functionality will still prevent them from reaching their potential as catalysts for community engagement.” {213}

Less persuasive are the authors’ analysis and rationale. They associate squares with democracy and imply that the demise of the square as a meeting place for locals might threaten democratic government itself. But even the correlation (not to mention the direction of any causal arrow) seems shaky based on their own evidence. Some squares played a part in the development of urban self-government, notably in Italian city-states; but Plaza Mayor in Salamanca — which they describe as “one of the world’s liveliest and most successful urban spaces” — was built only on the sufferance of King Philip V, and designed to provide “a splendid reflection of the power and grandeur of the monarchy.” {167} If anything, Salamanca’s story suggests that the square has been the plaything of larger social forces: in 1954, the square had fostered democracy to such an extent that Salamanca University awarded an honorary doctorate to the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. For this purpose the plaza was asphalted, and spent the following three decades as a parking lot. {169} (Seven sequential photographs show how many different guises the square has donned just since 1867.)

The authors maintain an admirably tight focus on their subject, but that makes it difficult to tell whether their recipe for square-based urbanism will turn out well. In the past, the viability of urban squares as incubators of public life has depended on people having limited options. The authors implicitly acknowledge this in their discussion of the Czech town of Olomouc, which now has malls and superstores on its outskirts. “As residents of Olomouc buy more cars, these commercial developments will profoundly affect commerce and social life on the square.” {181} Emphasis added.

In the past, social life in the square was not a choice. Now it is. That may change the equation. The authors are greatly enamored of Siena’s semi-annual Palio festival, with its pageantry and good-natured competition among neighborhoods (contrada), especially the way the festival supposedly brings adolescents into adult society in a harmonious way. “In historic costume,” they “parade through the city playing the drum and singing their neighborhood song.” {97} One would like to hear from some of these young people themselves to see just how this determined provincialism, centered around racing horses on a tricky track, sits with the World Wide Web and transcontinental instant messaging. Is quaint the new black?

The authors’ discussion of tourism is antagonistic and unhelpful. They’ve seen how mass tourism displaces local businesses and residents — it’s almost always more lucrative to serve well-heeled foreign trippers than local apartment dwellers. Venice and Prague have pretty much lost their cities to this economic juggernaut, and the authors’ legitimate dismay spills over into their derisive descriptions of tourists themselves: “You can always identify them [in Venice’s Pizza San Marco] by their shorts, tea shirts and sandals, inappropriate dress for the Piazza’s elegant and romantic urban setting.” {78} Padova’s interconnected squares are “untainted by the tourist industry.” {105} One Czech town is plagued by “mobs of tourists from bus tours meandering around and sitting at the restaurant terraces on the square.” {204}

True, squares crowded with strangers are not hotbeds of indigenous social life. But those strangers are people too — indeed, people who are paying homage to some of the world’s great architectural creations (and, if they’re using tour buses, are causing less damage than if they came in individual cars). Disneyland was built to welcome and withstand such an onslaught, and of course it was never a real community anyway. Even the built fabric of Venice and Prague cannot withstand it for long. But how do you ration history? The authors’ impassioned rhetoric about fighting mass tourism obscures the fact that this is a conflict, not between good and evil, but between two goods.

That may be why this book, thick as it is with descriptions and illustrations and admiration, seems thin in the end. It’s as if there were no cost to having a square and no benefit to anything else. The traditional social life of the square comes at a certain price in mobility and variety. (For example, if I jest and play chess with whoever happen to be my neighbors around my home square, I don’t get to know the stronger players across town or two cities away.) The idea that European squares are unrelievedly good and the alternatives unrelievedly evil is not helpful in dealing with people who appear to have chosen evil for no reason. Sienese are moving into suburbs, and according to the authors may be suffering from increased rates of alcoholism and social breakdown as a result. {204} What were they thinking?

When there was nothing to do indoors and no easy way to travel far, squares were the only social option, and a good one. Now there is a choice. Understanding how and why people may be induced to make that choice in the 21st century will require more than invoking the undeniable architectural genius of the 13th.

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