Discover Barcelona
Public spaces are places with a range of different features, made up of significant elements (from monuments full of statues, reliefs, murals, etc., to small details on building façades and urban furniture), with messages that relate to personal experiences and collective memories. They are places not just for communication and community life but also celebration and ritual. For anthropology, the elements of public spaces are not points on a map or connection nodes along our journeys, but rather signs packed with meaning that create a shared imaginary with others.
Marc Augé reflected on the identity of the individual according to their relationship with places and in contrast to non-places. The conceptual duality of the place and the non-place, for that famous French anthropologist, is the key to deciphering the social meanings of public spaces, that is, their capacity to accommodate, encourage and symbolise relations between individuals and with everyone’s memories.
Places are spaces where something can be read about collective identities and relations between individuals with this identity. So, in that sense, places are not physical entities and have to be understood as a symbolic construction. In other words, places are rhetorical spaces with codes that we can read, interpret and share.