Moscow, 28th May 1987

The young man is flying without instruments, low over the city’s rooftops. In the distance he sees the domes and walls of the palace he is searching for. He slows down and takes his position. The Cessna 172B lands in the Moscow dawn, a few metres away from the Kremlin walls, in the quiet of Red Square, while the guards look on in bewilderment.
It is 28th May 1987, a year after Chernobyl and two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mathias Rust, a 19-year-old student and amateur pilot from Berlin, had taken off from Helskini a few hours earlier with the aim of landing in Moscow’s Red Square: it was a flight of protest, an ingenuous and bold message of peace and unification between East and West in the final years of the Cold War.
After all these years, Rust’s adventure has provided an interesting viewpoint from which to consider the city and public space, although it may have been obscured by a new and powerful imaginary of the aerial invasion of urban space.
On a completely different scale, it seems that many small Cessnas are landing in our cities on a daily basis. They continuously tell us that the nature of public space has changed, and that a square can be an airport, a car park can be a square and an abandoned plot of land can be welcoming.
In other words, nowadays, rather than a codified sphere, public space is a set of behaviours that crystallise in a place that doesn’t necessarily have a public legal nature, although it can offer its potential inhabitants a framework for an act of collective sharing, albeit a temporary one. Rust’s action, while denigrating ideology, is also a temporary transformation of public space; it is as if, through his action, both things were indiscernible. Rust’s gesture was subtly revolutionary, although he was probably unaware of this. Gorbachov could do nothing else but imprison him for 20 months, and ended up sending him back to his family in Berlin. However, in the meantime, he dismissed thousands of generals and officers.

The final public space

Public space in the contemporary city isn’t only where we perceive it to be. Or, rather, it isn´t only there. It can also be found elsewhere, far from the hypercodified places of consumption and leisure, far from the monumental plazas decorated for the tourist hordes, far from the few public spaces that are still being built, but without much enthusiasm, without really believing in them, aware that they aren’t what we need to encounter.
A new – changing, mutable, occasional – network of spaces used collectively is spreading like delicate tracery throughout the city. They are residual spaces that are activated on the basis of the simultaneous presence of one or more human groups that occupy them and project onto them a partial, weak collective meaning. They are spaces that are unprotected by projects. And it is in this new network of spaces that an innovative, non-institutionalised project is developed and promoted collectively.
Like a text made up of post-its, the contemporary city is occupied temporarily by compartments that leave no trace – just like post-its do in books –, that appear and disappear recurrently, that have their forms of communication and attraction which are increasingly difficult to ignore.
In the new urban sphere of broad networks, traditional public space is always vague, anachronistic, and often unused. The contemporary city has constructed its built spaces by formulating new typologies and new fabrics – infinite patterns of houses, true cities of industrial units, enormous boxes that compress 18 film synopses, fake medieval theme parks – but it has not invested the same creativity and confidence in public space.
Nevertheless, a reaction has occurred: urban space today is the palimpsest of a continuous experiment with ways of life in public. It doesn’t give rise to new public spaces, but new dimensions of life and relationships in public. And the space occupied by these phenomena is seldom «public» in the strict sense of the word; it is the space of infrastructural enclaves, of abandoned industrial sites, of disused car parks, of different types of terrains vagues. Shifting public spaces drift through the city today, they border on traditional public spaces, they are born, put down roots, die and are reborn elsewhere.
The post-it city is the text that drifts through the city, a way of underlining, hiding, and highlighting the original text, to give it a temporary appearance, to make swift, light adaptations. It is a new public project, for a crowd we don’t yet know, whose unforeseeable demands eventually find space, build new links, establish vague relationships of identity with the places they occupy, and then free them up to occupy others.

What can be learnt by looking at the Post-it City

Three things, apparently. The first one is associated with the materials used to construct the post-its. These are often «sustainable» materials, rubbish, leftovers, waste, abandoned objects that are recovered for new uses, spatial inventions that optimise investments in urban infrastructures. The technologies and techniques of the space-time post-it are poor, they always involve a direct investment in the building by those who will eventually live in it, they are self-build, light products that can be dismantled and reassembled; they are portable, modular and provided with an efficient and strictly functionalist aesthetic. They are materials that tend to be invisible, that blend into our cities which are increasingly filled with useless objects that are a nuisance.
The prospect of a sustainable use of resources seems to lead to two seemingly irreconcilable scenarios. In the future we’ll need to combine intelligent and «popular» technologies, the former based on strong investment in projects and research, and the latter revived by a know-how which is often reclaimed and put back into circulation by the new populations who have recourse to a «foreign» creativity, enabling them to adapt to living, trading, moving and working, often by constructing the necessary materials for their survival. Both the intelligent and poor technologies are sustainable in character and lay siege to the ordinary and «modern» ones that still predominate, whose crisis, which seems definitive, we are beginning to witness.
Leaving aside the huge investments that need to be made in research, intelligence and experimentation, the road to coexistence between available resources and our way of consuming them also involves reviving some traditional forms of building, maintaining and finishing the project, as we go along, without leaving a trace.

Secondly, the new forms of temporary use of public space teach us to observe the projects and plans for urban transformations from a different point of view in the light of their abilities to adopt temporality in their interior. The invitation is to reverse the stance taken by architects and town planners with regard to the temporary forms of use of urban space. It isn’t so much a question of how to intervene without modifying or hindering the dynamics underway, but rather to think about spaces that can adopt forms that are different to the exclusive ones they have been designed for. The idea that a car park can be converted into a shared public space, that an infrastructural space can become a market, that a terrain vague can be a garden is a subsequent, active quality of urban space. The Post-it City becomes a sensor of a latent urban quality, of a space that is «open» to different, non-invasive dynamics. Wherever a post-it is placed, there is a sign of welcome, of promiscuity, of exchange, of a fertile tension between prediction and use. It is an urban sign par excellence, of a city that lives, thinks about and plans itself, which engages in self-criticism and finds solutions because it retains an ability to re-imagine itself.
Finally, post-it spaces expose relationships in the public domain, forms of habitation, structures of exchange and commerce that surprise us because they speak to us, in the materiality of space, of a community that invents a language. Each post-it develops a different jargon, a system of codes that are difficult to decipher. These places contain an implicit experimentation with new forms of sociality, be they open or closed, inclusive or exclusive, which engender a diverse laboratory of sociality that is weak but constantly transformed and expressed according to the occasions and opportunities. This mass of minorities, each with its own code, customs, diverse forms of attributing value and meaning to the space are the social horizon of this growing city.