Future public space. Foresight-based implications and design patterns for post-pandemic placemaking strategies

What qualities will the public spaces of tomorrow have? How will inner cities look like after the COVID-19 pandemic, in the face of climate change and increasingly digital environments? The claims to the highstreets and the public spaces as central places of our society have changed over time. City centers have already been in a comprehensive and long-term transformation, which is currently being accelerated. The topic of revitalization gains in importance of highstreets and public spaces in general can only be solved consequently when an alternative to the status quo is acknowledged which provides new characteristics of vitality and multifunctionality with simultaneous economic efficiency in this domain. Both for smart and for climate-neutral cities the centers play a crucial role within an urban transformation process - be it as a showcase for technological innovations, as social places or creative districts, as a laboratory for new mobility solutions, as marketplaces or places of experience. These futures must be anticipated across several disciplines and actively designed to make them a preferred reality. The applied research has shown that, in order to initiate transformation processes for public spaces on local level, new concepts, governance and planning approaches for future place-making strategies have to be established and prototyped.