The “Making Public Places” Twitter Forum was

held at the office of Balmori Associates on July 13, 2009. We discussed public places with a Dutch group of students in landscape Architecture and professors Erik de Jong and Arnold Van der Valk.

We used Twitter and live video to extend the discussion to a worldwide public. We started the discussion in house, divided in smaller groups around the following topics: ecology, funding, furniture and materials, program, public/private, public amenities, scale, and circulation/traffic.

In the Twitter forum our discussion focused on shared space, urban decorum, context, and the relations between past and present. Here follows a summary of the event and what we discussed.

Finally, we comment on the use of social media, like Twitter, to allow truly public discussion of public space.