In countrieslike France and the United States, the discourse on public space isfrequently saturated with images of peaceful agoras and refreshinglycivilized Italian piazzas as if these models were unsurpassablelandmarks implying, if not ensuring, harmonious relations betweencitizens. Even the reconstruction of a city like Beirut has given intothis imagery.A closer historical inquiry reveals a muddierhistory in which public space has always been characterized by ahistory of violence just as frequently as it has by more sereneactivities and civil conduct. The agoras and forums of the ancientswere marked by recurring and frequent episodes of violence, riots, andmurder. The Italian piazzas of the Renaissance and certainly themedieval public spaces of Italy were places of armed clashes betweenvarious factions.16 Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet isin this respect truer than the images forged and circulated by modernplanners and urban designers. In the same perspective, Baron vonHaussmann’s use of public space as a potential military asset in caseof riot or rebellion was by no means exceptional in thenineteenth-century metropolis even if the strategic importance ofHaussmannian public space has been often exaggerated by historians. Like architecture, public space is, has always been, profoundly ambiguous.Inthe past, the conflictual nature of public space was often translatedin terms of literal incompleteness. Many urban squares were neverfinished as a result of contradictory political, social, and fiscalforces that were exerted on them. Today, urban places, like thecelebrated Djemaa el-Fna square in the city of Marrakech, Morocco,provide spectacular examples of this unfinished character so differentfrom the well-ordered, rationalized, and pathetically empty publicspaces that designers try to implement today. One has only to imaginefor a moment a typical suburban office park to understand this point.Itis striking to observe how, in spite of the multiple failures thatsurround us, the myth of civic space as peaceful, uneventful publicspace has not only endured but also infiltrated the latest discourse onpublic space. From William Mitchell to Stephen Graham, the discourse onelectronic public spaces generally reproduces the same basic assumptionthat any space of public encounter could be pacific only.  Journal of Architectural Education 61 {3}, 6–12.
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