Public Space as the Fabric Connected to an Evolving City Structure: Case Study of Powiśle Północne, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract

Public spaces are indispensable elements of the urban spatial structure, binding the components of the urban tissue and playing a crucial role in shaping a sustainable housing environment. Fragments of urban tissue that are not connected by public spaces are prone to gradual degradation. A defragmented city must therefore be ‘stitched together’ by spatial corridors to counteract this tendency effectively, which directly affects the quality of the living environment. The aim of this article is to identify the process of increasing the attractiveness of an area by transforming nodes into places and forming connections between them. An illustrative example of this hypothesis-the development resulting from the creation and consolidation of a public space network-is the transformation of a previously neglected section of the Warsaw waterfront-the Powiśle Północne area, bounded by the Śląsko-Dąbrowski and Poniatowski bridges, the Vistula riverbank, and the upper edge of the Warsaw Escarpment. This article presents the development of urban landscape formation in the years 1990-2020. The process involves designing public spaces by connecting fully formed nodes and linkages into a coherent whole.