The Memory of An Urban Public Square

This paper is a real case study: it presents the almost 8-year long public place renewal process of Sopron, Yichang’s (China) sister city, a historic town located on the western border of the small Central and Eastern European country, Hungary. As part of a longer research, planning and negotiation processes, the first and largest phase of the public place project, which embraces the onion shaped city core, has already been implemented and awarded a number of Hungarian and international prizes, while the following phases are under planning. The stake was double. On the one hand, considering the city's infrastructure as a special hardware, we have fundamentally renewed it by reducing the dominant presence of car traffic and parking. Instead, the square was opened for the pedestrians, and the ground floor shops of the buildings surrounding the plaza were also provided with an enhanced connection to the square. On the other hand, any software can run on this hardware because since then the place has been refurbished by terraces of catering establishments, giving place to many city events, celebrations, but also to an ordinary urban walkway feature. With the renewal’s complex technical and engineering toolkit, we actually wanted to bring to the surface the characteristics hidden in the past, in the history, and finally in the memory of this urban space: the Várkerület (Castle District) was the filled up area of the former water-filled moat around the historic downtown. And this determines its special shape, form and width varying in space. The reconstruction of this spatial pattern provided a firm background to the revitalization that was tailored to the functional needs of the 21st century. All this was preceded and in parallel accompanied by a special research process the methodological results of which we could directly use in applying the design principles.