Organizing public space as a framework for re-thinking the city: Pafos’s bid for the 2017 European Capital of Culture

Abstract

As the main theme of Pafos’s bid to become the 2017 European Capital of Culture, the Pafos 2017 Working Group developed the idea of the “Open-Air Factory” as a framework that would host the city’s cultural activities in 2017, but also as a tool for redefining the identity of Pafos from a provincial tourist resort to a multi-cultural hub of civic cohesion and creative innovation. The projects included in the bid aim to create a series of interlocking public spaces in Pafos’s loosely-knit urban fabric, as an attempt to weave the city and its citizens back together. The paper presents the process of shaping the spatial component of the Open-Air Factory concept and discusses the ideas underlying some of the bid’s cornerstone proposals, as tools for examining issues of centrality in the context of a dispersed city and culture as an instrumental agent in shaping urban futures.