Impact of Location of the Central Activities on Development of Open Public Space in the City Centers of Small Cities

Abstract

Urban areas of the central activities with mixed land use are crucial for the development of city center, even in small cities. In the last decades or two the attention is drawn on the retail and service activities that are usually located outside of cities near main roads. Municipalities had already detected this problem, but they are not implementing any of the measures (Rebernik, 2010). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the central activities in small cities in Slovenia are located in freestanding buildings, which is most appropriate in terms of forming the open public space in the city center. In this research we compared ten central activities (Vrišer, 1988, 1990, Kokole, 1971) in 34 small cities. We selected only those small cities (Prosen et al, 2008) which have among other activities a county court. The results showed the differences and commonalities of the central activities in selected small cities according to the indicators. Litija, Domžale and Sevnica are small cities, where activities that could articulate open public space are located in the larger building complexes. The phenomenon is similar to a modern machine, where action in it and indirectly the insight into the functioning of the society is invisible to the observer (Kos, 2008). We found out that in these tree cities the central activities are not forming the open public spaces in front of the public buildings (Vertelj Nared, 2014). The result is problematic image of the city and changed forces of the city life.

Keywords

• small cities
• central activities
• open public space
• Slovenia