Bring Back the Town Square

We Need a Revolution in Civic Life

The jacaranda trees bloomed iridescent purple in Lisbon’s Largo do Carmo, as we sat with a bottle of inky Alentejo and let the haze of travel settle over us, black-and-white calçada portuguesa tiles beneath our feet. Pastel-painted buildings lined with blue azulejos kept vigil as dusk fell on the square, and the long-dry fountain at its center came alive in a ghostly glow. Evidence of the 1755 earthquake that destroyed the city survives here in the ruins of the Convento do Carmo, whose Gothic arches still loom over its collapsed church like the carcass of a desiccated beast. Next door, a guard in ceremonial dress stood sentinel outside the headquarters of the National Republican Guard, which has occupied the rebuilt Carmo monastery since the early 1800s.

Other ruins linger in the square, mostly invisible: it was here that the brutal, 48-year dictatorship of Portugal’s Estado Novo collapsed in the largely bloodless Carnation Revolution of 1974.

We learned about the dictatorship and its repressive reign across town at the Aljube Museum, a former prison where the regime once locked up dissidents but which now holds only memories. Largo do Carmo is also haunted by the ghosts of the past. What struck me was how such a dramatic event could take place in such a quotidian place. This was where the rebelling troops of the Armed Forces Movement had rolled tanks through the steep and narrow streets of Lisbon, where they stuck carnations in the barrels of their guns, where Lisboetas in the thousands gathered in solidarity and protest. And this was where, at last, a dictator took refuge in police headquarters and ceded power to a people who would chart a new and uncertain future for themselves.

Where else would such drama unfold than in a town square? Important events happen in town squares because town squares are so important to urban life.

Largo do Carmo, then and now. (Photo Credits: left, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa/DN; right, author)

Around the time we were sipping wine in Largo do Carmo, the X account City Aesthetics posted an arresting image of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid with the caption “Bring back the town square.” The image, seen below, shows the perfectly rectilinear expanse of the square within the dense warren of Madrid’s medieval streets—negative space amid the fabric of urban life. The implication of City Aesthetics’s post was that, while town squares or greens or commons were ubiquitous features of traditionally-built communities, such spaces are largely missing from modern developments, especially in places built as center-less suburbs or towers-in-the-park.

Madrid’s Plaza Mayor began life as a market square outside the medieval city walls. Over the centuries, Spanish monarchs transformed it into a monumental civic stage, hosting everything from bullfights to coronations to executions. Fire, urban renewal, and shifting priorities altered its form and function repeatedly. By the mid-20th century, it had been repurposed—like so many public spaces—as a parking lot. Unlike many American cities, Madrid reversed course: today, Plaza Mayor is pedestrianized, and once again central to civic and cultural life. Its evolution mirrors the shifting priorities of the city around it—a reminder that even historic places can be lost and found again.

Town squares are mirrors of civic identity, of the values and priorities of the town—and like the townspeople themselves, they evolve over time. Yet through every era—whether madrileños arrived on foot, on horseback, by tram, or by car—the Plaza Mayor remained a civic focal point in the city.

And that’s what makes a town square, literally: the surrounding town.

As we wandered through the many squares and plazas of Lisbon last week, I realized City Aesthetics didn’t have it quite right. What’s missing from many modern communities, from those comprising endless rows of tract housing on cul-de-sacs or soulless apartment buildings on highways or monolithic towers-in-the-parking-lot, is not merely a central focal point—it’s the kind of small-scale urbanism that makes town squares possible.

If we want to “bring back the town square,” we first have to bring back the town.

Where did it go?

Of course, exclusionary zoning played a role, but so did technology, policy, and changing preferences—themes I explored in “Defund the City.” Meanwhile, a desire for more privacy meant that the public square was devalued and divvied up, placed into backyards and fenced in—or turned into parking lots or inaccessible dead spaces. The twin patterns of postwar, autocentric suburban sprawl and urban renewal resulted in settlements without centers by design. What replaced town squares were shopping centers, malls, HOA community centers, and other largely private spaces, pseudo-squares accessible only by car—a pale simulacrum of the real thing, stripped of civic function. Often, there was nothing at all.

There’s no square there.

There’s no square there. (Photo Credits: Left, Center, Right)

Logan

Bryck has wryly observed that suburban sprawl resembles the Marxist ideal: in The Communist Manifesto, Marx called for the “gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.” Logan writes:

This is of course because Marxism was fundamentally a reaction against urbanization—“bourgeois” basically meaning “city people,” coming from the same roots as borough or burg. This is because cities are the bastion of capitalist growth and freedom that Marxism deplores.

There’s an uncanny lineage between the standardized houses of suburban subdivisions and the mass-produced tracts of communist apartment blocks—and the equally soulless phenomenon of towers-in-the-park, championed by authoritarian fanboy Le Corbusier. Towers-in-the-park likewise inverted urbanism by putting the “town” into alienating, identical towers, often devoid of commercial uses and amenities, surrounded by grassy voids. The result was the same:

There’s no square there, either.

As I’ve argued in recent essays, exclusionary zoning and other land development rules have effectively exiled the middle class to Siberian suburbia and turned off the opportunity escalator that used to elevate the urban proletariat into the upper classes. NIMBYism and proceduralism have blocked infill development in the high-opportunity places where town squares exist and have broken the spatial logic of our civic lives. Altogether, anti-urban land use policy has done more to achieve the communist utopia and the destruction of the urban bourgeoisie than Marx ever could.

In the absence of a physical town square, whither the revolution?

Will the masses convene on Bob and Shirley’s driveway with tiki torches blazing, electric hedge trimmers humming, and Yeti tumblers clinking with iced chardonnay? The HOA doesn’t allow yard signs, nor parties after 9pm, and the rec room in the clubhouse requires a deposit. In this classless utopia, where everyone lives in carbon-copy tract housing, the central planners planned no central place to plan the uprising. That was probably the point.

Here, the revolution will only be televised.

So perhaps the revolution will go online—into the new “town square.” Elon Musk has said that “X is the global town square—from the people for the people.” I’ll let you take a look at how the people are getting on there and draw your own conclusions.

There’s no there there, either.

What happens to a culture with no town squares?

I have to imagine that a near-century of planning this way has something to do with the decline of civic life. Something to do with the collapse of social trust. With the rise of alienation and anomie. With persistently low turnout in local elections. With the sense that we don’t see our neighbors as neighbors, or fellow citizens as fellow travelers. That we don’t belong anywhere. This, I suspect, is how you impoverish civic life: not all at once, but by removing the places where it used to live.

My point is not that we need town squares in order to have a revolution; it’s that we need town squares in order to have the basic quotidian experiences of civic life: interactions with friends, neighbors, shopkeepers, strangers—basic connections with people and experiences of all stripes that form the basis of civil society.

These experiences can’t be replicated in the “town squares” of X or Bluesky or any other social media platform, nor in the pseudo-squares of manufactured suburbia, and certainly not in places where they don’t exist. Real life happens in real, live embodied spaces. The townspeople of Lisbon brought back the metaphorical “town square” of free speech and free assembly that didn’t exist under the dictatorship—by taking to the physical town square that did exist at Largo do Carmo.

Portugal’s Carnation Revolution was not merely the toppling of a dictatorship, it was an act of civic pride and restoration. If we wish to restore civic life in America, if we wish to replenish and rebuild our town squares—we must bring back the town first.

That would be a revolution.