It’s 5.20pm and the hoodies have gathered. They can only be up to no good. But no. They gambol innocently in the evening sun like spring lambs. Beside them, on terraces basking in the warmth, grans and gramps look on, like the kind you see in Italian town squares on similar spring evenings. Ladies recline with a postwork fag and natter, and Goths risk their ghostly pallor in the sun’s rays. Babes paddle in rock pools. As a picture of civic harmony it’s almost saccharine.

But this is Nottingham, binge-drinking capital of the solar system. A city that is out of control, if you believe the headlines. Yet this evening it might be Siena. A Nottingham passegiata is in full flow.

We are witness to a miracle, for here lies the answer to every town and city council’s prayers: the civilising city square, a square to bring “respect” at last to our blasted streets, the square that gets hoodies frolicking and Goths picknicking, the square that finally transforms Britain’s Anglo-Saxon brutes into the continental sophisticates of our bourgeois fantasy.

Market Square is Britain’s second largest, after Trafalgar, but much older than its southern rival, its medieval roots clear from the broad swath and higgledy-piggledy curves, laid down over the centuries by farmers’ feet stumbling down the hill. Here, until those curves were straightened out in the 1920s by pompous city fathers, was where Nottingham had always gathered for fairs and fun, and, until it was shunted into a shopping precinct in the 1960s, for the city’s notoriously rumbustious market.

So with all medieval life having been sucked from it by the planners, Market Square has been a bit sad lately, its sunken, overformal municipal borders degraded and cruddy. Pedestrian-flow analysts calculate that 78 per cent of Nottingham’s citizens avoided the square like the plague. This could not be allowed to continue.

For Nottingham is, somewhat belatedly, having its Barcelona moment. Strictly speaking it was liberal American cities such as Boston and Portland, Oregon, in the early 1970s that first tried combating downtown decline and civil unrest by the modern-day equivalent of bread and circuses: the tasty cocktail of shopping, culture and coffee. Central to their success were squares. Boston laid out Faneuil Hall, Portland had its Pioneer Courthouse Square, tempting citizens back from the malls with the kind of old-fashioned qualities that city centres have always best delivered since the Ancient Greeks — crowds, theatre, human contact, at least the impression of excitement, the feeling of belonging.

Nottingham’s new old Market Square is simply the latest, though, perhaps the more significant because of the city’s reputation. Market Square is quite literally designed to reeducate the city in civility.

Civic space is constantly poised between order and chaos. Too much of the former leads to the deadening hand of autocratic planners. Too much of the latter and, well, you have an average Friday night in Nottingham. What the architect Neil Porter had to deliver in his new square was this equilibrium set in stone. “It’s a carrot and stick approach,” he says. “You tempt people in, then ensure they do as you ask.”

First the carrot. Nottingham dressed its main square in plain, almost minimalist, elegant greys and taupes. Tastefulness seems to be the first assault on the forces of incivility. “The council leader hates clutter,” notes the director of planning, Adrian Jones, so the usual paraphernalia of Britain’s overregulated, oversignposted streetscape has been removed for glorious emptiness, occasionally hosting farmers’ markets and civic jamborees.

Two thirds of the space is just that — space, with no little kiosks, adverts or, Lord help us, public art. Britain’s new city squares — Cathedral Gardens in Manchester, say, or, the worst offender, Centenary Square in Birmingham — tend to dress like performing seals. Here there’s emptiness, silence, the few concessions to decoration limited to the reds and yellows of the trees in autumn, and subtle, art-directed municipal borders. “Nottingham is a serial winner in Britain in Bloom,” says Porter. “This used to be hanging-basket hell, but we have eradicated them. It’s a cliché but it’s the people that should bring the colour.” And, this being Nottingham, you can certainly rely upon them to do just that.

As if they needed goading, there’s the ubiquitous water feature. Though here, at least, it favours simple jets, pools of gathering water. There is a theme — strata, the water spilling over splinters of grey and taupe rock emerging from Nottingham’s underbelly as if postearthquake. But it’s more Andy Goldsworthy than Fred Flintstone.

Still, I yearn for the sheer plainness of every modern square’s archetype, the Campo in Siena, or Caruso St John’s Stortorget square in the Swedish cathedral city of Kalmar, whose citizens needed but a field of stones marking out the space’s subterranean archaeology to entertain them.

The stick is equally subtle. There’s the obvious hope that by giving the city an Armani suit it won’t be as quick to puke over itself each Friday night. But if such mishaps occur, the square’s Portuguese and Chinese granite, if a little alien amid Nottingham’s limestone and sandstone streets, is at least wipe-clean, tougher than any binge drinker’s boot and, vitally, low maintenance. Its tone and pattern was picked to camouflage that civic menace discarded chewing gum.

Nooks and crannies where crack dealers might lurk and Burger King wrappers gather have been mostly eradicated. Any that remain are ruthlessly policed by CCTV and, when needed, floodlights. Skaters are banished by notches etched into the edge of the steps, niftily doubling as drainage channels after showers, and there are balustrades galore for the unsure-footed, a lack of deadly conkers and, should anyone decide to dive off the water feature, tastefully designed signage absolving the city of responsibility for such tomfoolery.

That such modern-day strictures haven’t turned the square into something resembling a penal colony is testament to Porter’s skill, one honed through the gruelling process of creating the most contentious piece of civic space in recent years — the Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park. There, though, the carrot was mightier than the stick. Porter maintains that cost-cutting removed elements — perimeter paths, the engagement of RoSPA, simple daily maintenance — vital to order and safety. “No fear of that here,” says Jones. “This is perhaps as good a city square as is possible in Britain today.”

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