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The rejuvenation of public spaces is a key policy concern in the UK. Drawing on a wide literature and on qualitative research located in a multi-ethnic area of East London, this paper explores their relationship to well-being and social relations. It demonstrates that ordinary spaces are a significant resource for both individuals and communities. The beneficial properties of public spaces are not reducible to natural or aesthetic criteria, however. Social interaction in spaces can provide relief from daily routines, sustenance for people’s sense of community, opportunities for sustaining bonding ties or making bridges, and can influence tolerance and raise people’s spirits. They also possess subjective meanings that accumulate over time and can contribute to meeting diverse needs. Different users of public spaces attain a sense of well- being for different reasons: the paper calls for policy approaches in which the social and therapeutic properties of a range of everyday spaces are more widely recognised and nurtured.

The present study investigated the effects of public art on visual properties and affective appraisals of landscapes. Undergraduate and graduate students sequentially viewed landscapes with or without public art and rated each one for visual properties and affective appraisals. Study 1 revealed that the presence of public art reduced pleasantness of the natural scene, but did not reduce that of the urban scene. In Study 2 focusing on the urban landscapes, the t-tests showed that public art consistently yielded greater arousal and the visual properties related with arousal level (e.g., complexity), whereas for pleasantness and the visual properties related with pleasantness (e.g., legibility) the scores varied with the public artworks. Adopting the experimental design that systematically combined 4 landscapes with 2 pieces of public art, Study 3 revealed that the affective quality of public art had more influence on the landscapes than the compatibility between public art and the landscapes.

The disappearance of public spaces from the urban realm is a sign of the de-individuation and asocialization of the modern individual. However, cities still provide important tools for reclaiming our lost public life. The aim of this essay is to approach industrial heritage, usually considered a conservation issue, from a different perspective, as a tool for individuation and socialization. In order to do this, we start by describing the effects of capitalism and globalization on public open spaces, and then link this to governments’ privatization policies for industrial heritage. We show how industrial landscapes could function as public spaces. Finally, we explain how, in the absence of other public open spaces, industrial landscapes could be used for public purposes to meet the social needs of humans, and could thus be instrumental in the proliferation of our rituals.

This article examines the aestheticization of the politics of exclusion in a suburban American community. The research for this study focuses on the relationships among landscapes, social identity, exclusion, and the aesthetic attitudes of residents of Bedford, New York. By being thoroughly aestheticized, class relations are mystified and reduced to questions of lifestyle, consumption patterns, taste, and visual pleasure. Landscapes become possessions that play an active role in the performance of elite social identities. As such, social distinction is achieved and maintained by preserving and enhancing the beauty of places such as Bedford. This aestheticizing of place is managed through highly restrictive zoning policies for residential land and by "protecting" hundreds of acres of undeveloped land as nature preserves. This article explores the role of romantic ideology, localism, antiurbanism, antimodemism, and a class-based aesthetic in the construction of "wild" nature in these preserves. We argue that, in places such as Bedford, the celebration of localism, environmental beauty, and preservation mask the interrelatedness of issues of aesthetics and class identity on the one hand and residential land shortages in the New York metropolitan region on the other. The seemingly innocent pleasure in the aesthetic appreciation of landscapes and the desire to protect nature can act as a subtle but highly effective mechanism of social exclusion and the reaffirmation of elite class identities.

Public monuments traditionally appear in high contrast to their landscapes, an effect that sets aesthetic, ideological and social distances. However, Manmale, counter-monuments, and counter-hegemonic monuments (eg the AIDS quilt, Rachael Whiteread’s House, Melbourne’s Another ViewWalking Trail, Tiananmen’s Goddess of Democracy, or Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial), challenge the norms of monuments in visuality, fixedness, and permanence, and suggest intricacies which mediate the interactivity of art, site and passers-by. In this paper, I consider three counter-hegemonic monuments in Vancouver, British Columbia – all installed in 1997/98 and all dealing with the issue of violence – sited within one neighbourhood. Via archival research, interviews, and extensive participant observations investigating how the monuments actually function in social memory rituals, I discovered that the characteristics of publicness in the landscapes that lay ‘beneath and before’ the monuments deeply affected their origins, designs, and current uses.

China, like many other nations, struggled in the twentieth century with defining an indigenous landscape design tradition. This was particularly true in addressing urban open space design after China implemented the Open Door Policy in the late 1970s, when Chinese garden design traditions became largely neglected. The objective of this study is to determine whether the traditional design approach could still effectively serve as modern design inspiration. Built upon a previous study by Wu (1999), our study is a reflective critique on modern Chinese urban public space design. We compare major types of traditional and modern Chinese urban open spaces. The percentage areas of five landscape variables that Wu proposed (planting, water, rock, architecture and pavement) were quantified using Photoshop and ArcGIS software. Although Wu (1999) compared only scholars' gardens (a traditional model) with modern parks (a modern model), we include imperial gardens (another traditional model) and urban plazas (another modern model). In addition, we supplemented Wu's plan analysis with perspective view analysis (photographs). Our results suggest more similarities between traditional and modern landscapes than previously suggested. This article concludes by suggesting that traditional models can be relevant to contemporary urban public space design in China.

While the age of physical environments is the central tenet of historic preservation, there is a lack of empirical evidence about how everyday people actually value, perceive, and experience age as an intrinsic part of an urban environment. In order to ameliorate this knowledge deficit, this study employs phenomenology to understand the lived experience of being in a “new” versus an “old” or “historic” urban residential environment. The new environment is the I’On new urbanist development in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and the old environment is the location of the United States’ first historic district in Charleston, South Carolina. These locations are approximately within five miles of each other. In both places, the physical characteristics of the built environment are remarkably similar in density, form, layout, and design, but the age is dramatically different. Through photo elicitation techniques and interviews, the results of this study reveal that residents of historic Charleston and I’On value their built environments in remarkably similar ways. Surprisingly, elements that evoke a strong sense of attachment tend to be landscape features, such as gates, fountains, trees, and gardens rather than buildings. The informants valued the “mystery” that they felt was part of the landscape and which consisted of layered elements such as fences, gates, and paths, such that these features (including buildings) had to be “discovered.” Lastly, the informants strongly valued landscapes that showed “people care” through regular maintenance. The essential difference in people’s experience and valuation of the new environment (I’On) and the old environment (historic Charleston) is in the older environment’s ability to instill creative fantasies in the minds of the informants based on a hypothetical past of their own creation. The informants in I’On did not share these kinds of meanings.

An entire category of urban space, albeit hardly recognized as such, is disappearing across North America. As retail logistics globalizes and big-box power centres replace enclosed shopping malls from the postwar era, a distinct form of social infrastructure vanishes as well. ‘Dead malls’ are now a staple of North American (sub)urban landscapes, and have provoked local activism in many places. But despite popular concern for the demise of mall space, critical urban scholarship has largely sidelined the phenomenon. Much of the disjuncture between popular outcry and academic silence relates to conceptions of ‘public’ space, and specifically the gap between formal ownership and everyday spatial practice. Spatial practice often exceeds the conceptions of designers and managers, transforming malls into community space. This is particularly true in declining inner suburbs, where poor and racialized communities depend more heavily on malls for social reproduction as well as recreation and consumption. In this article we investigate the revolution in logistics that has provoked the phenomenon of ‘dead malls’ and the creative activism emerging that aims to protect mall space as ‘community space’. Taking the case of the Morningside Mall in an old suburb of Toronto, we investigate the informal claims made on mall space through everyday spatial practice and the explicit claims for community space that arise when that space is threatened. We argue that many malls have effectively become community space, and activism to prevent its loss can be understood as a form of anti-globalization practice, even if it never employs that language.

This paper plots the recent changes in the uses of public space in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is argued that the economic and social changes in contemporary Vietnam have paved the way for a dramatic transformation in the ways in which streets, pavements and markets are experienced and imagined by the populace. The efflorescence of individual mobility, street-trading and public crowding around certain popular events has led to the emergence of a distinct public sphere, one which is not immune from state control and censure but which is a flagrant rebuttal of the state's appeal. The immediate struggles over space herald a new discursive arena for the contest over Vietnamese national imagery as represented in cultural heritage and public space, memorials and state-controlled events which the public are rapidly deserting. The paper concludes by suggesting that the everyday cultural practices that have created a bustling streetlife in urban Vietnam will inevitably provide the vitality and spectacle for the destabilisation of state control in a struggle for meanings in public space.

Men are at significantly greater risk than women to violent crime victimization in the US, especially in the public sphere. Despite this, their fears and vulnerabilities have received considerably less attention in recent social discourse than have women. Men's risk in, and fear of, public space is overshadowed by their apparent fearlessness in public space. This paper begins to address this apparent paradox using the conceptual lenses of masculinity and control. I explore fear and fearlessness among men as objects and subjects of masculinity. Stated fearlessness among men is counterbalanced by a chronic fear of violent crime victimization. Conditioned fearlessness combines with actual risk and chronic fear to shape men's experiences in the public sphere. I study the dynamics of men's fear using data gathered from a group of young men and women in Philadelphia. Gendered differences in fear and how environments are perceived and judged as to their relative safety are demonstrated and explored. Compared to women's fears and perceived geographical vulnerabilities, the men of this study demonstrate a persistent and chronic wariness of their environmental context that precedes any judgment of perceived safety. Violence and fear among both men and women in this study is further explained as a function of racism and economic marginalization.