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Research on urban walkability does not always make a clear distinction between design features supporting walkability and those leading to a sense of urban liveliness. Walkability, for this article’s purposes, entails the oppor- tunity for continuous movement across some distance and therefore engages both the local and global street networks. Urban liveliness, by contrast, may exist in isolated pockets that provide limited support for physical activity. This case study of a large, urban smart growth development in Atlanta, Georgia, provides an example of a new development with characteristics that suggest a high degree of walkability. However, observational data show pedestrians are clumped on relatively few street segments rather than distributed throughout the site, indicating it is unlikely that the site is hosting much walking between the development and its surrounds. This descriptive case study is intended to contribute to more explicit theory of how environmental design contributes to walking.

There is a growing body of evidence that indicates that for creating civic consciousness and sustaining urban identity and memory people need civic interaction and social reconciliation, which are promoted by public open spaces. However, in an era of globalisation, public open spaces are mostly discussed in relation to privatisation, disappearance, obsolescence and loss of place identity, leading to urban decay problems in many city centres. The aim of this study is to propose a research method for monitoring changes in place identity in public open spaces to set the right objectives and policies in the design process of these spaces for keeping them alive and for sustaining public life. In this context, a case study was conducted in Bursa’s Republic Square in Turkey, using different interpretive historical, quantitative and qualitative strategies. The main findings of the case study are that there has been a gradual decline in sense of place in recent years, although the architectural and artistic elements of the area and the name of the place are still effective in defining the identity of the area.

The article explores relationships among urban form, human activities and socio-economic-cultural features in Danwei compound. With Jingmian compound, a typical Danwei compound in Beijing, as a case study, the researcher studies urban form in open spaces from a socio-economic-cultural perspective. In addition, residents' activities are discussed. The research shows that open space form reflects features and transitions of Chinese society from sociological and economic perspectives. This article also proves the validity of thorough micro space form investigation.

This paper presents a morphological study of 100 main street networks from urban areas around the world. An expansion in the scale of main street networks was revealed using a unique heuristic visual method for identifying and measuring the lengths of main street segments from each of the study areas. Case studies were selected and grouped according to corresponding urban design paradigms, ranging from antiquity to present day. This research shows that the average lengths of main street segments from networks of historic (i.e. ancient, medieval, renaissance, baroque and industrial) and informal case studies are much smaller relative to those from networks of more contemporary case studies (i.e. Garden City, Radiant City and New Urbanism). This study provides empirical evidence in support of prior, observational claims suggesting a consistent pattern in the smaller scale of main street networks from traditional urban areas, termed the ‘400-metre rule’. Additionally, it makes the case for further empirical research into similarly recursive spatial patterns within other elements of urban form (i.e. plots, blocks, etc.) that, if discovered, could aid in future urban design efforts to help provide the framework for more ‘human-scale’ urban environments.

The research examines the shift from flood-resistant policies and plans to flood resilience. We use a case study of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina to illustrate this unfolding process and the emergence of a "living with water" approach to green infrastructure. The article highlights the challenges of this shifting policy landscape through the case of the Lafitte Greenway, a green infrastructure project that transformed a three-mile corridor of underutilized public land into a linear park running through flood-prone neighborhoods. Through the experience of creating this greenway, planners in New Orleans learned valuable lessons about US disaster rebuilding policies and how to implement green infrastructure in urban neighborhoods.

In this article, we aim to develop a conceptual framework from a community perspective to examine the noneconomic effects of ethnic entrepreneurship, paying close attention to the linkage between entrepreneurship and community building. We base our analysis on ethnographic data from our comparative case studies of the Chinese and Korean enclave economies in Los Angeles. We argue that it is the social embeddedness of entrepreneurship, rather than individual entrepreneurs per se, that creates a unique social environment conducive to upward social mobility. This study suggests that ethnic entrepreneurship plays a pivotal role in immigrant adaptation beyond observable eco- nomic gains. Policy implications are discussed.

The paper begins by reviewing the discourses of sustainable development and children's rights, before mapping-out their significance to play and playgrounds. The paper then draws on fieldwork conducted in two case study communities in Wales to investigate the spatial and social places of play. The paper concludes by questioning the sustainability of playgrounds and by urging reconsideration of the role of playgrounds in the built environment.

Although informality is typically associated with developing countries, this article argues that informal activities are an integral part of U.S. cities and should be addressed in planning curricula. It focuses on planning education and suggests a possible course, which includes a seminar covering academic literature on informality in both developing and developed countries, and fieldwork-based, case study research by students. It also suggests that the course can be an important avenue for students to understand inequality and poverty and an excellent method for preparing them to think about institutions and regulations in complex and sophisticated ways.

The aim of this paper is to study how women’s privacy needs are met through the physical form of public spaces in both old and new urban designs, using as a case study the city of Nablus, Palestine, which has been significantly influenced by the culture of gender separation. The findings will help develop a better understanding of the relationship between women’s privacy and the physical form of public spaces and will enhance the development of public spaces that women can use comfortably and actively to participate in the urban life. An environmental approach based on the concept of behavioural setting was used to examine women’s privacy issues in the chosen public spaces. Direct observations and questionnaires were used in the fieldwork, in addition to interviews with women and relevant people who influence the women’s privacy. Maps (GIS), sketches and SPSS techniques were used to interpret the data.

This paper draws upon a model of the publicness of publicly owned and managed spaces by means of fuzzy logic modelling. The value of this approach is that it is practical in simplifying and emphasizing both the interdependent nature of the concept of publicness and its complexity. The proposed model aims to effectively evaluate and compare the publicness of public space. The paper highlights different methodologies in understanding this publicness by considering various conceptual approaches at the heart of the debate about public space. In doing so, the paper is organized into four main parts. The first part considers the complex and fuzzy nature of the concept. The second presents the proposed model of publicness based on management, access and user dimensions by analyzing the leading discourse and previous models of publicness. The third part draws upon research methodology and fuzzy logic modelling, and the fourth part explains the findings of the case study in Istanbul.

City beaches are produced by spreading sand, deckchairs and umbrellas onto industrial brownfields, parking lots, rights-of-way or other under-utilized open spaces. Where major reinvestment projects are lacking, these informal developments offer great amenity. This approach to placemaking is post-Fordist. It is highly flexible, even mobile. It involves complex, temporary networks of people and resources. It focuses on ‘soft’ content—services, programmes, themes, atmosphere—rather than inflexible built form. This enables rapid innovation. Through four case studies, the paper explores the roles and relationships among diverse actors—city mayors, entrepreneurs, property developers, grass-roots organizations, think-tanks and planners—in the production of city beaches, and identifies what new policies, tools and management approaches they require.

Models of urban planning after authoritarian modernism raise the question of democratic control over the city and the possibility of imagining as a collective act. The paper examines systemic hindrances to free-thinking, and thus free-acting, embedded in urban communities. Through the case study of recent work by the art collective Department of Play, it illustrates the rationale for engaging public imagination specifically via play as world-building; and it posits the potential implications and limits of such activity as an intervention into city planning processes. Interested in liminal spaces between territory, language and social affiliation, the collective advances an agenda of productive dissent in public space through play and performance. Department of Play begins from the position that we can only plan that which we imagine, and thus exists as an effort to free the public imagination from modes of thinking dictated by the capitalist context.

The article concentrates on emerging relationships between physical characteristics of urban open spaces and their uses. It draws on a combination of behaviour mapping and geographic information system (GIS) techniques - as applied to urban squares and parks in two European cities, Edinburgh (UK) and Ljubljana (Slovenia) - to reveal common patterns of behaviour that appear to be correlated with particular layouts and details. It shows actual dimensions of effective environments for one use or more of them and shows how design guidance can be arrived at, based on the particulars of the case study sites and cities. In addition, the value of this article is in exploring GIS, a tool that is currently irreplaceable in spatial analysis and planning processes for urban areas, as a detailed analytical and visualisation tool that helps to describe inner structure of places revealed by behaviour patterns.

This article uses the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte as a case-study to show that beyond the centralized planning model that prevailed in the 1970s, a new model of urban intervention has developed, based on the participatory budget and focused on the most vulnerable portion of the Brazilian urban population: the favela dwellers. While larger Brazilian cities such as Sa ̃o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have a deeper history of intervention in the favelas, this article focuses on Belo Horizonte as the polar opposite to the well-known model of Curitiba. If we agree that any real sustainable urbanism should be built upon a participatory community, the favela’s interventions carried on in Belo Horizonte might rise to the occasion as a promising alternative.

Current projects to upgrade public spaces in Western cities seek to produce secured space by improving safety and decrease feelings of fear, and to produce themed space by promoting urban entertainment or fantasy. This study examines how ‘fear’ and ‘fantasy’ influence urban design and management of two public spaces in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It traces social antecedents for the development of secured and themed public space, such as a growing differentiation of urban lifestyles, and proposes a new technique for analysing public spaces. The case studies differ in design and management: one is secured, the other themed. However, each secured space contains an element of ‘fantasy’, and each themed space an element of ‘fear’.

Existing urban open space typologies within dense urban fabrics cannot meet society’s open space requirements in developing countries’ metropolitan cities, such as Istanbul. Because of high building densities, it is a challenging task to create new open spaces within urban cores. Developing new tools that work with the existing built environment is crucial to reveal ‘opportunity spaces’ that can act as breathing points within dense urban fabrics. In this research, a new model is developed to evaluate the 3D spatial enclosure of open spaces using basic geometrical properties and geographic information system (GIS) tools. As a case study, Istanbul’s changing spatial organization is analyzed using this model.

Urban plazas have proliferated in American downtowns during the last decade. This paper examines the private production of open space as a form of privatisation of a public amenity. Using three case studies of plazas built by private capital in downtown Los Angeles, the study examines their development process, design and physical layout, management, control and social uses. It is found that the spaces display characteristics drastically different from those of traditional public places. Certain design cues in combination with stringent control practices are used in these settings to promote the purposes and goals of private enterprise. Characteristics such as introversion, enclosure, protection, escapism, commercialism, social filtering and exclusivity are seen as resulting in environments that are congruent with the private interests but not always beneficial to the general public.

The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching investigation of the role of media in the construction of complex public spaces and diverse public cultures.

Through a case study based in Bristol, this article explores how the law of place' has transformed multiple heterogeneous city centre spaces into a single homogeneous and commodified privately owned retail site. Drawing on de Certeau, Lefebvre, and humanistic geographers including Tuan, the article explores how law facilitates spatial and temporal enclosure through conventional understandings of private property, relying on techniques of masterplanning, compulsory purchase, and stopping up highways. It suggests that the law of place draws on binary spatial and conceptual distinctions to apparently separate places from spaces, applying different legal rules either side of an often invisible boundary line. The article questions this legally facilitated spatial and conceptual enclosure, particularly as it restricts spatial practices within the public realm. It concludes by rejecting an urban 'right to roam' as insufficiently transformative, calling for a broader interpretation of Lefebvre 's 'right to the

The general aim of this paper is to demonstrate the significance of intentional soundscape design in urban squares by investigating people’s general perceptions of urban soundscape and sound preferences, and the effects of demographic factors. An intensive questionnaire survey was carried out in two urban squares in Sheffield. Sound identification and classification were both considered. The results show that natural sounds as a group were generally preferred to urban sounds; the preferences of soundscape elements influenced people’s choice of using an urban square; and in terms of sound preference, the differences amongst age groups were rather significant, whereas between males and females only slight differences were found. Finally, some suggestions on soundscape design in urban squares are given.