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For much of the last quarter of the 20th century debates on the state of public spaces in the UK concentrated on issues of neglect and abandonment. New public spaces, increasingly developed by private developers were of equal concern, seen simultaneously as creating privatized, socially exclusive enclaves and characterless ‘anywhere’ regeneration schemes, filled with the same retail outlets, coffee shops and anonymous pieces of public art. This paper addresses this latter concern of homogenization, examining the dynamics behind it and exploring whether local diversity can thrive in the face of such pressure. The paper further reports on a research project that was conducted on a series of prominent public spaces in North East England. The results of this study suggest that the spaces studied are far from passive recipients of global processes. Not only does the quality and quantity of public space often seem to have improved in the recent past, but that long standing locally significant traditions are thriving and new ones are being developed. So, while homogenization in retailing may be significant and harmful to some traditional shopping streets, it is not necessarily damaging the social and cultural lives of the public spaces in our towns and cities to the degree that may be expected.

A significant body of research has addressed whether fixed internet use increases, decreases or supplements the ways in which people engage in residential and workplace settings, but few studies have addressed how wireless internet use in public and semi-public spaces influences social life. Ubiquitous wi-fi adds a new dimension to the debate over how the internet may influence the structure of community.Will wireless internet use facilitate greater engagement with co-located others or encourage a form of 'public privatism'? This article reports the findings of an exploratory ethnographic study of how wi-fi was used and influenced social interactions in four different settings: paid and free wi-fi cafes in Boston, MA and Seattle,WA.This study found contrasting uses for wireless internet and competing implications for community.Two types of practices, typified in the behaviors of 'true mobiles' and 'placemakers', offer divergent futures for how wireless internet use may influence social relationships.

There is growing awareness among many city councils that their downtowns or central business districts have become bland or devoid of sufficient cultural activity to attract the highly skilled, creative workforce that is seen as a prerequisite for competitive success. This paper examines a recent set of policy initiatives to have emerged from the City of Sydney Council that has explicitly sought to mitigate the negative design outcomes of earlier phases of modernist office development through the promotion of a ‘finer grain’ urbanism, based around support for small shops and services, civic spaces oriented towards pedestrians and the reinvigoration of intra-block laneways enlivened by small bars and cafes. The noted Danish urban designer Jan Gehl was an important agent in the development of these strategies, along with the success of similar policies in Melbourne, illustrating the significance of globally operative design professionals and inter-city learning. However, these policies have not gone uncontested, and the paper examines the political context that surrounds their implementation in central Sydney.

People reside in homes; however, they live in neighbourhoods comprised of parks, sidewalks, restaurants, shops and other everyday places. Whether current or potential neighbourhood residents feel at home in these places remains an under theorised aspect of neighbourhood change. Rather than housing policy or real estate development, this essay explores public space as a mechanism of neighbourhood change. Drawing from ethnographic research in the Latino barrios of North Denver, It deconstructs the history of one small yet vital public space—la Raza Park. During the 1970s, this park, its pool and the many events it grounded, built community cohesion and fostered cultural identity. In 1981, city authorities went so far as to deploy a SWAT team to la Raza Park to enforce a permit violation. The following summer, they demolished its pool. North Denver is now gentrifying rapidly. This essay stitches these disparate-seeming events into a story of neighbourhood change.

This study introduces theory about how deficits in social support motivate consumers to replace lost social resources by forming relationships with customers and employees in commercial “third places.” The authors demonstrate sup- port for a multiple-indicator, multiple-cause model that illustrates how six common events that destroy or erode a person’s social support can cause the person to obtain emotional support and companionship in a third place. The model supports the linkage between commercial social sup- port and a consumer’s sense of attachment to a third place that harbors his or her social support network. The authors also propose and test hypotheses that reveal that consumers obtain social support in a third place to the extent to which they lost it outside the place. In essence, third-place patrons match their lost support to their commercial support, thus remedying negative symptoms associated with isolation. The article concludes with a discussion of managerial implications and limitations.

Recent studies of public space in US central cities tend to focus either on (1) market-driven placemaking (privatized parks, hipster shops) in gentrifying enclaves or (2) street cultures (community gardens, hip-hop) in low-income neighborhoods. Neither focus adequately frames the ability of African Americans to shape public space as the white middle class returns to central cities. In this case study of downtown Detroit, I theorize a dialectic: the history of clashes between racial capitalism and social movements in public space reappears in the contradictory design of market-driven placemaking, which suppresses and displays cultures of resistance. White business and real-estate interests showcase downtown spaces to counter news of disinvestment and suffering in low-income neighborhoods. The legal and political legacies of civil rights and black power struggles–– combined with consumer demand (black culture sells)––force them to involve black entrepreneurs, professionals and artists in placemaking. This placemaking subordinates the black urban poor, even as it incorporates their street cultures. The contradictions of placemaking shape possibilities for resistance, as shown in mundane subversions and street protests that use the downtown spotlight to call for social justice citywide. This analysis contributes to research on public space at a time when new movements are challenging public order in the financial core of US cities.

Walking is important for the health of elderly people. Previous studies have found a relationship between neighbourhood characteristics, physical activity and related health aspects. The multivariate linear regression model presented here describes the relationships between the perceived attractiveness of streets for walking along and (physical) street characteristics. Two hundred and eighty-eight independently living elderly people (between 55 and 80 years old) participated in the study. Street characteristics were assessed along homogeneous street subsections defined as ‘links’. Positively related to perceived attractiveness of links were the following street characteristics: slopes and/or stairs, zebra crossings, trees along the route, front gardens, bus and tram stops, shops, business buildings, catering establishments, passing through parks or the city centre, and traffic volume. Litter on the street, high-rise buildings, and neighbourhood density of dwellings were negatively related to perceived link attractiveness. Overall, the results suggest that three main aspects affect perceived attractiveness of streets for walking, namely tidiness of the street, its scenic value and the presence of activity or other people along the street. The results are discussed within the context of these three aspects.

What we have are closed, self-absorbed buildings. What we would like to have is open, versatile, interesting and safe cities. The challenge is how to incorporate large buildings in cities where people have the same small stature and slow pace they had hundreds of years ago. There is now a considerable confusion in the gap between large and small scales and between ‘quick’ and ‘slow’ architecture. Ground floor facades provide an important link between these scales and between buildings and people. For public space and buildings to be treated as a whole, the ground floor facades must have a special and welcoming design. This good, close encounter architecture is vital for good cities.

An actor-centered approach to the gendering of urban spaces demonstrates how individuals respond to competing ideologies in determining the rules that surround women’s presence in urban, Muslim spaces. This article examines how women in the Ville Nouvelle of Fes, Morocco draw on local conceptualizations of hospitality, kinship, and shame as they debate the gendering of four urban areas: the street, the café, a cosmopolitan exercise club, and cyber space. Women’s tactics for occupying social space indicate the resilience of local culture in the face of ideologies that attempt to posit a specific vision of women in the Moroccan nation state.

In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members’ situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a programme of ethnographic research into the regenerated setting of Cardiff Bay. The article demonstrates that these data yield sociological insight into social actors’ interpretive and interactional reasoning in relation to the negotiation, navigation and comprehension of space and place. Through this work the patterned signatures of the urban interactional order can be identified. Furthermore, we illustrate the forms of emic rationality associated with the everyday and ubiquitous constitution of urban space as a meaningful, and thence cultural, milieu. It is our claim that an appreciation of these urban forms of reasoning is important in the ethnographic, sociological and geographical analysis of space and place.