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This paper presents a model of, and method for benchmarking, the publicness of public space—termed here as the Star Model. The model is intended to be of value for comparative purposes (i.e. measuring the publicness of one place vis-a`-vis another); as an analytic measure of publicness to be compared with more subjective interpretations of publicness; and as a departure point for deeper investigations of why particular places are more/less public than they could/should be. The paper is in four main parts. The first part discusses and then conceptualizes the nature of ‘public’ space. The second considers publicness as a multi-dimensional concept, identifying and discussing five meta dimensions—ownership; control; civility; physical configuration; and animation. The third explains the model and the integration of these dimensions into a pictorial representation of a place’s publicness. The final part discusses the model’s value and suggests avenues for further development and research.

The increasing involvement of the private sector in the design and management of urban public space has prompted some critical scholars to predict the ‘end of public space’. This study reassesses the implications of private sector involvement through a comparative analysis of British and Dutch urban spaces, based on a threefold critique of the existing literature on the privatization of public space. The analysis is governed by a new model of pseudo-public space that consists of four dimensions of ‘publicness’: ownership, management, accessibility and inclusiveness (OMAI). The findings suggest that, while there are significant differences between the British and the Dutch cases, neither context supports the notion of a possible ‘end of public space’ in any literal sense.

Privately owned public spaces are frequently criticized for diminishing the publicness of public space by restricting social interaction, constraining individual liberties, and excluding undesirable populations. This study empirically determines whether, as is commonly believed, privately owned public spaces are more controlled than publicly owned spaces. To frame our empirical work, we propose a conceptual model that identifies publicness as the interaction between the ownership, management, and uses/users of a space. We then examine the management dimension using an observation-based index to assess spatial management paradigms in publicly and privately owned spaces. We find that the use of the private sector to provide publicly accessible space leads to increased control over use, behavior, and access. Furthermore, while both publicly and privately owned public spaces tend equally to encourage public use and access, managers of privately owned spaces tend to employ more features that control behavior within those spaces. More specifically, spatial control in privately owned spaces is normally achieved through the use of surveillance and policing techniques as well as design measures that ‘code’ spaces as private. Important findings are presented for planners, policy makers, and others concerned with the future of publicly accessible spaces.

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.

Parallel to the recent rise in interest in public spaces, the proliferation of alluring, distinctive and exclusive public spaces in many post-industrial cities raises the question of how far these environments are truly ‘public’. This paper discusses the question of the ‘publicness’ of contemporary public spaces in Britain, where they have been placed at the top of the political agenda of the Labour Governments since the late- 1990s. Studying in depth the changing ‘publicness’ of the Grey’s Monument Area (GMA), a public space recently refurbished in the city centre of Newcastle upon Tyne, regarding the dimensions of ‘access’, ‘actor’ and ‘interest’, the paper seeks to show that, contrary to the wide recognition of diminishing ‘publicness’ of contemporary public spaces in urban design and planning literature, the recent refurbishment has in fact had both positive and negative impacts on the ‘publicness’ of the GMA. The paper concludes that contemporary public spaces may show different shades of ‘publicness’, in which degrees of ‘access’, ‘actor’ and ‘interest’ can vary widely, and seeks to underline the emerging trends and threats of: (i) the blurring distinction between public and private spaces, and (ii) image-led regeneration strategies dominating everyday society’s needs and civic functions of genuine ‘public’ spaces, and ultimately violating the ‘publicness’ of public realms in post-industrial cities.

During the last two decades the literature on public space has registered the emergence of alternative forms of pubic space provision that depart from the traditional model of direct state ownership and management. The picture that emerges is a complex one, not so much one of privatization, but instead one of complex redistribution of roles, rights and responsibilities in public space governance to a range of social actors beyond the state. This paper discusses an approach to understanding the forms of publicness implicit in alternative forms of public space governance. Issues of rights, access, accountability and control could be examined in public space governance arrangements based on contracts, legal agreements and performance management mechanisms involving private and voluntary entities instead of the traditional public sector processes of policy delivery and accountability. The paper proposes a framework for investigating how ‘publicness’ is constructed and maintained through these arrangements.

The proliferation of alluring, distinctive and exclusive public spaces in many postindustrial cities raises the question of how far these environments are truly "public." Focusing on this question, this article explores the changing "publicness" of a recently redeveloped space in the city center of Newcastle upon Tyne, Britain, in relation to the dimensions of access, actor and interest. It further seeks to underline two emerging trends: the blurring of distinction between public and private spaces in the public realms of postindustrial cities; and the threat posed by image-led regeneration strategies to the everyday needs of and the civic functioning of genuine public spaces.

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.

How can the connection between public space and sense of community be evaluated? This paper asserts that, as a starting point, the measurement of the physical dimension of public space must be accomplished. Conceptually, the translation between public space and building sense of community, here defined as "the sense of belongingness, fellowship, 'we-ness,' identity, etc., experienced in the context of a [geographically based] collective" (Buckner, 1988:773),1 is seen as consisting of three interrelated dimensions. This paper describes the first dimension, the physical characteristics of public space, by offering a methodology for measuring public space differentials at the neighborhood level. Analysis of public space will thus be facilitated by a better characterization of the public domain: how does one neighborhood have "more" public space than another, constituting what some might view as a superior public realm? The method offered in this paper utilizes a particular vocabulary designed to measure aspects of the public realm which are seen, theoretically, as contributing to increased resident interaction and sense of community. The method builds on the work of Owens (1993) and Southworth and Owens (1993) to provide a practical measure of the "public realm." The goal is to facilitate the discussion of the use, meaning, and role of public space by delineating, in pragmatic terms, the geographic dimension of public life and how it varies from one neighborhood to the next. The basis of this differentiation are the public space design components embedded in new urbanist theory.

Analyzing the spatial genealogy of the student riots in May 1960 in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, this article investigates the relation between space and identity politics. Besides the social practices it contains, the “publicness” of space is also marked by the meanings and values attributed to the space by various social actors. The political participation of the social groups in public sphere becomes possible through spatial appropriation, which does not only mean the practical occupation of space but also the appropriation of the image of the (public) space. In the context of Ankara, the student riots transform Kizilay Square, which had been the prestigious center of a wealthy neighborhood, into a site of contesting spatial imageries and social identities.

Privatized public space reflects a current moment in the ongoing negotiation of the relationship between the state and the market that is a central concern of liberalism. The configuration of this relationship has consequences for the nature of citizenship and democracy in theory and practice. Emblematic of a shift to the privatization of urban public space, California Plaza provides a case by which to examine the multiscalar interests and machinations of the neoliberal state in practice. Exploring the meanings of public and private that are produced by a corporate plaza enables an assessment of how privatized public space helps constitute contemporary citizenship. Institutional and legal frameworks serve as a foundation for the relative publicness of the corporate plaza. Techniques of exclusion and control through design features and security measures exclude errant bodies and regulate the seamlessness of the desired public. At the same time, counter practices indicate the emergence of spaces and subjects that destabilize presumed notions of public and private.

Based primarily on an observational study, this paper addresses privately owned and managed public space at the Tjuvholmen waterfront development in Oslo. To date, no other research has been published internationally on external private-public space in a Nordic context. The four factors or processes dealt with are planning and development, design, management and, in particular, use. The main finding is that Tjuvholmen’s public spaces are characterized by ‘tightness’ and reduced publicness. As such, they share key characteristics with private-public spaces described in the literature from the US and the UK, while in some other respects they also deviate from these.

This paper introduces ‘fourth places’ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside ‘third places’. Through extensive empirical fieldwork on where and how social interaction among strangers occurs in the public and semi-public spaces of a contemporary masterplanned neighbourhood, this paper reveals that ‘fourth places’ are closely related to ‘third places’ in terms of social and behavioural characteristics, involving a radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity and social comfort. However, the activities, users, locations and spatial conditions that support them are very different. They are characterized by ‘in-betweenness’ in terms of spaces, activities, time and management, as well as a great sense of publicness. This paper will demonstrate that the latter conditions are effective in breaking the ‘placelessness’ and ‘fortress’ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make ‘fourth places’ sociologically more open in order to bring strangers together. The recognition of these findings problematizes well-established urban design theories and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space. Ultimately, the findings also bring optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into how to design more lively and inclusive public spaces.

Battles over public space involve conflicts of values that express themselves in planning policies as well as the built environment. However, the dominant conceptions of public space in planning practice and the academic literature support a limited range of those values. I argue that conceptions based on openness and accessibility play into a particular construction of public life that emphasises casual interactions and downplays purposive, political ones. Following a conceptual analysis of the public–private distinction, the paper offers a novel, threefold account of public space; argues that democracy requires a particular kind of publicness not recognised by the commonly accepted definition; and deploys a simple content analysis to highlight the conceptual emphases and absences in planning policy in the political heart of London. I argue that some advocates of public space are unwittingly supporting restrictive planning and design practices that limit important kinds of democratic expression.

The ground floors of buildings are a key element of the urban experience, yet the dynamics that shape frontages are largely unknown. This article delves into the forces and patterns behind the transforming relationship between architecture and public space in Western urban cores over the past century. After defining a methodology for structurally measuring the interactivity of ground floor frontages over time, the study focuses on two case study urban cores of Detroit, Michigan and The Hague, Netherlands. Through a combination of narra- tive historiography, detailed mapping and statistical studies a set of recommendations is generated to help urban designers and planners better understand and counter frontage decline. The two seemingly disparate cities are demonstrated to have undergone remarkably similar patterns of frontage interactivity erosion, with outcomes diverging as a result of an often reinforcing set of forces. Only upon understanding frontages as social, economic, cultural, political and technological constructs with physical, functional and connotative effects on public space will the profession be able to effectively steer the future of the architecture of public life.

This study attempts to comprehensively and objectively measure subjective qualities of the urban street environment. Using ratings from an expert panel, it was possible to measure five urban design qualities in terms of physical characteristics of streets and their edges: imageability, enclosure, human scale, transparency and complexity. The operational definitions do not always comport with the qualitative definitions, and provide new insights into the nature of these urban design qualities. The immediate purpose of this study is to arm researchers with operational definitions they can use to measure the street environment and test for significant associations with walking behaviour. A validation study is currently underway in New York City. Depending on the outcome of this and other follow-up research, the ultimate purpose would be to inform urban design practice.

The promotion of quality of life is becoming ever more important in a scenario of regional, national and even international competition among cities, triggered by globalization. Public sites, and green spaces in particular, which are available in varying extent in all urban areas, can bring important benefits to urban vitality and, as a consequence, to quality of life. However, cities are intricate entities and measuring their success in converting the potential for public green space usage into increased quality of life is a difficult task. In order to contribute to the objective of assessing the potential for public green space use, and its consequences on urban vitality, we applied the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to assess a total of 174 European cities. The results detect the best performing cities, and for the cities considered inefficient, a set of benchmarks is identified, whose best practices can be copied to support efforts of performance improvement.

By measuring twenty streetscape features and numerous other variables for 588 blocks in New York City, we were able to identify variables that explain pedestrian traffic volumes. We found significant positive correlations between three out of twenty streetscape features with pedestrian counts after controlling for density and other built environmental variables. The significant streetscape features are the proportion of windows on the street, the proportion of active street frontage, and the number of pieces of street furniture. This study provides guidance for streetscape projects that aim to create walkable streets and pedestrian-friendly environments.

In the prevailing literature on contemporary public spaces, two contested sets of arguments become apparent: one depicts the ‘end of public space’, while the other challenges with this ‘end of public space’ discourse. Following the debates, one can ask the question of whether there has been any ideally ‘public’ or ‘inclusive’ public space ever in cities, or the inclusivity (thereby ‘publicness’) of public spaces can or may change in time based on a variety of factors. This research, addressing these questions, contributes to this ongoing discussion, first by providing a model of inclusivity for the qualitative assessment of public spaces, and second by using this model to provide an empirical analysis on the largest urban park in the historic city centre of Ankara, namely Gençlik Park (GP). After in-depth analysis of the changing inclusivity of GP from its heydays to nowadays regarding four dimensions of ‘access’, in relation with its design, manage- ment, control and use processes, as well as the contextual aspect of the inclusivity–exclusivity continuum of public–private spaces, it concludes that the ‘inclusive’ nature of public spaces might change and evolve depending on time dimension, as well as the local and global contexts within which the public space is set and bounded. Although the causes and issues regarding the inclusivity capacity of public spaces are complex – that is, ‘multiple’, ‘site-specific’ and ‘interrelated’, the continuous presence of democratic and egalitarian procedural accessibility, which embraces all segments of the public, which gives them the opportunity to raise their voices and opinions about the public spaces, and which deliberation is used as the mechanism to endure a consensual rather than authoritarian style of interaction is a requirement for generating and maintaining inclusive public spaces.

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.