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Art festivals are a feature of many urban districts undergoing gentrification; they help to catalyze change by drawing a set of consumers with particular cultural interests. This article examines whether the arts produce racial exclusions by examining long-term Black and White residents’ participation in and perceptions of the monthly Last Thursday Art Walks in Portland’s gentrifying Alberta Arts District. We use surveys to measure arts participation and follow-up, in-depth interviews to understand whether long-time residents feel excluded by the arts, and if race is a factor. We find that Black residents participate less in Last Thursdays than White residents, and they often feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. We conclude that the arts-anchored symbolic economy results in racial exclusions that have little to do with differences in arts appreciation, but much to do with perceptions of people associated with the arts, and with residents’ abilities to use the arts to identify with neighborhood changes.

Visiting urban parks regularly can provide significant physical and mental health benefits for children and teenagers, but these benefits are tempered by park quality, amenities, maintenance, and safety. Therefore, planning and public health scholars have developed instruments to measure park quality, but most of these tools require costly and time consuming field surveys and only a handful focus specifically on youth. We rectify these issues by developing the QUality INdex of Parks for Youth (QUINPY) based on a robust literature review of studies on young people’s park visitation habits and an extensive validation process by academic and professional experts. Importantly, the QUINPY relies on publicly available geospatial data to measure park quality. We then successfully pilot test the QUINPY in Denver and New York City. We believe that park agencies, planning consultants, researchers, and nonprofits aiming to assess park quality will find this tool useful. The QUINPY is particularly promising given the increasing amount of publicly available geospatial data and other recent advancements in geospatial science.

The amount of noise in urban settings is steadily on the rise, creating a potential health hazard and causing a general nuisance. In major European cities, noise levels are so high that the majority of urban parks can no longer truly serve as recreational environments, a problem the World Health Organization and the European Union are attempting to address. This study explores various strategies that promote the sustainable development of urban soundscapes at locations meant for rest, recreation, and social interaction. Further, we look at how people are affected by the combined effects of traffic and nature sounds in parks and other outdoor settings. To this end, we adopted a new track — the use of interdisciplinary methodology — that brings together architectural analysis, artistic experiments, and psychoacoustic methodology to evaluate the aesthetic, emotional, perceptual, and spatial effects of noise on subjects spending time in public open-air spaces. We conducted a large-scale case study at a city park to explore whether subjects were affected by purposely distributed sounds and, if so, how. The working hypothesis was that it is possible to cancel out or mute traffic noise by affecting individuals' aural perceptions using a process known as informational masking. Our long-term objective is to create a scientific foundation for action plans, both preemptive and troubleshooting, targeting noise reduction in parks and similar public spaces that are meant to provide a relaxing environment.

The goal of this article is two-fold: to introduce the concept of augmented deliberation and to demonstrate its implementation in a pilot project.We look specifically at a project called Hub2. This community engagement project employed the online virtual world Second Life to augment community deliberation in the planning of a neighborhood park in Boston, Massachusetts. The local community was invited to gather in a physical space and a virtual space simultaneously, and a physical moderator and virtual designer orchestrated deliberation.This project demonstrates the design values central to augmented deliberation: (1) it is a multimedia group communication process which balances the specific affordances of digital technologies with the established qualities of face-to-face group deliberation; (2) it emphasizes the power of experience; and (3) it promotes sustainability and reproducibility through digital tracking. Augmented deliberation, when properly designed, provides a powerful mechanism to enable productive and meaningful public deliberation. The article concludes with directions for further research.

Over recent decades, cities have been radically transformed by information and communication technologies (ICTs) that modify people’s daily lives by reorganising mobility, infrastructure sys- tems and physical spaces. However, in addition to the role that technology plays in the develop- ment of the infrastructure in our cities, it is also being used ‘as a means of control’. This view of technology as a disciplinary tool that restructures space, time and the relations among activities has been promoted by scholars who have shown that technology is also a means of saturating and sustaining contemporary capitalist societies and deepening inequalities. However, the situa- tion is far more complex than that. Technology is not only used top-down but also bottom-up, with individuals using technological devices to share and enhance their visibility in space. This bidirectional paradigm – of vertical surveillance and horizontal sharing – contributes to a sense of ‘being exposed’ in public space that normalises practices of sharing personal data by individuals and thus results in diminished privacy. This argument is supported by an experiment conducted on smartphone users that includes personal interviews and the use of a smartphone Android application that combines online tracking with experience sampling. The findings show a conver- gence between the online and offline worlds (a ‘public’ situation in the offline world is also consid- ered as such in the online world), which is a condition that contributes to the normalisation of ‘asymmetrical visibility’. Based on these results, the paper ends with a discussion of the contem- porary meaning of public space.

By studying the mathematical properties of metrics, we identify three fundamental characteristics of distance, which are optimality, detour and break. In this paper, we explore the implications of these properties for transport planning, urbanism and spatial planning. We state that distances contain the idea of optimum and that any distance is associated to a search for optimisation. Pedestrian movements obey this principle and sometimes depart from designed routes. Local suboptimality conveyed by public transport maps has to be corrected by interventions on public space to relieve the load on central parts of networks. The second principle we state is that detour in distances is most often a means to optimise movement. Fast transport systems generate most of the detour observed in geographical spaces at regional scale. This is why detour has to be taken into account in regional transport policies. The third statement is that breaks in movement contribute to optimising distances. Benches, cafe´s, pieces of art, railway stations are examples of the urban break. These facilities of break represent an urban paradox: they organise the possibility of a break, of a waste of time in a trip, and they also contribute to optimising distances in a wider network. In that sense, break should be considered as a relevant principle for the design of urban space in order to support a pedestrian-oriented urban form.

All UNESCO urban World Heritage sites are strictly regulated. In Antigua, Guatemala, this includes building façades and streets, as well as the use of public places. Homeowners and building owners, however, challenge regulations by using unapproved paints, signs, and building materials. Residents modify building façades to accommodate cars and open walls to effectively blend home-based businesses with the street. At the same time, street vendors contest regulated public spaces by behaving inappropriately by selling goods on public streets rather than designated marketplaces. Rather than conceive of property owners and vendors behavior as outside and in contrast to the building and street vending regulations, I reframe their actions within what I am calling urban spatial permissiveness, a concept I derive from Roy’s (2004) theory of the unmapping—flexible regulation—of urban space. Antigua offers an ethnographic setting that shows how regulations are not always rigidly enforced but are negotiated to deal with everyday contingencies that relate to residents’ and vendors’ rights to the city (Harvey 2008). By way of conclusion I consider Foucault’s concept of governmentality as a negotiated process, in order to argue that relationships between building regulations and public space usage reveal the limits of legality and strict enforcement policies.

In recent years, local activists in the Global North and South have been organizing to improve degraded and abandoned spaces in marginalized neighborhoods by creating parks, playgrounds, urban farms, or community gardens. This paper integrates existing knowledge on urban place attachment and sense of community with scholarship on environmental justice in order to understand the role of place attachment in environmental mobilization in distressed neighborhoods across political systems and urbanization contexts. It examines the different forms of connections that activists develop and express toward neighborhoods with long-time substandard environmental conditions and how their experience of the neighborhood shapes their engagement in environmental revitalization projects. This comparison of three neighborhoods in Barcelona, Boston, and Havana shows that activists in all three places intend for their environmental endeavors to express grief at the loss of community, fears of erasure, and emotional connection and feelings of responsibility to place. To address environmental trauma, they aim to construct nurturing, soothing, “safe havens,” recreate rootedness, and remake place for residents.

To date, research into the subjective aspects of high density has focused mainly on the negative consequences of overcrowding. This study, in contrast, outlines some of the positive aspects of high density in neighborhoods, exploring the physical-spatial environment of two neighborhoods in the city of Haifa, Israel. It was found that while the relatively high residential density was similar in both neighborhoods (40 housing units per acre), this was more positively evaluated in one neighborhood as compared to the other. This can be attributed to some specific environmental and planning features. In particular, where physical planning enabled the potential advantages of high density to be realized, this was positively perceived and evaluated by local residents. Such advantages mainly comprised accessibility to a variety of services, more frequent public transportation, and access to open spaces within walking distance. Particularly advantageous were the increased opportunities for social gathering. At the same time, however, high density did not foster social relationships at the neighborhood level. The study further identified the gender and age groups that benefited most from the high density. Thus, women evaluated high density more positively than men. Young families with children and senior citizens (over 65) were also more likely to benefit, and to evaluate the high density environment more positively than other social groups.

We explore whether there is evidence of property rights among the homeless, and if so, how these rights are governed. By conducting interviews with 52 homeless people in Cape Town, we show that although the homeless are able to derive some value from assets, and can exclude other members of their community, these rights are precarious and dependent upon state agents not seizing the ‘property’ and overriding the community’s rules of the game. We demonstrate the intersectionality of claims with respect to the same physical property from the varying perspectives of the claimants involved and how this differs depending on the property. Homeless people rely on a community logic to develop rules of the game which results in the appearance of a market logic. In the absence of formal institutions effectively operating in their spaces, they have constituted social norms which provide some semblance of property rights respected intra-group.

Focusing on imaginaries of the ideal city is an important method to illustrate the power of ideas, imagination, representations, and even visions, and how these dimensions influence the way in which cities are organized and lived. In this article, we argue that one current and important city imaginary in a Swedish context is the gender-equal city. In this imaginary, the gender-equal city becomes a symbol for the open, tolerant, bustling, safe city, a city aiming to attract the middle and creative classes. However, at the same time, the imaginary of the ideal, gender-equal city is highly ambiguous. The ambiguity will be discussed throughout the article. Based on present planning projects in the city of Umea in Sweden, we will discuss how the imaginary of the gender-equal city is presented, filled with meaning and used in place marketing, with the overall ambition of discussing the possibilities and pitfalls of what we call the gender-equality planning strategy. The aim of the article is to study how the city of Umeå is acting to create a gender-equal city and what kind of imaginaries these practices build on. The material consists primarily of a case study focusing on projects that aim to create an equal city, and also includes analyses of policy documents and media reports. This study illustrates how imaginaries are produced through local projects and different imaginaries provide different spaces for politicizing gendered power relations.

Informal commerce, characterized by market and street trading activities, thrives in the central areas of many Latin American cities. Focusing on the neglected spatial dimension of informal commerce, the paper traces its considerable expansion in the historic centre of Quito in Ecuador since the early 1970s and examines the issues which have prompted municipal intervention. An early municipal response involves some attempts at redistribution of informal commerce, justified by essentially functional issues such as hygiene and congestion. However, the introduction of conservation policy and the way this policy evolved to embrace a broad concern for the urban environment is associated with the emergence of an aesthetic/cultural discourse in attitudes towards informal commerce. The authorities are increasingly motivated towards ‘selling’ a new image of the historic centre and encouraging new economies oriented towards the tourist and a relatively wealthy clientele. Moves to exclude informal commerce have concentrated on the most visible spaces, particularly those of the principal squares. Although informal trade hidden from view continues to thrive, only time and further research will show whether the re‐presentation of the historic centre and the promotion of new economies will finally effect the exclusion of informal commerce as a culmination of long‐term efforts to control its occupation of space.

Despite an increasing interest in issues surrounding environmental equity, much research evidence to date is based on studies adopting cross-sectional approaches which do not adequately capture the processes and mechanisms generating inequities. Longitudinal studies may better inform policy measures to remedy inequity between populations, but the few that have been undertaken have mostly been focused solely on environmental risks—ignoring access to amenities. As a case study, we adopt a longitudinal approach in this work to investigate the association between sociodemographic indicators and public park provision over an eighteen-year period in the city of Yokohama, Japan. We show that inequities in park provision are present over the whole time period. Hedonic modelling shows that park accessibility is positively associated with house and land prices in the city. Our results suggested some, relatively weak, evidence of two causal processes: new parks are located in more affluent communities; yet new parks also appear to encourage further move-in of affluent populations. We suggest that park provision by administrative authorities in less-affluent neighbourhoods may be required to maintain equity in access to these valuable community resources. Economic incentives, such as subsidy provision, may have a role to play to encourage park provision by developers.

This paper examines the opportunities for social activities in public outdoor spaces associated with high-density residential living. This study surveyed activities in outdoor spaces outside three high-density residential communities in Brisbane. Results indicated that activity patterns in public outdoor space outside residential communities are different to general urban public outdoor space. This broadly, but not fully, supports current theories concerning activities in public space. That is some environmental factors have impacts on the level of social interaction. The relationship between outdoor space and a residential building may have a significant impact on the level of social activities. As a consequence, a new classification of activities in public space is suggested. In improving the level of social contact in public outdoor space outside a residential community, the challenge is how to encourage people to leave their comfortable homes and spend a short time in these public spaces. For residential buildings and public space to be treated as an integrated whole, the outdoor open spaces close to and surrounding these buildings must have a more welcoming design.

Many people fail to achieve recommended levels of physical activity. Neighborhood parks serve as locations in which physical activity often occurs, and walking to parks provides added opportunity for leisure-time activity. The authors examine environmental characteristics of shortest pedestrian routes to parks to determine how route walkability affects park use. Using an objective environmental audit, the authors found that routes of park users were measurably more walkable than those of nonpark users and that each unit increase in total walkability score associated with a 20% increase in the likelihood of walking to the park, controlling for education and route length (odds ratio = 1.20; 95% confidence interval = [1.07, 1.34]). The most significant elements measured in- cluded route distance, traffic, neighborhood maintenance, street maintenance, safety, and aesthetics. Pedestrian scale environmental characteristics are associated with individuals’ use of neighborhoods for physical activity. Understanding these relationships can contribute to evidence-based design interventions to increase physical activity.

In the wake of the global recession, publicly funded urban development projects have reshaped Romania’s cities while transforming local governance practices. This study examines an emergent form of urban governance that is driven by the pursuit of EU and government funding and centres on large-scale spatial restructuring. During a time of severe economic decline, this form of local governance has brought about uneven development through a dramatic increase in redundant public works and urban beautification projects that serve neither the public need nor the EU’s development agenda. Seized by political patronage networks through selective and discretionary allocations of EU and public funds, public works projects have become vehicles for the extraction of public funds.

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.

Urban regeneration programmes in the UK over the past 20 years have increasingly focused on attracting investors, middle-class shoppers and visitors by transforming places and creating new consumption spaces. Ensuring that places are safe and are seen to be safe has taken on greater salience as these flows of income are easily disrupted by changing perceptions of fear and the threat of crime. At the same time, new technologies and policing strategies and tactics have been adopted in a number of regeneration areas which seek to establish control over these new urban spaces. Policing space is increasingly about controlling human actions through design, surveillance technologies and codes of conduct and enforcement. Regeneration agencies and the police now work in partnerships to develop their strategies. At its most extreme, this can lead to the creation of zero-tolerance, or what Smith terms ‘revanchist’, measures aimed at particular social groups in an effort to sanitise space in the interests of capital accumulation. This paper, drawing on an examination of regeneration practices and processes in one of the UK’s fastest growing urban areas, Reading in Berkshire, assesses policing strategies and tactics in the wake of a major regeneration programme. It documents and discusses the discourses of regeneration that have developed in the town and the ways in which new urban spaces have been secured. It argues that, whilst security concerns have become embedded in institutional discourses and practices, the implementation of security measures has been mediated, in part, by the local socio-political relations in and through which they have been developed.

Defensible space (DS) theory proposes that the built environment can promote neighborhood safety and community by encouraging residents’ appropriation of near-home space. This article examined the relationship between three differ- ent forms of resident appropriation and residents’ experiences of neighborhood safety and community. Results from a survey of 91 public housing residents living in moderately defensible spaces suggested that residents who defended near-home space through territorial appropriation experienced the neighborhood as a safer, more cohesive community than did residents who did not appropriate space in this way. Residents who spent more time outside experienced the neighborhood as a safer place; however, casual social interaction in near-home space was not consistently related to outcomes. While no causal information is available from the correlational data presented here, this work takes an important step of providing empirical evidence of a systematic link between certain aspects of resident appropriation and positive outcomes. Implications for DS theory and for public housing policy are discussed.

The authors seek to extend the literature on inequalities and exclusion in the nighttime economy through a rhythmic analysis of visitor presence in public space in nightlife districts in the city centres of the Dutch cities of Groningen, Utrecht, and Rotterdam. Substantial inequalities in visitor presence, based on race/ethnicity and gender, are demonstrated. In the cities considered, racial/ethnic inequalities vary more in spatial terms, and gender inequalities fluctuate more heavily over the course of the night. Overall, however, the findings support the argument that exclusion from the nighttime economy needs to be understood in temporal—ecological terms. Multiple drivers, or pacemakers, of rhythmic inequalities rooted in race/ethnicity and gender are identified, including opening hours and revellers' collective habits. For advocates of greater diversity among nighttime-economy participants, the analysis suggests that neither a more varied supply of nightlife premises, nor more surveillance and policing, are straightforward solutions: a strong orientation of premises toward university students and urban professionals may promote gender-based inclusion, but deters nonwhite revellers, and more police on the street may empower women to move through a nightlife district unaccompanied yet reduce the inclination to do so among racial/ethnic minorities.