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Ghats have come about as a response to religious, spiritual and social needs along the water edges in India and have become places of human congregation. This study is limited to the main ghat area of the waterfront in Ujjain, a historic city and a significant Hindu spiritual center in India. The objective is to identify forces that underpin and threaten this valuable environment and propose strategies that could be implemented to salvage it. Research was conducted through detailed examination of physical aspects of the urban public realm, activity patterns and environmental conditions. Text, data and drawings were systematically collected through various sources. Key concerns are discussed in the light of current thinking on the subject to propose strategies and draw up conclusions for necessary conservation and revitalization to take place.

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 importance of the nearby natural environment was studied in the context of multiple-family housing. Residents at nine sites responded to a questionnaire about the kinds of natural areas near their home and the perceived adequacy of these facilities. While the nearby environment is often relegated to the category of "amenity," the findings suggest that the availability and adequacy of nearby natural elements is of far greater significance than such a characterization implies. Furthermore, different aspects of the natural environment need to be distinguished. Large open spaces, for example, played a minor role, at best, in residents' ratings of satisfaction with various aspects of the neighborhood. Opportunities to grow plants, by contrast, were significantly related to the sense of community. The most important factors in neighborhood satisfaction, however, were the availability of nearby trees, well-landscaped grounds, and places for taking walks. The data suggest that some of the psychological satisfactions traditionally associated with home ownership may be achieved even in the multiple-family housing context through the effective use of the natural environment.

This article examines interstices in the urban fabric using the example of two urban leftover spaces in Paris. The article first analyzes the institutional mode of treating these spaces, which explains the ‘framing’ of the interstice as a temporary functionless space. It shows how interstices are not only institutionally created and controlled, as opposed to free, but also find a functional place as a temporary margin of maneuver in a process of decay, recycling and renewal enforced by landlords, the police and maintenance teams. Second, the article examines the improvised modes of action developed by diverse people in order to use the interstice. The article looks at what happens in the gaps of urban planning, when activities find a place in the interstice not in order to transform it, and bring it back into the realm of urban places, but to take advantage of its ‘in-between’ position in the city. In practice, such activities are led by individuals who have to be ‘just passing’, because the frame (Goffman, 1974) built by landlords and their agents prevents them from taking place. Under some conditions, ‘just passing’ can give way to another type of involvement described as ‘out of frame’, which in this case, allows a group of homeless people to settle in the interstice for a more durable period of time despite heavy surveillance.

Urban public space is a product of contestations by various actors. This paper focuses on the conflict between local level government and beggars to address the questions: How and why do government actors refuse or allow beggars access to public space? How and why do beggars appropriate public space to receive alms and adapt their strategies? How does this contestation contribute to the trends of urban public space in today's China? Taking the Southern metropolis of Guangzhou as a case study, I argue that beggars contest expulsion from public space through begging performances. Rising barriers of public space require higher investment in these performances, taking even more resources from the panhandling poor. The trends of public order are not unidirectional, however. Beggars navigate between several contextual borders composed by China's religious renaissance; the discourse on deserving, undeserving, and dangerous beggars; and the moral legitimacy of the government versus the imagination of a successful, "modern," and "civilised" city. This conflict shows the everyday production of "spaces of representation" by government actors on the micro level where economic incentives merge with aspirations for political prestige.

Today, although most of the international research community considers climate change adaptation to be essential, there is limited knowledge on its concrete integration with contemporary placemaking. Yet, with the emergence of the adaptation agenda, the effects of urban climatology are continually coercing the need for concrete action to increase the climatic responsiveness of urban environments. This article is constructed upon a “Research for Design” approach, and focuses upon improving urban design guidelines by reviewing existing theoretical/empirical research on how pedestrian comfort levels can be addressed through public space design. The objective is to incorporate such qualitative and quantitative interrogations into a generic tool such as the “Place Diagram” by the PPS. A total of six intangible criteria, and six measurable attributes, are explored and structured in order to introduce new generic design considerations which can contribute to the responsiveness of urban outdoor spaces in an era of expected climate variability.

This paper presents a comparative case study of two northern suburbs in Melbourne, Australia, in order to analyze local perceptions of proximity, mobility, and spaces of community interaction within diverse neighborhoods experiencing socioeconomic and demographic transition. We first look at government policies concerning the two suburbs, which position one suburb within a narrative of gentrification and the other within a narrative of marginalization. We then draw on diverse residents’ experiences and perceptions of local space, finding that these “everyday geographies” operate independently of and often at odds with local policy narratives of demographic and socioeconomic transition. We conclude that residents’ “everyday geographies” reveal highly varied and contested experiences of sociospatial dimensions of local change, in contrast to policy narratives that are often neoliberally framed.

Public art is an artistic expression created in streets, squares and other public spaces, including parks. Using the two popular public parks in the New York City, Central Park and the High Line, this paper explores the affordances offered by public art in these two urban environments, with a focus on physical, intellectual and emotional connections between the visitor, the artwork and the landscape setting. Using affordance theory as a framework, it considers the design of the landscape as a behaviour setting that affords viewing, acknowledgement and reflection of the artwork within the contemporary cultural context. Using preliminary qualitative observations of six artworks within the two parks, this research suggests that public art has the potential to afford such diverse opportunities for public park visitors. In order for these affordances to be actualised, the design of the park and the artwork’s intentions should be coordinated to ensure that the experiences of the visitor align with the claimed benefits of public art.

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.

The global public spaces literature has been critical of contemporary manifestations of public space on a number of grounds. This article reports on a research project that attempted to gauge the validity of these critiques through an examination of new and regenerated public spaces in London. The article introduces the dominant critiques around public space before outlining the mixed-methods approach used to interrogate them. The key findings from this work are summarised before the nature of contempo- rary public space is re-theorised in a more avowedly positive and pragmatic manner than is often the case, one that celebrates a return of a public spaces paradigm through tentatively advancing a new narrative and set of normative principles for public space generation. The work concludes that a more balanced view of public space is required, one that recognises the multiple complex types, roles and audiences for public spaces in cities today.

This paper examines the relationship between ethnic residential segregation and two components of the built environment: the geographic distribution of its elements and their spatial configuration (i.e., the spatial relations and visual access between those elements). This relationship is investigated through a case study of Arab-Jewish residential segregation in Jaffa. Statistical and structural analyses (Q-analysis) of this case show that the conjunction of elements having different meanings (symbolic, cultural, functional, etc.) with spatial and visual integration attributes provides varying conditions for the expansion of the Arab Jewish residential patterns, a process potentially affecting the geographic scale intensity of residential segregation. It was found, for example, that public land uses having relatively 'neutral' ethnic and symbolic meanings (e.g. commercial sites and parks) and spatially integrated with the surrounding urban environment tend to moderate residential segregation. Identification of the institutional character of the built environment—segregation/encounters in mixed ethnic areas—may contribute to a more socially oriented spatial policy.

Strategies that reduce fear of crime may contribute to improved health outcomes; however interventions require a better understanding of the neighbourhood correlates of both emotional responses to crime (i.e., fear of crime) and cognitive assessments of crime (i.e., perceived crime risk). This study explored the association between objective measures of suburban design and two safety outcomes: perceived crime risk and fear of crime, for participants who lived in new suburban housing developments in Perth, Western Australia. The characteristics of a walkable neighbourhood, particularly retail land, were associated with less fear of crime, but greater perceived crime risk. One interpretation is that ‘strangers’, attracted to the neighbourhood by diverse land-uses, might influence the emotional and cognitive as- pects of ‘fear of crime’ differently. Researchers interested in the impact of the built environment on ‘fear of crime’, and any subsequent influence of these perceptions on health, should be mindful that the environment appears to impact these constructs differently.

This paper emerges from an ethnography of the economic and cultural life of Rye Lane, an intensely multi-ethnic street in Peckham, South London. The effects of accelerated migration into London are explored through the reshaping and diversification of its interior, street and city spaces. A ‘trans-ethnography’ is pursued across the compendium of micro-, meso- and macro-urban spaces, without reifying one above the other. The ethnographic stretch across intimate, collective and symbolic city spaces serves to connect how the restrictions and circuits of urban migration have different impacts and expressions in these distinctive but interrelated urban localities. The paper argues for a trans-ethnography that engages within and across a compendium of urban localities, to understand how accelerated migration and urban ‘super-diversity’ transform the contemporary global city.

Declines in children's independent mobility are frequently attributed to parents' fears about stranger danger, yet there is limited understanding of the factors that might aggravate (or ease) these concerns. We examined the social and built environment correlates of parents': (1) fears about strangers harming their child; and (2) perceptions of the likelihood this would actually happen. We also tested whether associations differed by area socio-economic status (SES) as parents in low income neighbourhoods, typically with more crime, may hold greater fears for their children's safety. Results suggest that regardless of SES, neighbourhood features that encouraged pedestrians, whilst minimising vehicle traffic, were most conducive to parents perceiving a safer neighbourhood. The natural surveillance generated by a more walkable neighbourhood may help alleviate parents' fears about strangers.

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.

In India, there are religious practices intersecting with the process of urbanization at various levels. This paper looks at the practice of tree worship which continues to be a part of everyday life here. Specifically, it looks at how the Peepul tree (Ficus Religiosa) shrine with its serpent stones and the raised platform around it (katte) contributes to the territorial production of urban space in the city of Bangalore. Based on a study of 10 kattes in the city, it finds that these urban spaces belong either to a process of territorialization by the local community or its deterritorialization by the government. The paper builds a theoretical argument for how the katte as a ‘human activity node’ contributes to an ‘urban web’ which is categorized here as the physical layer. It finds that the Peepul tree could enable a ‘network of relations’, termed as the social layer. It suggests that the information fields generated within these layers influences collective memory of the people. Finally, the paper argues that the two layers acting together can help formulate an urban design model that can minimize deterritorialization.

This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects; and the social organisation of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as a political, active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the ‘prototype’ as an emerging figure for contemporary sociotechnical designs in and for social theory.

People are satis®ed with their environment as long as they understand the physical character of it. Because of this, in order to design understandable, clear and acceptable environments, designers have to increase the meaning of spaces. When open and semi-open spaces are mentioned, plants become an important space component. In accordance with this point of view, the aim of this study is to de®ne the role of plants in constructing prefered environments and to ®nd out which plants have suitable semantic value for planting designs that express the identity of buildings and spaces with dierent functions. The study consists of two parts: (1) The theoretical part deals with how plants became a symbol and the signi®cation they take. In this part, samples of symbolic plants are given together with the de®nition of signi®cation by using ``Sign Theory''. (2) The application part examines whether the idea that spaces and buildings having dierent functions can be associated with plants. In this part 10 spaces and 24 plants are used to form an inquiry and cross-tabulation of plants with spaces and the reasons (the concept de®ning the feelings associated by a plant) are investigated.

While the first part of this two-part essay portrayed the bleakness of the suburban public realm in the USA, the debate over how physical planning can contribute to making it more vibrant is the subject of this second part. Eurourbanism, or the practice of looking to European cities for a design paradigm, has been criticized on the grounds that the USA has its own distinct public realm which is either non-spatial in character or is located in 'non-traditional' public spaces, such as shopping malls, in contrast with the more 'traditional' European sites such as streets and squares. But there are questions about whether the distinctive 'American public realm' is as democratic, or can offer the diversity of experience of the 'traditional' public realm. A more recent addition to the debate has been 'new urbanism' or 'neotraditionalism', whose proponents have put forth a set of planning guidelines for suburbia by drawing on design principles embodied in the traditional American small town. The essay critically evaluates these guidelines by examining their application in two neotraditional develop- ments and proposes a research agenda to move the debate ahead.

The purpose of this paper is to take part in the debate about power relationships in contemporary cities between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities, as mediated by cultural and artistic interventions and projects. Our study proposes a new conceptual frame, focused on the comparison between two notions of heterotopia as theoretical alternatives for the interpretation of cities as social and participatory spaces. The notions we consider may be traced to two key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, and lay the foundation for alternative analytical paradigms of the contemporary urban condition, in relation to artistic and cultural practices in the public space. We draw upon these two alternative readings of heterotopia to explore the implications of the interaction of artistic practices with the urban space as a contested terrain from the viewpoint of power relationships. In our analysis, we find that Foucault's notion of heterotopia is potentially conducive to top-down planning processes and to gentrification. Lefebvre's notion is instead possibly more suited to participatory practices as strategies of reactivation of the right to the city.