Reframing Public Space Evaluation through Multisited and Plurispatial Perspectives
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Abstract
This paper proposes a multisited and plurispatial methodological framework for evaluating public space as a justice-oriented method that foregrounds the lived trajectories of precarious migrants across overlapping spatial and policy scales. Ever since Vikas Mehta’s Public Space Index (2014) articulated a multidimensional, site-based evaluative model, the field has increasingly approached public space evaluation as a hybrid practice combining observation, participation, and outcomes-based evidence, including policy considerations (UN-Habitat Global Public Space Toolkit, 2024; Ramos-Vidal, 2024; Mela, 2025). While these approaches offer valuable tools for assessing performance, they typically depend on aggregated metrics and assume relatively stable users and sites.
Drawing on social and design justice frameworks, the paper positions structurally produced vulnerability as a key standpoint for evaluation. Empirically, the paper draws on interdisciplinary research conducted in Belleville, Paris, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdown measures exposed the fragile infrastructures that sustain the lives of migrant and unhoused communities. Combining sensory ethnography, long interviews, embodied observation, collaborative mapping, and policy analysis, we trace the multisited trajectories through which vulnerable communities navigate urban space and multi-scalar governance structures.
Public space emerges through overlapping normative and policy migration frameworks -multiculturalism, interculturalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism - which operate simultaneously across scales, and which shape conditions of recognition, belonging, and exclusion. Building on this, we propose a shift from site-based, score-driven assessments toward trajectory-oriented evaluation grounded in “narrative cartography.” By conceptualizing public space as a plurispatial and transcalar interface, the framework connects spatial analysis with policy design and calls for collaborative evaluation teams that include researchers, community organizations, policymakers, and migrants themselves as experts of “lived space” (Lefebvre). This approach seeks to advance a more just and empirically grounded framework for understanding and evaluating public space within the mobility regimes that shape contemporary planetary urbanization.
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