Evaluating Informal Public Space: Understanding Public Space Value in Two Informal Settlements in Ahmedabad, India

Abstract

In a period of planetary transition marked by accelerating urbanisation, climate stress, and deepening social inequality, public space is increasingly recognised as a process of becoming shaped through everyday practices, relationships, and negotiated meanings. This paper rethinks public space evaluation from this perspective through an empirical study of public life in two informal settlements in Ahmedabad, India, where almost a century of incremental urbanisation has produced dense, socially complex environments that sit outside conventional planning paradigms. Informal settlements accommodate over one billion people globally, yet their public spaces remain under-represented in urban design research and evaluation frameworks and are frequently romanticised as vibrant or dismissed as disorderly in ways that risk erasing the social and economic practices that sustain life in conditions of poverty. The study adapts Jan Gehl’s Public Space - Public Life methodology to this context, combining systematic observation and mapping with sustained, relational engagement with residents. This expanded methodological lens reveals four distinct public space types including shared yards and local streets that function as intimate social infrastructures, and neighbourhood and public streets that function as major circulation routes and economic activity centres. The findings demonstrate that the perceived value of public space cannot be separated from social relationships, cultural meaning, and long-term patterns of use that standardised indicators are structurally ill-equipped to register. The paper positions public space evaluation as a critical practice of care, one that must attend to becoming, difference, and lived experience if it is to meaningfully inform design, governance, and policy on a planet in transition.