The Journal of Public Space

From Urban Safari to Becoming-Territorial

Dimitris Loupetis — 2026-06-29

This article examines how public space in central Athens is produced, evaluated, and contested under conditions of touristification, privatization, and neoliberal urban restructuring. In the wake of the economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, dominant frameworks of public space quality - typically focused on safety, efficiency, and attractiveness for investment - are increasingly challenged. Public space emerges not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic and contested field where competing forms of value, use, and meaning are negotiated. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becomings alongside Ghassan Hage’s notion of generalized domestication, the article conceptualizes gentrification and touristification as intertwined processes that produce a new “familiar” urban space. This is described as a domesticating pole, where public space is reshaped to accommodate tourism, transforming everyday life into a consumable and managed resource.
In contrast, the article identifies a “wild” pole of public space production, driven by grassroots movements and informal collectivities. These actors cultivate alternative ways of inhabiting space based on care, coexistence, solidarity, and non-instrumental uses, challenging dominant urban rationality. Focusing on the territorial struggles surrounding Strefi Hill - a hill serving as a small-scale forest area in the Exarcheia neighbourhood in the centre of Athens - the article employs a comparative qualitative methodology to examine representations, discourses, and everyday practices of inhabiting public space as articulated by different actors. This methodological approach enables an examination of how divergent enactments of locality correspond to different evaluative understandings and criteria of public space quality, highlighting evaluation as a situated, contested, and politically embedded process.

Reframing Public Space Evaluation through Multisited and Plurispatial Perspectives

Jilly Traganou — 2026-06-29

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.

Remember and Reuse: Spatial Memory and Emotional Value of Post-socialist Public Spaces

Veronika Sharova — 2026-06-29

The legacy of socialist architecture and urban planning in Europe is worthy of attention not only from the point of view of its historical significance but also in the context of modern “culture wars” or “memory wars,” which are a recognizable feature of modern socio-political life. Using the example of a specific location, the Ernst-Thälmann-Park in Berlin, the article examines the problem of perception of this heritage of European urbanism of the 20th century. This location in eastern Berlin remains the subject of residents' emotional experiences and discussions about the memory of the place revolves around both the demolished gas storage buildings, on the site of which a park was created during the socialist era and the central square with its monument. Nowadays, the residential area with the central square is popular among the locals, combining symbolic and practical aspects.
It is emphasised that within the framework of socialist urbanism, the creation of public spaces received considerable attention. This was rooted in the ideological foundations of the socialist system: the dominance of the public over the individual and the values of centrally organized social practices. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc resulted in numerous transformations in political institutions, in the economy, in social relations. These transformations also impacted strategies and practices in urban planning, construction and architecture: the planned economy was replaced by free market, and ideological foundations blurred. At the same time, “places and spaces of memory” emotionally linked to the socialist era are being revised, and the discussion on the value of this architecture is going on. The spatial aspects of this debate are particularly evident in urban environments, given the high diversity of urban communities and the specific nature of urban life: politically competitive and agonistic.

Spatial Dialogues

Dieudonné Elohym Da Costa — 2026-06-29

Public space evaluation commonly relies on measurable indicators of accessibility, activity, comfort, safety, and spatial performance, but often gives limited attention to relational, affective, and historically situated dimensions of lived experience. Drawing on spatial justice, relational, and affect theory, this paper introduces Spatial Dialogues as a relational, evaluative framework for understanding public space through reciprocal exchanges among Self, People, and Space, and Spatial Dialogues Mapping as an exploratory tool for operationalising these relations using criteria, survey responses, and radar-chart visualisation. The framework is tested through Bree Street Sundays, a recurring car-free street experiment in Cape Town’s inner city led by Young Urbanists South Africa, understood as an intermittent public-space and tactical-urbanism intervention. Drawing on participant responses, the findings indicate that the intervention produced a strongly positive public-space experience, particularly regarding comfort, enjoyment, social interaction, and collective welcome. However, these positive atmospheres did not fully translate into stronger perceptions of agency, historical connection, or long-term spatial transformation.

Limits of Public Space Evaluation under Overlapping Urban Priorities

Ines Dobošić — 2026-06-29

Public spaces emerge through the layering of interventions implemented over time in response to shifting urban priorities, regulatory frameworks, and moments of urgency. Concerns about climate change, security, and crime are increasingly shaping how these are adapted and managed. These efforts are rarely coordinated and arise from fragmented processes. Evaluation approaches within each domain tend to rely on standardised and quantitative indicators, which can miss perceived quality, while generalised quality evaluations rely on qualitative ones. Neither accounts at the same time for both how quality attributes are perceived and institutionally produced. These tools work best within separate domains and temporal isolation. The objective of this paper is to rethink evaluation by conceptualising public space as a site of negotiation, with a particular focus on the intersection of urban security and climate adaptation. Rather than assessing these agendas as separate performance domains, the paper explores how their interaction shapes the quality conditions of public space over time and challenges what evaluation can meaningfully capture. The paper combines a policy and planning document analysis with spatial observations to trace how security and climate adaptation measures are translated into built interventions, and to make the resulting trade-offs and synergies legible for evaluation. The analysis shows that public space quality cannot be adequately assessed through individual interventions alone, but depends on how measures are combined, sequenced, and implemented over time. This requires evaluation approaches that recognise quality attributes as institutionally produced conditions. The findings highlight the limitations of domain-specific evaluation in capturing the temporal and institutional character of public space quality. The paper does not propose a new evaluation method but identifies three reorientations for future evaluation practices: toward temporal sequencing, relational reading, and cross-domain interaction. This perspective contributes to more context-sensitive approaches to public space evaluation in cities facing overlapping demands.

Unfolding Process-Based Indicators: Linking Participation, Perceived Ownership, and Stewardship Practice to Public Space Sustainability

Rizqa Hidayani — 2026-06-29

This paper examines how community-centric design processes influence the sustainability of neighbourhood-scale public spaces through the lens of perceived ownership and stewardship practices. While participatory approaches are widely promoted in public space development, their contribution to the long-term maintenance and care that contribute to the sustainability of the space remains insufficiently discussed. Building on insights from ‘collective ownership’ literature that links perceived ownership to stewardship behaviours in shared environments, the study investigates how these dynamics unfold in practice. Drawing on two neighbourhood-scale public space projects co-designed with local communities in Indonesia, Sungai Jingah (Banjarmasin, 2012) and Mangkubumen (Surakarta, 2022), the paper explores how participatory processes that were designed to facilitate community aspirations and build ownership are translated into patterns of use, social inclusion, and maintenance. The paper adopts qualitative, practice-based research approaches, combining in-depth semi-structured interviews with reflective process, field observations and project archives on impact assessments. The findings show that community-centric design contributes most to the usership and inclusivity of the space, ensuring that the design of spaces reflects the needs of the user. Although the participatory process facilitates the emergence of ownership and stewardship practice, the result is highly context dependent. Ownership and stewardship practice does not automatically emerge from participation but develops through a combination of various factors such as interest, control over the space, attachment and familiarity, and investments, mediated by factors such as tenure stability, social cohesion, governance arrangements, and access to resources. While stewardship practices emerge through community initiative, their continuity often depends on larger institutional support. This paper proposed a process-based evaluation framework that not only focuses on the design process of the space but also covers aspects that nurture the sustainability of the space, particularly by facilitating the ownership building and stewardship practices that contribute to the sustainability of small-scale public spaces.

Evaluating Informal Public Space

Kali Marnane — 2026-06-29

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.

The School Street as Extended Cognitive Space

Luciana Mastrolonardo — 2026-06-29

Contemporary cities face a paradox: as urbanization intensifies, children's access to public space contracts. Vehicular dominance, parental safety concerns, and digital shifts in social behaviour converge to produce spatially dispossessed childhoods: not merely a mobility issue but a cognitive and developmental crisis. Children's growth depends on embodied exploration, unstructured play, and independent navigation, yet prevailing evaluation frameworks privilege permanent features and adult priorities, failing to capture how spaces serve children's cognitive and social development. This paper proposes a theoretical and methodological framework conceptualizing public space as cognitive infrastructure: urban streets function as distributed cognitive systems when activated through tactical, temporary, and participatory interventions. We focus on school streets, those regularly closed to traffic near schools to enable children's free play and interaction and argue that reconceptualizing the street as cognitive infrastructure carries direct methodological consequences, since conventional, feature-based evaluation tools are structurally unable to capture these dynamic and relational processes. In response, we develop a four-dimensional evaluation framework based on spatial-cognitive affordances, temporal rhythms, participatory co-design, and perceived safety, which is operationalized through participatory, practice-based methods that position children and families as co-researchers rather than research subjects. We grounded the framework in an early-phase action-research project in Pescara, Italy, where a street in a working-class neighbourhood is being transformed. Findings from the preparatory phase already begin to corroborate the framework's core premises, indicating that the methodology is a logically derived structure under test rather than an untested proposal. The framework equips municipalities, designers, and communities with actionable tools to evaluate interventions that reclaim streets for children's development.

The Public Space Service System (PSSS) Method

Ana Brandão — 2026-06-29

This paper presents the PSSS - Public Space Service System method, an innovative approach to assessing and interpreting the value of public space, its services, and systemic features, incorporating stakeholders’ perspectives. In recent decades, investment in public spaces has grown in many cities, becoming more important in public policies and in daily users' activities. With recognition comes the need to evaluate the performance of public spaces, whether in decision-making or design contexts. However, public space is inherently complex, diverse, and multifunctional, which complicates the task of defining what makes a good public space. Additionally, different actors view space differently, generating multiple values (sometimes contradictory) rather than a single universal one.
To address this, the PSSS method moves away from conventional practices centred on predetermined attributes to acknowledge subjectivity, treating the values generated by public space as context dependent. The method is structured around four fundamental dimensions: System (spatial relations and connections), Service (benefits provided by public spaces), Actors (users, producers, and regulators), and Value (diversity of recognised values). The paper details the method's development, explaining how the main concepts respond to the new assessment demands and how they are applied within the framework and workflow. The practical implementation is illustrated through case studies from diverse urban settings - historic cores, consolidated cities, suburbs, and dispersed areas - in both European and Latin American contexts, demonstrating its adaptability across different geographies, scales, and urban dynamics. The method proposes an interpretive and collaborative process, emphasising problem identification and resolution within a learning-and-transformation logic, combining interests and viewpoints through interdisciplinary dialogue. This approach responds to the complexity and subjectivity inherent in contemporary urbanism by providing tools that facilitate communication, participation, and collaboration among the diverse actors involved in the production, management, and use of public space, thereby fostering more targeted public policies.

Evaluating Public Space through Inequality

Alessandro Rosaneli — 2026-06-29

Public space is a fundamental component of urban life, supporting social interaction, collective activities, and democratic coexistence. However, its distribution within cities is uneven, often reflecting and reinforcing socio-spatial inequalities. A key challenge in public space research is developing methods that link its physical availability to broader socioeconomic conditions. This article addresses this issue by examining the relationship between the land allocation of public space and household income in Curitiba, Brazil. The study builds on the development of the Public Space Coefficient (PSC), an indicator that measures the proportion of physical public space - streets, squares, and parks - relative to the total area of a given territorial unit. Using census data and intra-urban divisions, the PSC is compared with income levels to identify patterns of social and spatial inequality. The results show that the relationship between public space and income is not absent but varies by the type of space considered. While streets are widely distributed and dominate the aggregate indicator, they primarily reflect basic urbanization conditions, masking deeper inequalities. In contrast, squares exhibit a stronger association with income levels, with lower-income areas showing significant deficits. Parks, although unevenly distributed, are more influenced by territorial constraints than by socioeconomic patterns. These findings demonstrate that aggregate measures of public space can hide structural inequalities if different types are not examined separately. The study emphasizes that public space allocation should be understood as an unevenly distributed urban resource, and that disaggregated indicators are essential for revealing socio-spatial disparities. By linking spatial metrics to social variables, the article contributes to the development of more precise analytical tools and supports more equitable urban planning strategies.

Seen, Felt, and Lived

Maurice Harteveld — 2026-06-29

Public spaces are increasingly expected to address complex societal challenges, from climate adaptation to social fragmentation. Yet, while the technical performance of public space has received considerable attention, its social sustainability remains less clearly defined and operationalized. This article, developed within the STEPS project funded by the Dutch Research Council, explores how social sustainability can be translated into design-oriented principles for public space. The contribution focuses on three interrelated dimensions of social life in urban environments: social cohesion, social encounter, and social learning. Social cohesion concerns the ties that connect people to places and to one another through trust, participation, and shared values (Aelbrecht & Stevens, 2018; Asadollahi Asl Zarkhah et al., 2025; Harteveld, 2017, 2020; Lai et al., 2024; Schiefer & van der Noll, 2017). Social encounter addresses the capacity of public spaces to foster meaningful interactions across difference, moving beyond co-presence towards genuine exchange (Askarizad & He, 2022; Ferreira et al., 2021; Horgan & Liinamaa, 2023). Social learning refers to collective processes of reflection, knowledge creation, and problem-solving that enable communities to develop civic literacy and transformative capacities (Bandura, 1977, 1986). Rather than treating these dimensions as isolated categories, the article approaches them as relational qualities that emerge through the immersive experiences in public space. In this perspective, public spaces are more than their physical form or functional assets. They are social infrastructures where belonging, encounter, and collective learning continuously take shape and give live to interactions of bodies in space. Building on a co-creative and interdisciplinary research process, the article proposes a conceptual and design-oriented framework that translates debates on social sustainability into operational principles for analysis and design. In doing so, it challenges approaches centred primarily on technical performance and advocates for a more holistic understanding of public space, towards subjective, symbolic, and culturally embedded dimensions.

How We Evaluate Shapes What Public Space Becomes

Thomas Chung — 2026-06-29

Public space - streets, parks, squares, waterfronts, commons, and civic interiors - is foundational to wellbeing, democratic expression, climate resilience, and socio-cultural identity. Yet it remains under-protected and under-funded in many contexts, vulnerable to privatisation, encroachment, and uneven access. As cities densify and rural territories evolve, the need to assess the quality and impact of public spaces has become more urgent - and more complex.
This Special Issue of The Journal of Public Space has been developed by the UIA Public Spaces Work Programme (WP) as part of our 2023-2026 roadmap that positions public space as both a universal right and a strategic lever for policy and practice [1]. Our WP and the UIA have an enormous asset for public space assessment, bringing together professionals from all five regions of the globe, thereby pooling the cultural, historical, identity-related, and governance-related experiences of each region as shared resources.

[1] Chung, T. & Brener, N. (2025) Becoming Public: A 2023–2026 Roadmap for the UIA Public Spaces Work Programme. UIA. https://www.uia-architectes.org/en/mag/becoming-public-a-2023-2026-roadmap-for-the-uia-public-spaces-work-programme/

Designing Publicness

Rui Leão — 2026-06-29

Public space is where cities breathe - and where cultures negotiate who “we” are. As the UIA Public Spaces Work Programme advances a 2023-2026 roadmap including this Special Issue of The Journal of Public Space, we speak with Rui Leão, UIA Secretary-General and co-founder of award-winning LBA Architecture & Planning in Macau. From the handover-era Nam Van Lake Square and Sai Van Lake Square (ARCASIA Gold Medal 2006) with its incremental waterfront ring, to M30 (UNESCO Asia‑Pacific New Design in Heritage Context Award 2022) - an infrastructural “communication tool between two worlds” - and Station 12 at Barra, Rui’s projects show how publicness can be crafted through section, symbol, and governance. We discuss translating metrics into meanings and participation into policy, and how Barcelona 2026 can anchor a legacy that cities can measure - and feel.

UN-Habitat and its Public Space Mandate

José Chong — 2026-06-29

Over the past fifteen years, public space has gained increasing prominence within global urban policy discussions, particularly in relation to climate adaptation, urban liveability, and sustainable development goals. Despite growing recognition of its importance, cities continue to face increasing pressures from rapid urbanisation, land scarcity, and unequal access to quality public spaces. This paper gives a panorama of the evolution of the global public space agenda, with a particular focus on UN-Habitat’s role in advancing policy frameworks, measurement systems, and operational programmes. It highlights the consolidation of SDG indicator 11.7.1 as a Tier I metric and explores persistent regional disparities in access to open public space. The analysis further traces the development of the Global Public Space Programme (GPSP) and its transition towards a more decentralised Global Public Space Network (GPSN). Finally, the paper discusses emerging priorities in legislation, governance, and financing as critical pillars for ensuring the long-term accessibility, inclusiveness, and resilience of public spaces.