Public space as lived

Abstract

This chapter focuses on exploring how people use urban open spaces, and the design features, policies, and regimes of control that govern their use, as a means to understand how public space might best be designed and managed. In doing so the chapter outlines concepts and methods useful for analysing people's behaviour and examines environmentbehaviour relations across a variety of scales and conceptual frames, from the affordances that physical details provide for specific body postures, to the emotional resonance of spaces, to broad questions about needs and purposes for public space. In doing so the discussion focuses in particular on unanticipated uses. Varied disciplinary methods can be used to explore these issues, and those discussed include discreet behavioural observation, mapping and recording, participant observation, 'netnography', discourse analysis, and analysis of physical characteristics of built form, both directly and through images; all methods which are contrasted to interviewing. The chapter suggests several frameworks and questions that might shape data collection and analysis, including spatial orientations, different sensory perceptions, varied user abilities, particular practices of moving through space, small-scale loose 'props', and critiquing risk and crime minimisation strategies. Finally future directions are explored for conceptualising the dynamic relationships between spaces and their users. © Matthew Carmona and the contributors 2014. All rights reserved.