Urban Public Life Research Articles

The Effects of Public Spaces on People’s Experiences and Satisfaction in Taif City: A Cross-Sectional Study

Public places play a central role in shaping positive and negative human experiences. They have a profound impact on people’s lives, affecting their sense of place, well-being, and overall quality of life. While public spaces have such an impact, little is known about their effects on the overall experiences of people in Saudi cities. Particularly, in Saudi Arabia, the form of public spaces has rapidly evolved and changed in recent years. Therefore, this study examined the impact of urban public spaces on people’s experiences, aiming to assess satisfaction levels within the broader context of urban life in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it investigated the correlation between the public spaces and individuals’ perceptions and feelings toward the environment of Taif city. Taif is one of the key cities in Saudi Arabia targeted for significant improvements in quality of life as part of the 2030 vision. Therefore, it is important to study the effects on the residents there. The method used in the study involved quantitative data collected through a survey of 384 participants from Taif, which included questions measuring multiple aspects of the quality of urban public life, including the safety, walkability, social interaction, and functionality of public spaces. The results indicate that people in Taif would face a jeopardised level of satisfaction, as not all elements of the public spaces meet the desired standards. Therefore, their experiences would be impacted negatively if the noted concerns are not addressed. By identifying key urban design elements that impact people’s experiences and overall well-being, this research provides a foundation for planners and policymakers to work towards achieving the Saudi vision of creating more liveable and enduring urban environments in Saudi Arabian cities.

CONCEPTUALISATION OF THE DEFINITION «URBANISED AREAS»

The article outlines theoretical approaches to explaining the essence of urbanisation as a trend in the development of modern society. The article establishes that at the present stage of development of post-industrial urbanism, new theories and concepts of urban development are emerging. Scientists pay considerable attention to knowledge and high technologies. In the context of urban development, there are trends towards suburbanisation, as well as decentralisation and an increased role for local governments. Theories of urbanisation that are typical of post-industrial society characterise urbanism as a process that is directly related to political, economic and social factors. The author's own approaches to building the conceptual apparatus are proposed, taking into account the subject of this study and the identified characteristics of urbanised areas, in particular, the concepts of «urbanisation», «city», «agglomeration» are clarified. It is established that public management of development of urbanised areas is the exercise by public authorities of targeted influence on various spheres of urban public life with a view to ensuring intensive and extensive development of urbanised areas and improving the living standards of the population. An approach to the classification of urbanised territories for the purposes of public administration is proposed, which allows identifying the properties of urbanised territories and, accordingly, taking them into account in the formation and implementation of the State policy, strategies and public administration decisions on the development of urbanised territories, in particular: by the form of territorial settlement, planning structure, population density, level of urban development, functions performed by it, environmental status, as well as the level of economic and social development of the relevant territory, the level of damage and the level of security.

Women’s search for public space and leisure in Agra: cots, courtyards, and riverbank

ABSTRACT Historians have often highlighted the centrality of bazaars and the streets in urban public life in India as a space for politics and mobilisation. Historically, these bazaars and streets have been the domain of men, while spaces created by dominant urban planning logics like sequestered parks and enclosed marketplaces are marked by exclusion across various axes. Where do women then find opportunities for leisure, solidarity, chance encounter, or discursive politics? The paper explores this question through a case study of a low-income riverside settlement in Agra using ethnographic field work conducted in 2019. This included observations, interviews, and group discussions with residents, community leaders, and police officials, and a systematic review of local and national news reports. The paper finds that for women, public spaces like riverbanks, streets, and large parks are characterised by a ‘mahaul’ (translated here as affective environment) that is risky and ‘kharab’ (immoral or corrupt) due to their sticky affective association with harassment, transgression, romance, and the risk of elopements. Instead, women find opportunities for leisure and sociality by coming together on cots in shared courtyards or rooftops within their neighbourhood – these form their ‘enclosed outside’ where they find opportunities for sociality, leisure (which exists simultaneously with work), and discussion. By centring women’s experiences, vocabularies, and everyday relationship with public spaces, and underscoring the register of ‘affect’ in these experiences, this paper makes an important contribution to the growing literature on gendering right to the city and the feminist argument for women’s right to leisure spaces. The paper also centres the importance of local built elements like shared courtyards within a neighbourhood especially for women, with implications for urban planning and design.

The Forks Market: Cosmopolitan Canopy, Conviviality, and Class

This article contributes to scholarship on the varieties of co-existence expressed in urban public life by providing an analysis of cosmopolitan conviviality as it surfaces in the branded public space of The Forks Market in Winnipeg, Canada. Recently renovated to create an intimate food hall, the Market is framed as a “commons” to encourage sociability among patrons. It is also configured as an inclusive space where an urban multicultural clientele can gather and share in a variety of foodways. Drawing on empirical observational research, and paying attention to the Market’s material affordances, I argue that Forks Market patrons co-perform a kind of cosmopolitan conviviality comprising two key components: (a) convivial sociability, and (b) cosmopolitan openness. Exploring tensions between inclusivity and exclusivity, however, I maintain that such conviviality is marked by ambivalence linked to the Market’s operation as both a “cosmopolitan canopy” and a branded space with an emphasis on consumption. In particular, I consider how the “look” of the Market conveys a sense of authenticity with an “upscale” design oriented toward middle-class tastes.

Curating Unmarked Banality

Bindi Kang's ‘Curating Unmarked Banality’ explores the digital videos in Jingjing's Life Journal on Today's Headlines and examines the seemingly ordinary and repetitive nature of vlogs by migrant workers, uncovering their captivating appeal to online audiences. The research argues that the vlogging of mundane life offers an updated narrative of migrant workers' urban experience, creating a contemporary Asian worker's rendition of the flâneur–a classical literary archetype known for its associations with urban public life and leisurely observation. By self-documenting their daily experiences, these workers are shown to challenge the conventional urban-rural binary that prevails in Chinese mainstream media portrayals. These vlogs serve as an act of 'reverse (un)marking', reaffirming and showcasing a mediated urban identity for the migrant population. The analysis adopts Peggy Phelan's concept of the 'unmarked'–which examines the ideology of visibility and its relation to power in performance–and Wayne Brekhus's sociological extension of the term to critique the disproportionate focus on the 'marked' in academic inquiry. Through 'reverse marking', this research discusses the significance of these digital narratives in the broader cultural landscape, examining how such mediated performances engage with issues of visibility, representation and identity formation of traditionally underrepresented groups.

A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul

A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul

Crooked and Straight: Street Stories and Moral Stories in Early Soviet Odessa

Moral storytelling about urban public life in Odesa in the 1920s is at the center of attention. A key social space is in focus: streets and corners as spaces and as concepts. And a particular storyteller is central: the well-known and yet biographically mysterious feuilletonist for the city's evening newspaper, “Al. Svetlov.” Soviet journalists, like Soviet reality, were expected to offer ideological clarity: a morally unambiguous and teleologically straight story about the death of the past and the birth of a bright and healthy new world. But such temporal and moral (and thus political) consistency was elusive—in the urban spaces where “vestiges” of the old persisted, and in their telling, as observers found it difficult to sustain an unwavering and unambiguous moral orientation. The article asks also how minor and subordinated individuals understood their own lives, suggesting an orientation other than delinquency and pathology.

The Digital Underground: Public Life Beneath the Streets of Bucharest, Romania

Much has been written about the public life of cities, almost all of which is grounded in observations taken from the square and the sidewalk. Yet across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, environmental, demographic, and economic pressures have prompted cities to invest in new and expanded underground spaces, such as subterranean Metro systems, pedestrian passageways, and the basement levels of buildings where apartments, offices, cafes, bars and restaurants, supermarkets and shops, for example, are now found. Romania's capital city, Bucharest, is one case in point. As the city's planners ask its residents to move increasingly off of the boulevard and to relate to the city from beneath its main squares, this essay asks a basic question that has received surprisingly little analytical attention: what kind of public life does the urban underground make possible? Ethnographically, this essay takes as its point of departure a prominent advertisement campaign called, "The Digital Public Library" (DPL), which was first installed with civically minded intentions in a major Bucharest Metro station in 2012. The campaign then evolved, through various iterations, for years to come. This essay engages the Digital Public Library—its placement beneath the city as much as its civically minded aims and successes—historically and ethnographically to argue, ultimately, that the expansion of underground urbanism opens up an added and concerning dimension to the privatization and class separation that has threatened the character of urban public life in recent decades.

High-Resolution Urban Air Quality Mapping for Multiple Pollutants Based on Dense Monitoring Data and Machine Learning.

Spatially explicit urban air quality information is important for urban fine-management and public life. However, existing air quality measurement methods still have some limitations on spatial coverage and system stability. A micro station is an emerging monitoring system with multiple sensors, which can be deployed to provide dense air quality monitoring data. Here, we proposed a method for urban air quality mapping at high-resolution for multiple pollutants. By using the dense air quality monitoring data from 448 micro stations in Lanzhou city, we developed a decision tree model to infer the distribution of citywide air quality at a 500 m × 500 m × 1 h resolution, with a coefficient of determination (R2) value of 0.740 for PM2.5, 0.754 for CO and 0.716 for SO2. Meanwhile, we also show that the deployment density of the monitoring stations can have a significant impact on the air quality inference results. Our method is able to show both short-term and long-term distribution of multiple important pollutants in the city, which demonstrates the potential and feasibility of dense monitoring data combined with advanced data science methods to support urban atmospheric environment fine-management, policy making, and public health studies.

Disparate Approaches to Maintaining Roads and Sidewalks: An Interview Study of 16 U.S. Cities

America’s “crumbling roads” currently headline the infrastructure zeitgeist, but deteriorating sidewalks are also in desperate need. Sidewalks can be vibrant, social conduits in cities that, when safe and well-maintained, enhance public health and enable accessible passage for all residents, particularly the most vulnerable. The scant but burgeoning research on pedestrian infrastructure has largely focused on data collection technologies and spatial analysis. This research instead seeks to uncover the similarities and differences in how American cities treat their road versus sidewalk networks by asking: are these two indispensable assets of daily urban public life repaired, maintained, and funded disparately? The research was structured around interviews with employees of 16 U.S. cities about their road and sidewalk policies and procedures. We found multiple disparities between roads and sidewalks in and among American cities, including: municipality responsibility, repair timeliness, data availability, and condition assessment. We also discuss cities’ pressing concerns for these assets and directions for future research. The implications of this study could affect several themes across transportation infrastructure, including project prioritization, equity, and efficient government spending.

Shopping and Urbanity: Emerging Assemblages of Main Street, Mall, and Power Centre

ABSTRACT Car-dependent cities of the mid-late twentieth century transformed urban shopping as shopping centres became privatised and separated from urban life – traditional main streets were often replaced by suburban malls and then power centres (big-box clusters). We identify 13 emerging synergies between these retail types and critique the ways the synergies may foster or endanger urban public life. This evidence suggests contradictory trends: a return to urbanity with more fine-grained, mixed-use, and pedestrian-friendly shopping, juxtaposed with anti-urban tendencies of entrenched car-dependency and sophisticated private control. The role of planning in creating resilient urbanity is at stake.

Research on dynamic visual attraction evaluation method of commercial street based on eye movement perception

ABSTRACT Commercial streets play an essential role in urban public life, and their appearance constitutes an important visual attraction, which can attract people to form high-quality and active public spaces. However, in the traditional design analysis methods, limited by the existing evaluation tools, the key content of visual attractiveness analysis under dynamic conditions has rarely been paying attention to. Given this, this research adopts both objectivity and real-time eye movement perception technology to construct an evaluation method based on dynamic visual attractiveness-through the application of virtual reality technology to construct a virtual scene of a typical commercial street and detect the user’s actions in it Eye movement at a time and physiological parameters such as the number of fixation points, fixation duration, and pupil diameter changes.This paper takes the main commercial street in Huanggaihu Town in Hubei Province of China as an example to analyze the visual attraction caused by different design methods.Therefore, from the four aspects of material, shape, line, and vegetation, design suggestions for the reasonable distribution of visual attractiveness in the commercial street space design are proposed to provide useful enlightenment for the vast towns’ commercial street space design.

COVID-19 Bringing Cairenes Back to their Streets

In a city of high vehicular traffic like Cairo, in some neighborhoods simple social activities were usually practiced in enclosed places. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has somehow turned the corner in the street life of Cairo as the livability of the urban public spaces enhanced. Residents of Cairo were widely seen using every well-maintained public space they could find. This paper aims to explore the emerging questions concerning Covid-19 and its effect on the city. How did Covid-19 help in bringing residents of Cairo back to the streets? What kind of street activities were introduced during the pandemic and what are the reasons behind them? What are the effects of these novel activities on both the people and the city? Basing on relevant international literature, this research will provide a comparative analysis between urban public life in the streets of Cairo before and during the pandemic. The research adopts a case study qualitative approach for a selected neighborhood in Cairo. It relies on observations, focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with residents from the district. Findings indicate that enclosed commercial and recreational facilities, and vehicular domination in the streets have taken life away from the city before the lockdown period. During the pandemic people have acquired new habits which gave life back to the streets. The flow of the main social stream has a very important role in shaping the street life. As a result of these new circumstances the physical and psychological health of the residents were maintained, new social ties were created and their sense of belonging has been enhanced.

Research on Functional Interdependence Patterns of “Village-Urban” Spatial Structure of Shenzhen: A Living and Activity Space Perspective

The urban village is a special product of the rapid urbanization process in China. To accurately understand its functional embedding mode in the urban organism is an important decision-making prerequisite for optimizing the governance effectiveness of urban renewal. Taking residents’ living and activity space as the breakthrough point, this paper analyzes the spatial functional patterns of villages in cities by measuring the “village-urban” interdependence relationship based on cellphone big data. It is founded that urban villages in Shenzhen are closely related to other parts of the city, and are not self-isolated communities. At the same time, due to the extensive construction and management mode, the function homogenization of urban village space is obvious, and its location is the main determinant of its participating way in urban activities. The research holds that from the perspective of providing citizens with low-cost opportunity to participate in urban public life and ensuring the resilient development capacity, it is necessary to coordinate and reserve a certain proportion of urban village residential land within the sub-community of residents’ living and activity space to promote the benign and healthy development of urban space organisms.

Toward a new normality in Via Paolo Sarpi (Milan, Italy)? Social behaviors and spatial transitions during and after the lockdown

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 crisis (February–September 2020), Lombardy—the most populous region in Italy—suffered more than 101,705 contagions with more than 16,880 deaths. Such an amount of cases (38,9% over the total Italian COVID-19 patients and 47,8% over Italian deaths) imposed a severe lockdown that affected ten million inhabitants in one of the larger urban regions of Europe that includes the cities of Milan, Bergamo, and Brescia. Social contact where forbidden, and civil rights and mobility dramatically reduced. Therefore, over two months, three urban values (the density, the proximity, and the continuous interaction) that shaped the European lifestyle in cities were considered dangerous. The urban space itself turned in a risky environment for its inhabitants. The disruptive result has been a general decline of urban public life, and this reduction has been evident in high streets and other public spaces. Hoping that the current situation will change rapidly, we recognize that we must adapt to a new normality, where public spaces and social encounters will still have a crucial role in cities. Regarding the rapid and profound transformation of social behaviors in Milan during the COVID-19 crisis, the research will be picking the focus on the street space as a suitable environment for converting more sociable anwctd healthy public spaces. Starting from the case of a multiethnic consolidated neighborhood in Milan (around Via Paolo Sarpi, a pedestrian-oriented street marked by the presence of the Chinese community), the proposed chapter explores how social behaviors and their spatial impacts changed—and adapted—during the lockdown. We will involve the analysis of the changes in the living practices of the street during the pandemic not only physically but also performed as booming social media connections. In the conclusions, we will point out how several reflections about the new normality that is rising out after this extra-ordinary situation at the local level, and how this original knowledge must support a new approach to the urban planning and territorial governance in the next years.

Towards an antifragile urban form: a research agenda for advancing resilience in the built environment

This paper aims to initiate reflections on what an antifragile (Taleb, Anti-fragile. Things that gain from disorder. Penguin Books, London 2012) built environment might look like by furthering the debate on dynamic non-equilibrium resilience, specifically in terms of scale, urban morphology and social life in urban areas. It will do so by presenting a critical review of relevant literature on resilience in the built environment and linking it to what we know so far about the physical (i.e. geographical, morphological and so on) and socio-cultural conditions that have likely limited the spread of COVID-19 while maintaining quality in urban space in early 2020. As the current pandemic is sharpening our understanding of both the link between local and global action and the power encompassed in the exercise of professional and technical knowledge and practice, the paper concludes with (i) speculations on how the current crisis and its management (i.e. lockdown and social distancing measures in public space’ use) might lead to radical changes to the way we think of, and design the conditions for, urban public life and sociability; and with (ii) an agenda for further research on what role urban forms and uses play in speeding or slowing viral spread in different contexts.

Exploring the public value of streets in the context of rapid urbanization

Urban street is an important form of urban space. It is the economic lifeline of the city, as well as the most public space that people use in daily life. City streets bears not only the flourished style of this region, but also embodies the unique style and taste of a city. Since China's reform and opening, economic development has maintaining a rapid growth momentum. The economic base determines the superstructure,so the scale of city population is facing a rapid expansion. The city is changing rapidly with the vigorous development of motor traffic. The traditional street space is faced with the situation of being nibbled away.Based on the concept of urban street and public space, this paper further analyzes the importance of paying attention to urban public life for achieving sustainable development, and then points out the importance of urban street space as an important carrier of public life in the context of rapid urbanization.By clarifying the important public value of urban streets, this paper draws the attention of a wide range of city government decision-makers and urban planners.

CHALLENGING SPATIAL MARGINALIZATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATION? A CASE STUDY OF THE TWITTER DISCOURSE ON HOUSING IN BERLIN

Urban public life has historically and famously been structured by social stratification and a segregation of social milieus. Such spatialized social inequality along the lines of, most importantly, class, age, and ethnicity engenders unequal access to civic participation and supportive social networks. Meanwhile, the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies in particular have often been hailed for their potential of bringing underrepresented voices into the public discourse and even creating so-called “networked counterpublics”, challenging social power structures. This contribution seeks to address the question of whether social media communication about urban issues challenges or reproduces patterns of spatial inequality in its attention distribution. Empirically, it investigates the distribution of place-naming within the Berlin-based Twitter discourse on housing. It finds that - while issue attention in the urban Twitter discourse is clearly spatially unequal, with a striking imbalance between center and periphery - neither sociodemographic composition nor issue characteristics perform well in explaining these patterns. Instead it proposes focusing more on local civic and activist infrastructure in future research.

Investigating sense of place of the Las Vegas Strip using online reviews and machine learning approaches

Public space is essential to urban public life, activities, and events, and has become a key component of design and regeneration schemes. However, visitors’ experience of public space and the subsequent perceptions and sense of place are often difficult to measure because of its intangible nature and the expensive data collection process. This study collected 20,476 online reviews from 18,387 Tripadvisor users from 2008 to 2019 to understand how visitors experience and react to the public spaces on the Las Vegas Strip. We effectively elicited sense of place on the Las Vegas Strip and quantified the popularity and sentiment of each sense of place facet with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and logistic regression machine learning methods. The results specified 30 distinct topics related to the Strip, among which the most important ones were exploring different hotels, night scene, people watching, and walking long distances. The visitor experience explored within this study uncovered multiple facets of sense of place on the Strip and suggested urban design strategies and public space management policies related to the programmatic and physical elements of the Strip sidewalks. The study shows how online reviews can provide strong empirical evidence for visitor experience in built environment projects. This approach can be used by landscape architects, urban planners, and policy makers on post-occupancy evaluation and guide redevelopment efforts to provide a full feedback loop.

Youth and children's public associations of Yaroslavl: state, activities and prospects for the development of the public sector

The article presents the results of a comprehensive sociological study of the Yaroslavl youth movements, associations, as well as informal groups and their participation in the life of the city. 500 Yaroslavl citizens aged 14 to 35 were interviewed. The level of awareness of Yaroslavl youth about youth organizations, movements and movements, including operating in the city, the degree of involvement of young citizens in these organizations was assessed. Modern youth is poorly absorbing the difference between formalized public youth organizations and informal youth groups. Yaroslavl youth is rather apolitical. In the youth sector, military-patriotic and volunteer trends are developed and popular. Organizations of this orientation have a high recognition rating. If we compare formal and informal youth groups, then the Yaroslavl youth is most informed about the latter. Almost 60% of youth organizations and movements, according to their members, take part in the public life of the city. Most often, such participation is limited to involvement in citywide events, holidays and promotions (32%), as well as in the creation of performances that affect the urban environment and public life (30%). Potentially, one can try to attract from 70 to 84% of participants in youth associations of Yaroslavl to socially significant activities. The main points of application of their labor for the benefit of the city, youth sees social labor, creative, search and rescue and scientific activities.