Social Interactions In Urban Public Places

This report examines how different people use public spaces and analyses how social interactions vary by age, gender or place. A free pdf version of this report is available online at www.jrf.org.uk

Public Places - Urban Spaces is a holistic guide to the many complex and interacting dimensions of urban design. The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and the practice of urban design from an unrivalled range of sources. It aids the reader by gradually building the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject. The author team explain the catalysts of change and renewal, and explore the global and local contexts and processes within which urban design operates. The book presents six key dimensions of urban design theory and practice - the social, visual, functional, temporal, morphological and perceptual - allowing it to be dipped into for specific information, or read from cover to cover. This is a clear and accessible text that provides a comprehensive discussion of this complex subject.

Social cohesion is often perceived as being under threat from the increasing cultural and economic differences in contemporary cities and the increasing intensity of urban life. Public space, in its role as the main stage for social interactions between strangers, clearly plays a role in facilitating or limiting opportunities for social cohesion. But what exactly is social cohesion, how is it experienced in the public realm, and what role can the design of city spaces have in supporting or promoting it? There are significant knowledge gaps between the social sciences and design disciplines and between academia and practice, and thus a dispersed knowledge base that currently lacks nuanced insight into how urban design contributes to social integration or segregation. This book brings together scholarly knowledge at the intersection of public space design and social cohesion. It is based on original scholarly research and a depth of urban design practice, and analyses case studies from a variety of cities and cultures across the Global North and Global South. Its interdisciplinary, cross-cultural analysis will be of interest to academics, students, policymakers and practitioners engaged with a range of subject areas, including urban design, urban planning, architecture, landscape, cultural studies, human geography, social policy, sociology and anthropology. It will also have significant appeal to a wider non-academic readership, given its topical subject matter.

The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces.

This publication aims to investigate the nature of social life in public and urban spaces in the cities of the Middle East, considering the value of environmental approaches. It aims to develop a better understanding of the patterns of social interactions and activities in public places, which have been influenced by cultural heritage values. Sustainable and livable open spaces can help in improving living conditions in cities. Public spaces are relevant as they satisfy many human needs. In public spaces, people interact and meet; people with different cultures and social backgrounds can communicate and learn from each other in social and spontaneous ways. However, decision-makers tend to forget the value of public spaces, especially in the absence of a national regulatory framework in emerging globalized cities. The book provides a multi-disciplinary approach in reading the characteristics and values of public spaces in the emerging cities of the Middle East.

This book is about the "public realm," defined as a particular kind of social territory that is found almost exclusively in large settlements. This particular form of social-psychological space comes into being whenever a piece of actual physical space is dominated by relationships between and among persons who are strangers to one another, as often occurs in urban bars, buses, plazas, parks, coffee houses, streets, and so forth. More specifically, the book is about the social life that occurs in such social-psychological spaces (the normative patterns and principles that shape it, the relationships that characterize it, the aesthetic and interactional pleasures that enliven it) and the forces (anti-urbanism, privatism, post-war planning and architecture) that threaten it. The data upon which the book's analysis is based are diverse: direct observation; interviews; contemporary photographs, historic etchings, prints and photographs, and historical maps; histories of specific urban public spaces or spatial types; and the relevant scholarly literature from sociology, environmental psychology, geography, history, anthropology, and architecture and urban planning and design. Its central argument is that while the existing body of accomplished work in the social sciences can be reinterpreted to make it relevant to an understanding of the public realm, this quintessential feature of city life deserves much more u it deserves to be the object of direct scholarly interest in its own right. Choice noted that: "The author's writing style is unusually accessible, and the often fascinating narrative is generously supported by well-chosen photos."

Place-making in public spaces is an important and worthy objective in the field of architecture. Sense of place is rooted in the dynamic interaction among people, space and activities. Hence, scholars observed human behaviors in successful public spaces and explored how the physical environment supports users' goals, expectations, activities and social interactions. Consequently, designers adopted the findings of these studies and created inhabitable public spaces in the urban area in which activities are diverse, social interactions are plentiful and sense of place is attached. What distinguishes public spaces from private spaces is the interaction partners. In public spaces, people interact with strangers whereas in private spaces, users participate in interpersonal behaviors with acquaintances. However, the ubiquitous use of digital media devices has blurred the line between public and private spaces. It modifies human behaviors and produces new genres of public spaces: the socializing private space and the privatizing public space. In the socializing private space, people participate in public activities and interact with strangers in social networking sites, online video games and news forums while the body is physically situated in private environments, e.g. home; whereas in privatizing public space, through digital media devices, users isolate themselves from other participants and build private zones to interact with acquaintances in physical public environments, such as local coffee shop and urban plazas. The juxtaposition of public and private life has challenged the existing theories of place-making in public spaces. Following the step of previous studies in social interactions and public spaces, this research adopts behavioral observations as the major methods to investigate current public spaces. Different types of computer-mediated public spaces were selected and examined. After careful investigations and analyses, the findings of this research pointed to two directions. On one hand, in the same type of computer-mediated public spaces, the ability to closely observe the interaction partners facilitates social interactions and enhances sense of place. If users are able to perceive more visual cues of appropriate behaviors, they experience better social interactions and attach sense of place to the environment. On the other hand, each type of computer-mediated public spaces is equipped with its social potentials and design problems. Although users somehow experience perception and interaction difficulties in the socializing private space due to the limited visibility to the interaction partners, the worldwide social pleasure, unexpectedness and exclusive activities associate the environment with sense of place. In the privatizing public spaces, people are able to directly sense, consciously understand, and automatically response each other; however, their ignorance of physical surrounding decreases sense of place. Therefore, by learning from different types of computer-mediated public spaces, the outcome of this research contributes to the design of both physical and virtual public spaces. It provides practical suggestions to the designs of information technologies as well as spatial designers. Furthermore, the analysis scheme and experimental process of this research extend the methodological approach for the future research of social interactions in public spaces.

Cites successful examples of community-based policing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Intelligent Interactive Technologies and Multimedia, IITM 2013, held in Allahabad, India, in March 2013. The 15 revised full papers and the 12 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 90 submissions. The papers present the latest research and development in the areas of intelligent interactive technologies, human-computer interaction and multimedia.

Sustainable Cities simultaneously tackles two issues of immediate public concern which also find themselves high on the policy agenda: sustainable environmental development and urban development. The themes of the book - the bringing together of the insights of environmental science, the social sciences and management; the combination of problem analysis with practical application; and a critique of urban environmental problems concentrating on air and water pollution - are illustrated throughout with in-depth material and case studies taken from around the world and are approached from a variety of perspectives: economic, ecological and managerial. Each chapter has a concluding section pointing to key concepts, key reading and a range of discussion points.