Public Space: (Critical Concepts in Built Environment)

By closely examining its public spaces, we can decipher the social, cultural and political life of a city. Public space is the arena for individual and group expression; a forum for dialogue, debate, and contestation; a space for conviviality, leisure, performance, and display; a place for economic survival and refuge; a site for the exchange of information and ideas; and a setting for nature. Public space has concerned philosophers, political thinkers, social scientists, legal scholars, planners, and architects and has also intrigued writers, painters, musicians, film-makers, and other artists. In this new four-volume collection from Routledge, Vikas Mehta brings together the key literature that encompasses the social and political issues in the making and experience of public space. It addresses the complete ecology of public space and the many interrelated issues. The set journeys the vast territory of public space to compile a multidisciplinary selection of materials that offer new as well as traditionally recognized principles of understanding and the making of public space. Public Space is fully indexed and includes comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editor, which place the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context. It is an essential reference collection and is destined to be valued by scholars and students—as well as policy-makers and practitioners—as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Table of Contents:
Volume I: Theorizing and Contextualizing Public Space Part 1: Philosophical and Theoretical Perspectives Part 2: Defining and Situating Part 3: Histories Volume II: Surveying and Appraising Public Space Part 4: Dying. Declining or Transforming? Part 5: Types and Typologies Part 6: Territories and Claims Part 7: Sensing Part 8: Studying and Evaluating Volume III: Owning Public Space Part 9: Rights, Power and Resistance Part 10: Managing and Securing Part 11: Diversity, Conflict and Negotiation Volume IV: Futures for Public Space Part 12: Global and Multicultural Perspectives Part 13: Design Principles Part 14: Looking Ahead: New Directions, New Meanings

Review :
“As a concise, cross-disciplinary synthesis I know of no current competition for the book. For designers, managers, and advocates of public places, Public Space is a cogent introduction, a call to action, and articulation of its complexities and import. For scholars of public space it offers an integrated review of work from multiple disciplines.” Mark Childs, Emeritus Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico "That it may work better when picked up and browsed than read front to back does not stop Public Space from achieving considerable scholarly value. The book is deeply grounded in planning history and theory, and contains an enormous volume of key ideas from across the urban design discourse. What’s more, Mehta voices a significant concern for the social, including contemporary debates around access and equity, crime and public safety. All of these could be confronted at greater length in a different book, but it’s something that they are included here at all, being (hopefully) communicated to an eclectic audience of urbanists and design professionals. If it even partly succeeds in the goal of sharing a wealth of ideas on this most important of human habitats across disciplines and professions, it is a worthy endeavor. Perhaps even a new model." Gordon Douglas, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and Director, The Institute of Metropolitan Studies, San José State University