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The city of Singapore has a very short history of 185 years. However, since 1972 , Singapore has been confronting significant transformations owing to different agendas and priorities of the city government. The present morphology of the city can be best described as the accumulation of different layers, carefully controlled and manipulated by the State through planning and design. Hence, the public spaces within the city are formed as a result of the interactions among these layers. The inclusion of each layer not only shapes the physical form of the public space, but also adds a newer set of meaning by adding new functional role within the existing fabric. This article is a result of the preliminary investigation of a research project that observes the urban transformation of Singapore from 1972 to 2005 within the framework of this layered morphology. It will delve deeper to discern and identify the layers that act as the main determinant for shaping the urban public spaces in Singapore.

Urban public open spaces are an important part of the urban environment, creating the framework for public life. The transformation of open space into successful public places is crucial in this regard. In the context of target-driven performance it is essential to identify the value of successful public open places, along with characteristics that define them. This research evaluated three case studies in Belgium (Namur, Wavre and La Louviere) which successfully transformed spaces into lively public open places. The transformation was captured by means of before-and-after imagery and analyses, and evaluated in terms of space-usage prior to, and after redesign, along with the experience and added value that the redesign brought to the area.

A case study of the renovation of New York City’s Bryant Park, this article revisits the end of public space thesis. The renovated park signifies not the end of public space but the new ends to which public space is oriented. In Bryant Park, a new logic of urban publicity was assembled and built into the landscape. The social and technical means by which this transformation was achieved are analyzed. New public spaces of this sort promulgate a conception of the public that is decoupled from discourses of democratization, citizenship, and self-development and connected ever more firmly to consumption, commerce, and social surveillance. If such places do not herald the end of public space, they do represent “publicity without democracy.”

The aim of this article is to explore new ways of integrating technology, nature and infrastructures into urban public spaces. This is done through a case study, the design of General Vara del Rey, which is offered here as a model to explore a novel urban political ecology that calls into question dominant definitions of public spaces as self‐contained sites operating independently of natural and infrastructural spaces. Through the double movement of ‘the technification of public space’ and ‘the publicization of infrastructures’, the square aims to rethink the political ecology of urban public spaces by enabling the effective incorporation and participation of infrastructural and natural elements as active actors into the public and political life of the community. It is argued that the transformation of infrastructures into fully visible, public and political agents provides a useful model to address the growing proliferation of infrastructural and technological elements onto contemporary urban surfaces and to open up the possibility of new forms of civic participation and engagement.

In 2003, for the second year running, the Paris municipality entrusted a young theater designer with the transformation of one stretch of the banks of the Seine River—normally congested with heavy traffic—into an open space evocative of the seaside. Paris in August is therefore Paris by the seaside. The objective of our study is to examine the entire operation, from the moment the political decision was taken by the municipality to the many and varied activities of all those who participated. Through this study, we attempt to highlight the different forms of material and symbolic (re)creation of Paris being undertaken today. We show that in a situation such as this, a reflection on the fieldwork undertaken and the production of ethnographic knowledge is in fact the key factor in the analysis.

This paper examines how the decentralization of state power and, advent of mayoral elections in Bogota ́, Colombia, enabled municipal government, with the help of a cadre of professional planners and designers, to transform the city socially and physically by reinventing civil society and public space. Three contiguous mayoral administrations used public space as a setting and tool to reinvent a culture of citizenship as well as to demonstrate competency on behalf of the mayors. The mayors’ strategy was largely successful as Bogota ́ has experienced a move from individualism to collective spirit, and citizens report improvements in civility, friendliness and quality of life. Much of the city’s success derives from the vision of the mayors and the important role urban planners and designers provide in implementing that vision. By examining Bogota ́’s transformation, it is possible to better understand how local politicians and planning and design administrators are key to that change.

This article explores the public spaces of Laredo, a city situated on the border of the United States and Mexico along the Rio Grande. The construction of urban history is shaped by changes in public space—its physical settings, access to residents, and utilization by people. The author analyzes the transformation of public spaces and public events of Laredo to trace how amnesia and remembering are reflected in the cityscape. Public events reproduce assorted versions of urban history and help scholars to locate what part of history is preserved and what part is erased in the collective psyche of the community. The visual history of public spaces and events thus conserves a narration of the past, one that shapes collective memory and self-image.

This paper plots the recent changes in the uses of public space in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is argued that the economic and social changes in contemporary Vietnam have paved the way for a dramatic transformation in the ways in which streets, pavements and markets are experienced and imagined by the populace. The efflorescence of individual mobility, street-trading and public crowding around certain popular events has led to the emergence of a distinct public sphere, one which is not immune from state control and censure but which is a flagrant rebuttal of the state's appeal. The immediate struggles over space herald a new discursive arena for the contest over Vietnamese national imagery as represented in cultural heritage and public space, memorials and state-controlled events which the public are rapidly deserting. The paper concludes by suggesting that the everyday cultural practices that have created a bustling streetlife in urban Vietnam will inevitably provide the vitality and spectacle for the destabilisation of state control in a struggle for meanings in public space.

How might the urban structure and public space of Christchurch change as a result of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes? This paper will look at council and community led post-earthquake urban space projects in Christchurch, New Zealand, to investigate the potential reconfiguration of urban public space and structure and the balance of top-down and bottom-up design processes for the delivery of these projects. This will be achieved by comparing the performance of the urban public space and structure of the city during the post-earthquake emergency and recovery phases, with a view to understanding the contribution that these elements can make to the resilience of Christchurch. The paper will argue that Christchurch’s nineteenth century urban structure served the population well during the emergency phases of the disaster and that post-earthquake community-led initiatives model innovative capabilities which may enhance urban design practice in the future.

This two-part essay analyses the changing nature of the public realm in the evolving edge of the American metropolis and the implications for urban design and planning. Many forces are changing the form and use of public space in cities--concerns for safety and liveability, increasing dependence on telecommunications, decline in public revenues, the privatization of many amenities, and an increasingly pluralist society. The essay specifically focuses on the historical influence of planning and design practices on suburban form: density levels, land use and zoning patterns, suburban layouts and streetscapes. Field surveys and morphological analyses of urban edge patterns from the San Francisco Bay area document the current state of the suburban public realm. The second part of the essay will examine how physical planning can contribute to restoring a more vibrant public realm amidst raging debates over its changing nature and relevance.

This essay considers public art practice in post-apartheid Cape Town within the notion of symbolic reparations—a concept deriving out of South Africa’s Trust Reconciliation Commission. The paper situates developments in public arts practice in the context of developments in cultural politics in South Africa and globally. More especially, it discusses new genre arts projects, which focus on a range of issues related to identity, space and place. The projects—the District Six Museum, District Six Sculpture Project, PTO, Y30, BLAC, Returning the Gaze, and the In Touch Poetry Bus Tour—focus on issues such as rethinking monuments, the memorialising of ‘hidden histories’, engagements with racism and the abuse of power, and the reimagining of the city. The paper asks how these contemporary and often ephemeral projects, critically engage with issues of history, geography, memory and transformation and, in so doing, mark the landscape of Cape Town, making spaces for dialogue and/or standing as poetic symbols and challenges to the inequalities of the city.

Internal migration within Asian countries and international migration to, within, and out of Asia have been on the rise throughout the past decades. As types and pathways of migration, migrants’ sociocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and their transnational and translocal trajectories become increasingly diverse, a majority of them move to cities. Diverging power geometries and relations are constantly negotiated and (re)produced in the sociospatial dialectic of the city. Through their individual and collective agency, assets, and knowledge, mobile subjects have become important agents in the (re)production of spaces in cities, whereas the socio-political and physical conditions of spaces frame their livelihoods, opportunities, and agency. Research on migrants’ agency has intensified recently, but the specific modes through which agency operates in the socio-spatial dialectic still need to be conceptualised. We develop a framework that outlines different modes through which agents and space interact. The framework is exemplified through papers on case studies from Dhaka and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) that are part of this special issue. Dhaka and the PRD have been characterised by accelerated growth throughout the past decades, particularly due to the influx of rural-to-urban migrants, but they also receive an increasing number of international migrants. We conclude that through their diverse, multi-sited, and translocal relations and activities stretching beyond the receiving cities in a context of constant transformation, migrants’ practices contribute to the emergence of a specific type of urban spaces that we delineate as transient urban spaces.

Temporary uses of vacant urban spaces are usually not foreseen in conventional urban planning and have often been linked to economic or political disturbances. In New Zealand, Christchurch’s vacant spaces came into existence after the city was hit by several devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. Parallel to the ‘official’ rebuild dis- course, temporary uses have emerged on vacant post-earthquake sites including community gardens, urban agriculture, art installations, event venues, eateries and cafés, and pocket parks. Based on the review and analysis of exemplary transitional community-initiated open spaces and correlated literature, the paper looks at how the post-disaster urban context in Christchurch has influenced particular aspects of temporary urbanism in comparison with case studies in non-disaster environments. By focusing on the anticipated benefits of community-initiated open spaces, the paper dis- cusses the relevance of temporary uses of vacant urban spaces for urban sustainability in relationship to concepts of community resilience and raises questions about possible long-term values.

Planning issues for urban waterfront Redevelopment projects are examined in this paper, based upon case studies in New York, London, Boston and Toronto. The research programme was based upon over 100 interviews with key actors in the four cities. The paper is oriented towards practical problems in the implementation of planning. It generally considers the perspective of the redevelopment agency to consider waterfront planning and development techniques. The specific issues which are addressed include changing the waterfront's image, improving accessibility and controlling the quality of the physical environment. An incremental approach to implementation is recommended, with emphasis upon controlling the quality of the public realm and the role of urban design guidelines to guide private development.

This is a study of Istanbul's periodic bazaars and an attempt to place them in the context of contestation over urban space, urban poverty and informality. The periodic bazaars in the city are either disappearing or being moved to the outskirts. These trends reflect and reproduce spatial unevenness in the city, manifesting new forms of social exclusion and polarization. The city's increasingly commodified urban space has become an arena of social and economic contestation. We address these questions by focusing on the story of the relocation of one of Istanbul's most popular periodic bazaars, the Tuesday bazaar in Kadıköy. Our analysis reveals that the relocation and reorganization of bazaars in Istanbul in the 2000s have largely been driven by rising real‐estate prices in the city: land has simply become too precious a commodity to be left to the bazaaris. Furthermore, in the context of a pervasive neoliberal discourse on urban renewal and modernization that promotes the notion of a hygienic city, the bazaaris, it seems, have become the new undesirables of the urban landscape, leaving them under double siege from the commodification of public land and from spatially defined social exclusion.

The ground floors of buildings are a key element of the urban experience, yet the dynamics that shape frontages are largely unknown. This article delves into the forces and patterns behind the transforming relationship between architecture and public space in Western urban cores over the past century. After defining a methodology for structurally measuring the interactivity of ground floor frontages over time, the study focuses on two case study urban cores of Detroit, Michigan and The Hague, Netherlands. Through a combination of narra- tive historiography, detailed mapping and statistical studies a set of recommendations is generated to help urban designers and planners better understand and counter frontage decline. The two seemingly disparate cities are demonstrated to have undergone remarkably similar patterns of frontage interactivity erosion, with outcomes diverging as a result of an often reinforcing set of forces. Only upon understanding frontages as social, economic, cultural, political and technological constructs with physical, functional and connotative effects on public space will the profession be able to effectively steer the future of the architecture of public life.

Singapore is a multi-racial island nation. The three main ethnic groups are Chinese, Malays, and Indians in respective descending numbers. Prior to the extensive provision of public housing, they lived in either of two forms of housing: timber houses with roofs of "atap"—a form of palm leaves, corrugated zinc plates or asbestos sheets, or rows of shophouses of more permanent materials, such as brick and mortar, and later concrete. The shophouses were found almost exclusively in the central area, while the former was found in ubiquitous semi-rural Chinese villages "kampongs"—the Malay word for village—or urban squatter.

The current deployment of large screens in city centre public spaces requires a substantial rethinking of our understanding of the relationship of media to urban space. Drawing on a case study of the Public Space Broadcasting project launched in the UK in 2003, this article argues that large screens have the potential to play a significant role in promoting public interaction. However, the realization of this potential requires a far-reaching investigation of the role of media in the construction of complex public spaces and diverse public cultures.

This article analyses post-apartheid public spaces through social and spatial practices at the Victoria & Alfred (V&A) Waterfront mall in Cape Town. Our empirical evidence suggests that these public spaces involve much more than just consumption patterns, as they sustain and support novel ways of asserting social identities in a new political situation. These changes are, however, quite complex and fraught with ambivalence. Consequently, we scrutinize how race is staged in that space, and how racial diversity produces various kinds of boundaries. We then argue that these urban practices lead us to an understanding of the precarious balance between private and public spaces. We propose the notion of ‘publicization’ – the process whereby private spaces acquire a more public dimension.

City beaches are produced by spreading sand, deckchairs and umbrellas onto industrial brownfields, parking lots, rights-of-way or other under-utilized open spaces. Where major reinvestment projects are lacking, these informal developments offer great amenity. This approach to placemaking is post-Fordist. It is highly flexible, even mobile. It involves complex, temporary networks of people and resources. It focuses on ‘soft’ content—services, programmes, themes, atmosphere—rather than inflexible built form. This enables rapid innovation. Through four case studies, the paper explores the roles and relationships among diverse actors—city mayors, entrepreneurs, property developers, grass-roots organizations, think-tanks and planners—in the production of city beaches, and identifies what new policies, tools and management approaches they require.