11th EAEA Envisioning Architecture: Design, Evaluation, Communication Conference in 2013

Track 1 | Visualizing Sustainability - Making the invisible visible

Making the publicness of public spaces visible: from space syntax to the star sodel of public space

ABSTRACT

In an urban world greatly concerned with sustainable development, building more socially cohesive, environmentally friendly and economic competitive cities is a key prerequisite. Through their multiple functions and various roles, public spaces are central to achieving urban sustainability. However, public space is neither an uncontested nor an uncontroversial arena. Indeed debates on the “politics of space” continue to capture academic and public attention (see Mitchell, 2003; Kohn, 2004) raising important questions of social justice, such as: “Who makes and controls public space?” and “Who benefits from the development of new public space in the context of restructuring the city?” Reflecting these concerns, public space has become the subject of a growing academic literature from the full range of social sciences and humanities. One of the main difficulties of public space research is that a large amount of studies are descriptive and based mainly on qualitative research. A notable exception is Hillier’s Space Syntax theory, which has provided a theory of space and an analytic technique to model and measure the performance of cities’ spatial structure. Although highly innovative, the work of the space syntax team has focused on quantifying and illustrating only one key element of a public space’s publicness: accessibility. In order to understand publicness, other crucial elements that make a space public need to be integrated in the analysis. The Star Model developed by Varna (2011) in the PhD thesis is so far the first method of its kind that measures and illustrates publicness as objectively and holistically as possible.
This paper presents this new method of measuring and illustrating publicness, integrating space syntax and applying it on three public places from the city of Turku, in Finland.

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AUTHORS

Georgiana Varna

Scottish Cities Knowledge Centre, Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom

Dr Georgiana Varna is a multi-disciplinary scholar with a passion for making better places for people. Coming from a background of Human Geography and Planning, she has obtained her PhD at the University of Glasgow, Scotland in the field of urban studies. Her main speciality is public space development in the context of urban regeneration. After spending a year and a half in Finland, she is now a researcher at the Scottish Cities Knowledge Center, an ambitious new project for the development of Scotland's cities. Her work of the past six years will be published by Ashgate in late 2013, under the title Five Star Public Space.

Damiano Cerrone

Spatial Intelligence Unit, Architecture Department, Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia

Damiano Cerrone is a spatial planner and analyst with a BA in Urban Planning and GIS achieved at La Sapienza University of Rome and an MSc in Urban Studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In the past years he has undertaken an intense research activity funded by EUREGIO for the Development of the Helsinki -Tallinn Transportation and Planning Scenarios, focusing on spatial cohesion, accessibility and the Talsinki Decision Support System. Currently he is Principal Investigator of the Spatial Intelligence Unit (www.spinunit.eu) in Tallinn and PhD candidate on the Heritage of urban morphologies.

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