Through illustrated case studies and conceptual re-framings, this volume showcases ongoing transformations in public space, and its relationship to the public realm more broadly in the world's most populous urban megaregion--the Greater Bay Area of southeastern China--projected to reach eighty million inhabitants by the year 2025.

This book assembles diverse approaches to interrogating the forms of public space and the public realm that are emerging in the context of this region's rapid urban development in the last forty years, bringing together authors from urbanism, architecture, planning, sociology, anthropology and politics to examine innovative ways of framing and conceptualizing public space in/of the Greater Bay Area. The blend of authors' first-hand practical experiences has created a unique cross-disciplinary book that employs public space to frame issues of planning, political control, social inclusion, participation, learning/education and appropriation in the production of everyday urbanism. In the context of the Greater Bay Area, such spaces and practices also present opportunities for reconfiguring design-driven urban practice beyond traditional interventions manifested by the design of physical objects and public amenities to the design of new social protocols, processes, infrastructures and capabilities.

This is a captivating new dimension of urbanism and critical urban practice and will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners interested in urbanization in China.

Miodrag Mitrasinovic is Professor of Urbanism and Architecture at Parsons School of Design, The New School. Miodrag is the co-editor of the Public Space Reader (Routledge 2021); editor of Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion (Routledge 2016); co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (Routledge 2009); and author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Routledge 2006). One of the foci of his scholarly work is infrastructural dimensions of public space, specifically at the intersections of urban and public design, socio-spatial justice and public policy.

Timothy Jachna is Professor of Architecture and Dean of the School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati. His recent research and publications deal with the impact of digital technologies on urban public space, as well as the relationship between material/performative and psychological/sociological aspects of the planning, design, construction, inhabitation and critique of urban environments.