Is it truly the "end" of public space? This handbook presents evidence that the answer is "no". In cities in different parts of the world, people still use public space to pursue activities of their choice.
The book is divided into seven sections. The first section presents three emerging types of public space. Each of the subsequent five sections focuses on a type of activity: recreation, commerce, protest, living and celebration. These sections are international in scope, presenting cases of activities in Brazil, China, Colombia, DR Congo, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Libya, Taiwan, Turkey and the U.S. The closing section, composed of three chapters, presents research methods for studying public space.
Graduate students, faculty members and researchers in social science, architecture, landscape architecture, geography and urban design will find the book useful for understanding, studying and designing urban public space.
About the Author: Karen A. Franck is Professor Emerita from the Hillier College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey. While teaching graduate and undergraduate students there, she also served as Director of the Joint Ph.D. Program in Urban Systems sponsored by NJIT and Rutgers-Newark. She took particular pleasure in advising Ph.D. students. Research conducted by many of them appears in this handbook. Karen's own research interests have spanned several topics: alternative housing (New Households, New Housing, 1989), building and place types (Ordering Space, 1994) and the design process (Architecture from the Inside Out, 2007 and Design through Dialogue, 2010). She pursued her interest in public space with Loose Space (2007), Memorials as Spaces of Engagement (2015) and this volume. Karen holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology from the City University of New York.
Te-Sheng Huang has been working in the Baltimore County Department of Planning in Towson, Maryland since 2020. He is now the Lead Planner of the Eastern Sector, one of the three sectors of the county. From 2014 to 2017, he was an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Feng Chia University in Taiwan. He also ran a small architectural firm and was responsible for the design of a pavilion in Taichung Folklore Park and the revitalization of the Rainbow Village in Taichung City. Te-Sheng holds a master's degree in Architecture from Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and a Ph.D. in Urban Systems from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark. For his dissertation, Te-Sheng studied the design, management and use of privately owned public spaces in New York City, finding that they are not as exclusive as commonly believed.
