Re-Making Public Space Through And In Asia

The essays in this volume offer a timely engagement with, and challenge to, accepted thinking about public spaces in cities. Within contemporary urban studies, how public spaces are thought of and theorized is often trapped within a largely Western tradition, which rapidly folds the nature of public space into larger questions of citizenship. Much of the recent debate about public space has focused on its “reregulation and redaction” such that the ability of these spaces to serve public interest is compromised. This might include any number of processes, from the colonization of public footpaths by privatized concerns, to the emergence of new hybrid public/private consumption spaces, to the introduction of surveillance technologies, to the crackdowns on political protests. This is important scholarship with a great deal at stake. There is another influential thread of scholarship on public space that emerged from in the North American city. This is more concerned with how public space is used in an everyday sense. This tradition traces back to William H. Whyte's The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Using New York City as his laboratory, Whyte observed how public spaces were used and how the design of public spaces influenced that use. In effect he was s systematically studying what my namesake Jane Jacobs' had in passing referred to as the “ballet of the street”. His methods and observations remain influential among urban designers and city planners, as is evidenced by the Project for Public Spaces…