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By utilizing the concepts of field, habitus, and capital inherited from Bourdieu, this study explores publicness as a social practice. In doing this, the paper problematizes publicness concerning accountability and public value and empirically explores the organization of social support delivery in Istanbul. We posit our research question: In what manners does publicness open up a space for collaboration and convergence in relation to accountability? The data gathering and analysis follow a qualitative methodology. We found different forms of publicness under three different conditionalities: (1) publicness as political authority based on hierarchization and centralization; (2) publicness as competing positions produced by diverse actors and their diverse positions taken beyond hierarchical relations; (3) publicness as social inclusion and diversity that is all‐embracing by employing more inclusive practices. Publicness relationally unfolds public value with and among formal rules, voluntary practices, and networks. By delving into constitutive elements of practice—symbolic capital and habitus—engaging in the field struggles of redefining and owning publicness, the paper goes beyond the conventional dichotomy of normative versus empirical conceptualizations of publicness and instead differentiates among distinct forms of publicness in different conditionalities and contributes to the literature by bridging publicness and accountability habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privatisation is a challenge for international law. Against this background, this article purports to identify a minimal ‘international public law’. Based on an account of publicness defended in the first section, the article’s second section explains how, although the ‘public’ had only been a reference in passing in the early law of peoples, an international law ‘of the public’ has gradually developed since the nineteenth century. As discussed in the third section, however, that public dimension has never been very strong, and may even be considered a vector of public/private hybridisation. In response, the article’s fourth section identifies the rights of States and other public institutions which may not be conferred to private persons and whose interpretation could be strengthened, while its fourth section turns to the States’ and other public institutions’ obligations that, when duly applied, set limits on the private exercise of these rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the figure of the 'virtuoso', as theorized by Paolo Virno, Isabell Lorey and others, as the contemporary contrarian par excellence. In particular, the essay looks at the role of language for virtuosity, and what analytical purchase might be offered by the notion of contrarian speech. Through a close reading of Peter Greenaway's Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), we will analyse the virtuoso's relationship with freedom, politics and power in connection with themes of creative enterprise and the public realm. The film permits us to explore virtuosity as contrarianism, that is to say: it helps us see how both mediate between freedom and servility, between ideas of self-grounding agency and a subjugating governmental logic and between different notions and practices of publicness in relation to symbolic forms of authority and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of malls in China raises questions about their roles as public spaces in Chinese cities. This article proposes the concept of everyday space of publicness to trace contextually sensitive ways that urban inhabitants make the mall a space for public life. The making of everyday space of publicness is evidenced using data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an inner-city open-air mall in Beijing. I demonstrate how the mall becomes an everyday space of publicness across three aspects: spontaneous social activities, cooperative practices of regulation, and users' interpretations of their mall experiences. Centering on mall users' everyday experiences and interpretations, these accounts offer nuanced insights into the dynamic relationship between urban spaces and publicness, and contribute to understanding the lived dimension of Chinese urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Landscape Architecture Frontiers is the property of Higher Education Press Limited Company and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Different understandings of what it means to be critical in the social sciences, especially in terms of the distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge, can be illustrated by the ongoing conceptual disputes about the critical epistemic value of public opinion and the public sphere as the main instantiations of publicness. The concept of the public sphere has gained prominence in media and communication theory, filling a void created by the decline of critical public opinion discourse, which was overshadowed by promotional publicity and opinion polls. Initially rooted in the German concept of Öffentlichkeit, this idea was revived in the English term 'public sphere'. Its adoption transcended disciplinary boundaries, sparking fresh critical perspectives in the study of publicness. Yet, this widespread adoption also brought about a certain dilution of the concept's epistemic depth. The digital age, characterized by the ascendancy of the Internet and the blurring of public–private boundaries, has greatly reshaped our comprehension of the public sphere, and expanded the scope of the concept. Today, however, the public sphere concept faces a fate reminiscent of administrative public opinion discourse following the proliferation of opinion polls. At a time when society is faced with issues related to the control of digital platforms by oligarchs, reevaluation and revitalization of the concepts of the public sphere and publicness become essential for comprehending the dynamics of modern communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: Public space is an important carrier for maintaining the cultural values of a village and the production and living customs of the villagers, but the use rights and boundaries are in an unstable and ambiguous state, and it is not a completely open and inclusive public space. The study aims to deepen the understanding of the publicness of public space in traditional villages from the perspective of subjective and objective combination, which reveals the relationship between the space and villagers' behavior. (2) Methods: The research established an evaluation framework for assessing the "publicness" of public spaces in traditional villages by integrating space syntax and cognitive surveys. This framework facilitates the analysis of the extent and dimensions of publicness, along with corresponding behavioral patterns, and explores the underlying mechanisms influencing publicness. (3) Results: The study reveals significant variations in the publicness of traditional village spaces. High-publicness areas tend to cluster, whereas low-publicness areas are more scattered, and riverfront regions exhibit greater publicness compared to mountain-adjacent ones. Villagers exhibit notable differences in their evaluations of public spaces, and individuals aged 14–18 and those over 66 rate the highest. The utilization rate of high-publicness spaces is significantly high, catering to a diverse array of activities. In spaces with lower publicness, the duration and variety of activities tend to be more constrained, often limited to rapid exchanges or brief respites, exhibiting a narrower scope of activities. (4) Conclusions: The study underscores the variability and complexity of publicness in traditional village spaces, which manifest not only in spatial layouts and types but also in villagers' usage patterns and behavioral preferences. This may be influenced by objective factors such as spatial accessibility, social interaction, and richness of cultural activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New technologies of algorithmisation, data mining, and artificial intelligence appear to elicit contentious impacts on the public sphere. Evaluations of these effects frequently diverge. A noticeable schism exists between critical/normative perspective, which highlights the problematic aspects of data exploitation, surveillance, and imperialism, and market-oriented empirical approaches. Drawing on a conceptual–historical argumentation that links current developments to a longer tradition of social communication research rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, the article highlights the contrast between the normative conceptualisations of publicness and public use of reason on the one hand, and empirical approaches aimed at measuring and managing the public(s) and public opinion on the other. The article first identifies the role of the opposition between Humean empiricism, which is based on the principle of conformity to past habits, and Kantian pure law of publicity, which is systematically opposed to such empiricism on many different layers. This opposition is also rooted in the Enlightenment foundational divide between religious and civil communities. It seems that today, with the predominance of data-driven approaches in adapting opinion to past expectations and beliefs, we are paradoxically again returning to the principles similar to those of functioning of pre-modern (religion- and tradition-based) communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines modern re-conceptualisations and re-contextualisations of publicness, proposing theoretical and empirical advancements in its conceptualisation. It critically analyses two significant developments following the English translation of Habermas's seminal work, "Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit." On the one hand, the book (re)affirmed the key role of communication and media in democratic politics and instigated a broad acceptance of the public sphere as a fundamental concept in academic discourse, leading to renewed research efforts and innovative developments. However, the subsequent conceptual fragmentation of (the concept of) the public sphere raised concerns about the loss of its original critical epistemic value. On the other hand, Habermas's book obscured important sociological traditions, contributing to a divide between normative theory and sociological analysis, exemplified by a neglect of the habitual roots of public opinion and contractual bonds in the evolution of publics. These aspects gain relevance within the context of the platform economy and artificial intelligence governing internet communication. The paper concludes by introducing the concept of the contractual public, which draws on the evolving dynamics between public and private spheres, and proposing four strategies to revitalise publicness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the idea of publicness, the process of becoming public, as a means of redressing the ambivalent position occupied by those going through the asylum system in relationship to the normative Habermasian public sphere. Through asylum claims and bids for citizenship people going through the asylum system seek entry to normative polities, yet are legally and culturally excluded from them. The paper in particular considers alternative creative communication practices employed by cultural and community institutions that seek to subvert this exclusion. I argue that we need a more flexible conception of how communication occurs in and around such publics to critically accommodate these tensions. The study draws on participant observation in community centres offering creative mediation activities in North East England and South Wales in 2019-2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the volunteerism approach is regarded as a helpful strategy, critical concerns arise regarding the dynamics of vulnerability and the publicness of disaster-affected communities’ collective action. This study aims to examine the publicness meaning of public interest and its function in enhancing resilience capacity through voluntary action. Using a hermeneutic approach, this study investigates the collective action of “Canthelan” food sharing within the environmental structure of the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, during the COVID-19 outbreak. The findings indicate that voluntary action in the context of “Canthelan” is a response to crises accumulated by the pandemic’s socioeconomic threat, the emergence of societal vulnerabilities, and the failure of social protection policies. Voluntary action functions as an alternative resilience mechanism for vulnerable and disadvantaged communities by providing access to and control over food resources in an egalitarian interaction space. Simultaneously, the constructed mechanisms become structurally aggregated knowledge narratives and manifestations of contestation concerning the development of resilience. Voluntary action mechanisms contribute to the development of social resilience through the mediation process, which is a process of mutual support and interaction to face and adapt to threats. However, the deterministic view of power authority hinders the transformative capacity of voluntary action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public space is the domain of interest for urban designers, and streets represent one of its most significant forms. In multicultural societies, public space users come from diverse social and ethnic backgrounds with varying interests and needs. Therefore, streets should serve as inclusive spaces designed for use by a wide-ranging public. While streets are inherently public, the questions regarding the extent of their publicness and their role in promoting multiculturalism remain significant. This paper aims to evaluate and compare the degree of "publicness" exhibited by streets situated within ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Drawing upon dimensions of publicness established by previous models and informed by observations and interviews, a set of criteria has been selected. The core dimensions of publicness encompass accessibility, management, and inclusiveness. The study assesses and compares three streets located in diverse neighbourhoods across New Zealand based on these criteria. The findings illuminate varying levels of publicness within the studied streets, providing insights into the key factors that impact the promotion of multiculturalism in urban settings. The results indicate that the publicness of a multicultural street is significantly influenced by the types of businesses clustered in the area, their associated characteristics, and the overall design of the built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of ‘open montage’, a framework developed to explore the media configurations between art, cinema, and urban space and the entangled relations this interplay presents in terms of publics and publicness. The unique perspective of our open montage concept enables us to put forth a framework for artistic arrangements in space, which liberates them from the confines of representation and human interpretation. Our argument for the notion of open montage also lies in its ability to challenge conventional theories about spectators, presenting them as active participants in a process of material embodiment bound by spatial and temporal constraints. The structure of our article revolves around the theme of openness. We draw on art, critical theory, and media studies literature to demonstrate the concept of open montage and its application in spatial coordinates. Subsequently, we explore the lens of posthumanism, aiming to challenge the linguistic account characterising the public dimension evident in the montage of our media configurations in space.

Undergoing dramatic changes in its form, structure and purpose, public space has recently drawn sharp criticisms from its investigators and its theorists. At the same time, for the public who use it, public space has continued to be meaningful and attractive. To understand what public space is and what constitutes its publicness in the city of today, I conducted a multiple-case study and prepared a doctoral dissertation Publicness of Public Space in the Contemporary City: Insights from Helsinki (Tamašauskaitė 2024). On March 1st, 2024, during the public defence of my dissertation, I gave a lectio praecursoria, which this short article is based on. In my lectio, I overviewed contestations over the concepts public space and publicness, suggesting that the publicness of contemporary public space shall be conceived through use and treated as a phenomenon that comprises three dimensions, namely activities, users and control. The focus of the lectio was on my main findings from the three publicly usable spaces within the Kamppi area of Helsinki: Narinkka Square, Tennispalatsi Square and Kamppi Shopping Centre. First, I highlighted that from my study, I learnt that the publicness of the three spaces is primarily activity-based, whereby their publicness is strikingly similar when the spaces are used in comparable ways. Next, I suggested that even if the diversity of user groups is highly important in ensuring a wide variety of activities, it is all those activities that intermix and combine with one another that produces an ecosystem out of activities and that reveal the dynamics of activity-based publicness to be situational. Finally, I argued that various means of control are but some of the matters that affect the actual and the possible use of public space, for the publicness of adjacent public spaces may also complement each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most tweeted events of 2020 is the #EndSARS protest that was carried out by Nigerian young people against police brutality. Yet the protest did not only happen on digital media. It eventually became evident on the streets, taking different dimensions including religious highlights. Apart from narrative accounts of the 12-day event that was brutally suppressed on 20 October 2020, there is yet to be any analysis of the critical aspects of the protest that attracted so much global interest. This article critically examines the #EndSARS protest within the background of a threefold criteriology of dissent, namely intentionality, criticality and publicness, as proposed by Ronald Collins and David Skover. Additionally, the article pays attention to the moral and epistemological components of dissent. The central objective is to provide a philosophical understanding of dissent and to determine how this is demonstrated in a complex society like Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, currently used as a set of standards by socially conscious investors to evaluate a company's operations before investing, are becoming an important global trend today. In particular, environmental and ecological crises are increasingly being seen as issues that will determine the sustainability of human civilization. Scholars of religion have been paying more attention to the issue as well. In fact, religion and environmentalism have emerged as sub-disciplines in, among others, religious ethics, religious studies, the sociology of religion, and theology. In view of this development, this paper aims to reexamine Minjung theology, literally meaning "the people's theology", which arose as a form of liberation theology in South Korea in the 1970s, from an ecological perspective, particularly focusing on the former's view on the relationship and interrelationship between the individual and the environment. The paper pays special attention to the work of Ahn Byung-Mu, a founding scholar of Minjung theology, shedding light on the connection between his concept of gong, literally meaning "publicness", and ecology, the characteristics of his ecological thoughts and their relevance to his view of god, and his views on bapsanggongdongche, literally meaning "the table community". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the classic questions in publicness literature is whether public and private organizations operate differently, and what implications they have for organizational outcomes. This study seeks to identify mechanisms through which publicness influences organizational outcomes that have a public value. Focusing on US acute care hospitals, we userealized publicness framework and investigate how regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive publicness affect the organizational strategies to offer public services that address patient health-related social needs (HRSN). Furthermore, we examine the effect of providing these public services on realized public value outcomes related to patient health and overall community benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public employers struggle with recruiting talents and labor market competition. Research on the understudied topic of employer branding can help address this challenge. This study presents five large-scale, pre-registered field experiments (n = 155,634) aimed at increasing the number of individuals initially interested in a job at a public employer. In social media ads, public sector values served as signaled employer value propositions (EVPs). The results show the importance of target groups and points of difference related to public employers' organizational type. Significantly fewer women show interest in a job, and for a municipal administration, a fair pay EVP has a negative effect. This study enhances the understanding of potential recruits' environment- and self-processing, bridges EVPs with public values theory, and provides a missing theoretical link between publicness and recruitment. It shows the importance of testing common assumptions about what works in recruitment in field studies with high external validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a series of narratives collected during the Covid-19 pandemic and after the port explosion in Beirut. The selected narratives cover “meaningful encounters” defined by the authors as acts of urban engagement that are able to challenge dominant or prejudiced perceptions in the city. These spontaneous and sometimes prolonged interactions seem to strengthen collective engagement and foster new opportunities to be together during strenuous and challenging times for all. The importance of this study stems from the fact that most of the designated public spaces are rather exclusive and fall short in bringing together the different factions of the community. In a context of increasing socio-spatial polarization, reading everyday practices, activities, and meaningful encounters in Beirut reveals a more comprehensive and inclusive notion of publicness and challenges the popular and sometimes biased perception of a fragmented city. This research draws from a combination of qualitative approaches that include both observation and collection of narratives. The final selection of narratives was based on their potential to illustrate what we considered to be typical cases addressing three different types of engagements with the urban context. The article seeks to better understand influences exercised by individuals over one another and the subsequent emergence of new places of encounters in the city. Finally, the article argues that the sites of encounters are rather fluid and spread beyond the footprint of traditional and designated public spaces, thus contributing to the reshaping of the public sphere in the city.

(1) Background: Public space is an important carrier for maintaining the cultural values of a village and the production and living customs of the villagers, but the use rights and boundaries are in an unstable and ambiguous state, and it is not a completely open and inclusive public space. The study aims to deepen the understanding of the publicness of public space in traditional villages from the perspective of subjective and objective combination, which reveals the relationship between the space and villagers’ behavior. (2) Methods: The research established an evaluation framework for assessing the “publicness” of public spaces in traditional villages by integrating space syntax and cognitive surveys. This framework facilitates the analysis of the extent and dimensions of publicness, along with corresponding behavioral patterns, and explores the underlying mechanisms influencing publicness. (3) Results: The study reveals significant variations in the publicness of traditional village spaces. High-publicness areas tend to cluster, whereas low-publicness areas are more scattered, and riverfront regions exhibit greater publicness compared to mountain-adjacent ones. Villagers exhibit notable differences in their evaluations of public spaces, and individuals aged 14–18 and those over 66 rate the highest. The utilization rate of high-publicness spaces is significantly high, catering to a diverse array of activities. In spaces with lower publicness, the duration and variety of activities tend to be more constrained, often limited to rapid exchanges or brief respites, exhibiting a narrower scope of activities. (4) Conclusions: The study underscores the variability and complexity of publicness in traditional village spaces, which manifest not only in spatial layouts and types but also in villagers’ usage patterns and behavioral preferences. This may be influenced by objective factors such as spatial accessibility, social interaction, and richness of cultural activities.

The paper explores the role of public space development in helping Shanghai strive for an “excellent global city,” an ambition prescribed by the city’s latest master plan, through quality- and people-oriented urban regeneration. Drawing on qualitative data collected for two case studies, namely the Huangpu River waterfront public space connection project and the community public space micro-regeneration initiative, the research discusses the publicness of these publicly produced public spaces with an extended place-shaping continuum as analytical framework. The research finds that public space development in present-day Shanghai, essentially a state project shaped by specific local ambitions and forces, not only opens up physical space for citizens’ daily enjoyment but also materializes the people-oriented ideals through the design and delivery of public spaces and discursively supports the city’s visionary narratives of building an “excellent global city.” This reflects the multifacetedness of publicness and complex scenarios of publicization, re-publicization and de-publicization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lacuna in our understanding of how publicness of public transit is being constituted is the primary point of departure for this paper. In recent times, publicness has been articulated through two parallel readings – one, a political economic reading that sees publicness through static macrostructural constraints; and two, micro-sociality aboard public transit manifests an in situ and spontaneous public space. Moving beyond the static and the spontaneous, we articulate a dynamic co-constituted notion of publicness. Building upon recent work that examines the entangling of micro- and macropolitics onboard public transit and relying upon a mobile ethnographic approach revolving around situated observation and interviewing surrounding buses located in the Indian metropolis of Bengaluru, this paper offers publicness as a contingent entity that is constituted through the process of transiting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works in media and communications studies have increasingly embedded the analysis of publicness within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and, interrelatedly, the new materialism. The result has emphasized the significant role that everyday objects play in engendering various publics. Yet, the uncritical incorporation of the new materialism and its bias toward present forms of materiality has led many scholars of the media to ignore the relationships between absent material objects and publicness. This is a key shortcoming since absent material realities are actively, and not so innocently, produced as non-thinkable alternatives to what exists, impeding externalized material worlds from becoming pronounceable as a need or an aspiration within the contexts of hegemonic globalization. In this essay, I draw on emerging works in media and communications studies, along with the social and political history of revolutionary Iran, as touchstones for a critical discussion on the linkages between publicness, materiality, and absence. I conclude with some observations and questions on publicness amid emergency climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although individuals have different kinds of defensive strategies towards identity threat, the relationship between identity threat and unethical behavior is still unclear. In the current study, according to identity threat and self-affirmation theory, we propose and test the role of publicness of identity threat in determining whether identity threat will lead to unethical behavior. One online experiment with 197 participants (mixed design) and one laboratory experiment with 86 participants (between-subject design) are used to test our hypotheses. Our findings reveal that when individuals' identity threat is from the public sphere, it will increase their unethical behavior, but when such a threat is from the private sphere, it will reduce their unethical behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions about the publicness of public spaces have started to take place more in the literature in recent years, depending on the privatization of urban spaces all over the world, especially after 1980. The wide scope of the subject and the fact that it is studied in other fields of social and human science other than spatial planning and design offers a very broad perspective. This diversity and richness of information bring some difficulties in determining and systematizing the information on priority fields of study. In this context two research questions emerged (1) what are the prevailing themes related to the publicness of public spaces and (2) how did these themes come together? In this study, the “all open access” SCOPUS Database and VOSviewer were used to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the publicness of public space documents. In this context, co-word analysis which is accepted as one of techniques of the bibliometric analysis has been applied. As a result of the analysis, themes (social media, public sphere, public, public art, etc.) and some subthemes related to the publicness of the public space were found and the relationship of these themes with each other was determined and visually displayed. Afterward, it was examined how these themes are handled in the literature. As a result, a conceptual layout has been created to guide the researchers who study the publicness of public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a series of narratives collected during the Covid-19 pandemic and after the port explosion in Beirut. The selected narratives cover "meaningful encounters" defined by the authors as acts of urban engagement that are able to challenge dominant or prejudiced perceptions in the city. These spontaneous and sometimes prolonged interactions seem to strengthen collective engagement and foster new opportunities to be together during strenuous and challenging times for all. The importance of this study stems from the fact that most of the designated public spaces are rather exclusive and fall short in bringing together the different factions of the community. In a context of increasing socio-spatial polarization, reading everyday practices, activities, and meaningful encounters in Beirut reveals a more comprehensive and inclusive notion of publicness and challenges the popular and sometimes biased perception of a fragmented city. This research draws from a combination of qualitative approaches that include both observation and collection of narratives. The final selection of narratives was based on their potential to illustrate what we considered to be typical cases addressing three different types of engagements with the urban context. The article seeks to better understand influences exercised by individuals over one another and the subsequent emergence of new places of encounters in the city. Finally, the article argues that the sites of encounters are rather fluid and spread beyond the footprint of traditional and designated public spaces, thus contributing to the reshaping of the public sphere in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publicness of publicly owned public spaces is an important concept that needs further examination, especially in countres like China where most urban public spaces are publicly owned and managed. This case study of Chongqing People's Square reveals that the transformation of municipal squares' publicness in reform-era China is closely linked with the country's shifting political and sociocultural contexts. We argue that despite traditionally valued public ownership and planning-design qualities, the crucial role of governance management in shaping the publicness of publicly owned and managed public space is not yet fully understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the very existence of community interests has arguably motivated states to engage in multilateral treaty-making, create international organisations and criminalise conduct internationally, among other things, the foundational 'publicness' of public international law appears largely under-explored among public international lawyers. A turn to publicness is rendered all the more necessary by the blurring divide between public/private, in the face of globalisation processes that have been affecting the way in which public interests, goods and functions traditionally thought to be within the exclusive remit of state sovereignty are defined, negotiated and acted upon by private entities. Looking at 'publicness' as an epistemic tool, this contribution critically revisits how private actors engaging with areas of common interest have actually shaped the contours of 'public' in a public international law context. It suggests to (re)imagine the 'publicness' in order to be able to guide practices instead of being forged by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study taps into the knowledge of practitioners who have hands-on experience of public sector accounting at the local government level. As the public sector and public services are developing by progressively reducing bureaucracy and focusing on improving efficiency and effectiveness, accounting practices should also evolve to meet these challenges. This article demonstrates the importance of involving experienced local government officials in discussions that include changes in accounting practices. Their feedback would enhance the value added of suggested changes, by decreasing the risk that new methods are not applicable or not practical and end up being only ceremonial in nature. This article explores the perspectives of government accounting practitioners about how far public sector accounting should follow in the footsteps of private sector accounting practices. Accounting practitioners in Polish local government have been facing changes to introduce more 'modern' accounting practices for around 15 years. The authors reveal practitioners' scepticism underlying the introduction of some doctrines of New Public Management related to accounting. While supporting the accrual accounting principle, the more experienced practitioners appeared more doubtful about the utility of accrual accounting practices in the complex local government scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public value of public spaces within existing market paradigms is being ignored. The existence of the public sphere is a fundamental requirement for preserving a democratic environment in everyday life. The question of which functional spaces can revitalize the values of publicness is essential. This article takes a critical look at the erosion of democracy and publicness. It contributes to urbanism by looking at it from a social science perspective. The review article method associates different interdisciplinary concepts used in various disciplines, It is a theoretical article that tries to go beyond the typical evaluation of spaces to examine the qualities that revitalize publicness using conceptual relations to draw attention to the fact that the functions of different architectural structures can also effectively revitalize publicness. Based on this, it argues that the variety of functions considered in the context of social facilities in the urbanism literature can be grouped according to different definitions. The article questions how social facilities associated with publicness can function as social infrastructure in the context of public space. This perspective requires one to look at spaces in urban planning using qualitative definitions, which, in turn, requires one to examine the concept of social infrastructure using definitions from social disciplines due to the fact that a human-centered perspective is necessary in order to identify spaces with the potential to revitalize publicness. This theoretical approach looks at planning from the perspective of communicative rationality. In addition, it is also essential to understand the types of social infrastructure elements to consider as public space tools in terms of the qualities of living publicness that bring the public sphere into existence. This makes the qualities one wants to define as social infrastructure essential. Tools that function as public spaces should offer qualities that revitalize publicness and thus diversify the public sphere. This article analyzes the qualitative relations between the concepts of publicness and social infrastructure to reveal the kind of social infrastructure needed to provide the qualities that revitalize publicness. One can consider social facilities as social infrastructure tools in the context of their role in the development of social reinforcement that strengthens the public sphere. With this perspective, the article proposes that the limits of the concept of public space in instrumental planning can be transcended and that new and contrarian spatial tools can also be considered in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Policy & Internet is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research delves into the multifaceted nature of publicness, offering insights into areas in the field of public administration. In times, the importance of publicness has grown significantly as it plays a role in shaping interactions among the public sector, private organizations, and civil society. Despite the available literature on publicness, there remain a few underexplored aspects that merit further investigation. This study reviewed the existing literature to identify and analyze gaps in research on publicness. By examining various perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and relevant aspects related to publicness, we discovered domains where scholarly discussions have notably lacked attention. The results of this study demonstrate that the concept of publicness encompasses a diverse range of theoretical perspectives, such as the management of publicness, public-private partnerships, governance, and the provision of public goods. Each element provides a distinct contribution to the comprehension of publicness in public administration. Moreover, this study highlights issues discussed in publicness, including public enterprises, public leadership, public facilities, public interest, public-private partnerships, governance, public goods, public space, public organizations, public value, and public service. These findings lead to a proposal for further research initiatives in publicness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publicness discourse has been extensively explored from the perspectives of numerous disciplinary interests, multiple actors, especially the government and expert professions, and its normative ideal. This study examines how individual engagement in shaping private and semi-public space could be viewed as a means of reframing the publicness of everyday life and thereby contributing to the shaping of cities. Through examining the rationale of build-by-people trials in Shanghai, categorising in stewarding practise, DIY tactic, and informal trial, this study anticipates shedding light on the particularities of publicness in the contemporary Chinese context. Drawing on empirical data from observation and interviews, the study discusses different facets of build-by-people trials, including the combination of desire and belief to push individuals to be a part of the public, contribution to forgotten spaces, impact on social relationships, as well as concerns on privatisation. The analysis demonstrates that the current ‘build-by-people’ trials have manifested their capacity to proactively engage concerned citizens, develop forgotten spaces, and advance a broader sense of publicness discourse. However, additional research is needed to investigate how to maximise the value of ‘build-by-people’ practises in a sustainable manner, and how to strategically advocate for more ‘public-isation’ processes while keeping the privatisation scenario from deteriorating.

We need to know more about the financial accountability of corporatized public services. In this article, the authors analyse the audit fees of a large sample of English local SOEs from 2009–2017, assessing the impact of board composition and ownership structure on those fees. SOEs with more politicians on their boards of directors had higher audit costs and this was especially so for majority-owned SOEs. This article highlights the need for policy-makers to evaluate the consistency of auditing arrangements for the hybrid arm's-length organizations delivering public services. This article investigates the relationship between political control and audit fees for local state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in England—hybrid public service organizations not subject to public sector audit. Panel regression techniques are used to analyse secondary data on 405 SOEs for 2009–2017 where major local authorities held an interest. Statistical results suggest greater political representation on boards of directors of local SOEs is associated with higher audit fees and positive relationship between political control and audit fees is stronger for majority public ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The booming development of the Internet and extended reality technology has changed the way communities transmit information. Individual needs and emotions can get the possibility of multi-dimensional display in virtual space, which makes the boundary between virtual and real space tend to blur, and motivates people to participate in public things. This paper focuses on the topic of publicity in virtual space, studying how to build a user content generation platform based on virtual space, guiding users to spontaneously form communities in their creation, constructing a virtual community, and solving the problems and demands they encounter. At the same time, the factors that attract the establishment of communities are explored from the perspective of publicity, namely the desired goal of wider public participation, the inclusiveness of the host content, and the support services of the platform. It tries to provide a different perspective for thinking about the relationship between designers and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores how contracting out can contribute to the fiscal sustainability of public services. Together with the economic advantage that contracting out can lower production costs over government production in house, contracting theory informs that contracting out can offer an insulation of efficient and effective service production from the political incentive problem of the principal. Hypotheses from the perspective are tested over panel data on subnational public service facilities operated via user fees in South Korea. As hypothesized, the analysis results confirm a positive relationship of contracting out with net revenue over government production. While both regionally/municipally owned corporations (R/MOCs) and nonprofits demonstrate their capabilities as competent partners of a government, nonprofits are more effective at the generation of net revenue. The study discusses the implications of contracting out for publicness and a style of governance that actively utilizes the flexibility and expertise of organizations outside a government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past five decades, privately owned public open spaces (POPOS) have become increasingly prevalent and significant in urban areas. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant changes in the performance and utilization of these spaces as the internal functions of adjacent buildings were shut down. This offers an opportunity to address the research gap in the theory of publicness—one of the most crucial attributes in these places due to their ownership and management—by assessing user satisfaction with spatial publicness in POPOS independently of adjacent commercial and corporate functions. This study aims to identify key environmental factors that significantly affect user satisfaction during a pandemic and develop adaptive strategies to enhance user satisfaction and resilience in such contexts. Based on a comprehensive literature review of previous assessment criteria for spatial publicness, the study proposes 30 vital indicators. Importance-performance analysis (IPA) is employed to analyze changes in user satisfaction regarding these vital indicators. Data from 386 users of Plaza Gae Aulenti in Milan, Italy were collected via an online questionnaire. The findings reveal that optimizing physical facilities and visual permeability are crucial environmental factors for promoting a higher degree of publicness during pandemics, as evidenced by a comparison of pre-COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 feedback. This study addresses the research gap by assessing the spatial publicness of POPOS independently of adjacent commercial and corporate functions. These findings have practical implications for the design and regulation of future projects in the post-COVID-19 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waterfront intervention, as one of the post-industrial reuse paradigms, has flourished around the world and been studied as a global phenomenon. This paper investigates the application of a dual adaptive reuse strategy to industrial heritage waterfront buildings and explores its social significance. The case study is of the West Bund, a waterfront renovation in Shanghai, China. Insights are drawn from the qualitative research approach of triangulation, with evidence derived from document sources, archival records, direct participants and semi-structured interviews. This paper examines a series of galleries and landscapes created from former industrial buildings and facilities along the Huangpu River. It concludes that the West Bund exemplifies a dual strategy of adaptive reuse: art-led and landscape-led building reuse. This dual strategy can be viewed as an endeavour to balance urban gentrification and publicness in the megalopolis. It can also be argued, however, that the dual approach to adaptive reuse is unsustainable within the framework of an entrepreneurial state, and significantly so in the post-epidemic era when economic growth pressure increases. This study contributes to our understanding of the complex nature of industrial heritage in the rapidly shifting landscape of contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Kastamonu University Journal of Economics & Administrative Sciences Faculty / Kastamonu Üniversitesi Iktisadi ve Idari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi is the property of Kastamonu University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Community planning has undergone changes in direction over time, from a traditional neighbourhood approach seeking to ensure well-functioning local communities to a newer focus on the feasibility of neighbourhood-based urban renewal for combating segregation. The latter initially concentrated on the internal social relations of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, but nowadays the focus for interventions is changing towards opening up such neighbourhoods to improve their external relations with more affluent surrounding districts. This article unfolds the visions related to a new urban planning strategy for constructing common meeting places inside disadvantaged neighbourhoods, which seem closely related to the political discourses about the need for opening these neighbourhoods up. Specifically, the article scrutinises the visions for two meeting places currently being constructed in two Danish neighbourhoods characterised as disadvantaged, and it examines which problems these meeting places seek to solve and how they are intended to provide for publicness. The study reveals that, despite being part of the same strategic funding programme and having similar problem framings, it is claimed that the two future meeting places will provide for publicness in distinct and context-specific ways. Furthermore, we show that the way problem representations entangled in specific political discourses are being manifested in specific local planning strategies may have contingent, yet potentially pervasive social and physical consequences for local neighbourhoods.