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This study aims to investigate the connection between property owners and shopfront retail changes on main streets, exploring the role of private property ownership in retail gentrification. Examining four inner-city streets in Stockholm between 2009 and 2018, a commercial gentrification index reveals patterns of retail gentrification. Privatization in Stockholm (1990–2010) resulted in cooperative housing associations (CHAs) becoming the dominant property owners. Retail gentrification is slightly more pronounced among CHA-owned properties. Interviews with 122 small-business owners renting from CHAs indicate that their short-term economic interests limit efforts to counteract retail gentrification, favouring its exacerbation over preserving independent retailers on main streets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses gaps in knowledge about whether or not smart street furniture could enhance the relationship between people and place, and whether it improves the design, amenity and management of public open space. An Australian design team, comprising a local council, a street furniture manufacturer, and academics, designed, built, piloted, and assessed a new piece of smart street furniture called a 'ChillOUT Hub'. This Hub is an integrated street furniture system, designed for public open spaces. It is enabled with 'smart' technology features such as Wi-Fi, mobile device charging stations, plus infrastructure usage and environmental sensors. The Hub aims to support social health, improve microclimatic conditions, and provide equitable access to technology. Street survey processes were undertaken with both 'users' and 'non-users' of the Hubs. The findings help to identify what value digitally enhanced street furniture actually has in open space and how that value is perceived by the public. The Council and Hub users overwhelmingly appreciated the newly designed street furniture and its smart amenities. Non-users clarified why they did not use smart street furniture and discussed the option of having digital amenities in public spaces more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review identifies research articles published in Event Management that discuss the use of public spaces for events. Events and festivals utilize public spaces, which are specific geographic locations in cities. These public spaces transform into places when imbued with meaning through experiences related to events and festivals. This article reveals that uniqueness, emotions, and cocreation through social interaction are important in facilitating events and festivals, although there is also the danger of becoming exclusive, commercialized, commodified, and privatized. Considering the dearth of studies looking at public spaces, future studies may delve into analyzing public space utilization during events and festivals, aiming to unveil spatial trends pertinent to both a city's overarching urban policies and its tailored event (and tourism) strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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With economic development and changes in the industrial structure of cities in China, the transformation of industries from agricultural to non-agricultural has brought about significant changes in the living spaces, economic growth, ideology, and cultural attitudes of rural people. Placing people first and responding to rural residents’ wishes in the process of rapid development could become an important issue. This study focuses on the relationship between the well-being experience of relocated residents in rural areas and the public realm of new communities, and constructs a framework for understanding the relationship between the two. By doing so, it aims to resolve the conflict between the design of new settlements and the residents’ needs, thus providing a reference for similar designs in the future.

The term "the space of appearance," which originates from the writings of Hannah Arendt, resonated strongly within the writings of Kenneth Frampton. In this article, I trace how Frampton understands this notion. As he has been mostly concerned with the democratic necessity to establish a public realm, he laments the loss of architecture's ability to establish such a realm. Arendt's notion informs him to turn to the local and thus can be understood as informative with regards to his engagement with "critical regionalism" and his attempt to define an architecture resisting neocapitalist urbanisation and its inherent placelessness. By introducing Martin Heidegger's distinction between space and place, he connects Arendt's "appearance" to bounded spaces and the notion of proximity. Frampton, I claim, nevertheless does not align the "space of appearance" with particular spatial typologies, but develops his understanding of the potential (or lost potential) of architecture through the reflection on specific projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labics (Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori with a text by Marco Biraghi) The Architecture of Public Space Park Books, 2023

This article addresses gaps in knowledge about whether or not smart street furniture could enhance the relationship between people and place, and whether it improves the design, amenity and management of public open space. An Australian design team, comprising a local council, a street furniture manufacturer, and academics, designed, built, piloted, and assessed a new piece of smart street furniture called a ‘ChillOUT Hub’. This Hub is an integrated street furniture system, designed for public open spaces. It is enabled with ‘smart’ technology features such as Wi-Fi, mobile device charging stations, plus infrastructure usage and environmental sensors. The Hub aims to support social health, improve microclimatic conditions, and provide equitable access to technology. Street survey processes were undertaken with both ‘users’ and ‘non-users’ of the Hubs. The findings help to identify what value digitally enhanced street furniture actually has in open space and how that value is perceived by the public. The Council and Hub users overwhelmingly appreciated the newly designed street furniture and its smart amenities. Non-users clarified why they did not use smart street furniture and discussed the option of having digital amenities in public spaces more generally.

From a social pedagogical perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic has (re-)raised the question of what constitutes social bonds. In this article, we focus on participatory art, as a practice that in recent decades has been put forward as a (new) pedagogical project in dealing with complex societal issues, especially in urban areas. Drawing on the connection between participatory art and the urban public realm, our purpose is to explore the potential of these practices to rethink the nature of social coherence in a context of post-crisis reconstruction. Based on a bi-monthly follow-up of 10 Brussels participatory art practices, we explore how these practices have or have not been able to cope with the pandemic, how the public realm unfolds within this process, what this entails for the (future) role of practitioners and what we might learn from these practices in terms of finding a new voice for arts and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young women's (im)mobilities are influenced by a web of factors at the individual, interpersonal and macro levels of analysis. These factors, including young women's social identities, perceptions of themselves and their environment; parental rules; transportation systems; and systematic inequalities, influence how, at what times and where young women access the public realm. In this article, I argue gender is an often-hidden but significant force shaping young women's (im)mobilities in the public realm at different levels of analysis. Drawing attention to how gender influences mobilities is a necessary first step to making the public realm inclusive and accessible for women of all ages. This research was undertaken as part of a PhD in Social Policy. Qualitative data were collected with 41 participants over 8 months using semi-structured interviews and a pilot series of participatory workshops. Participants included young women, their mothers, key adults in young women's lives, and policy professionals. The findings reveal how gender suffuses the experiences, decisions, regulations, and policies informing young women's mobilities, often with a limiting effect. However, the strength of gender as a force affecting young women's mobilities, and the recognition of the role of gender in mediating young women's travel varied among participants. The contextual and intersectional nature of young women's mobilities accounts for this variation and begins to explain it. The research focused on the experiences of young women in Scotland, but the findings illuminate the persistent, and surprising ways that gender shapes young women's (im)mobilities in different contexts around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban form is defined as the physical composition and arrangement of elements that form urban areas, which have been affected by many driving forces and unseen factors. In general, urban spaces are formed as a reaction to the composition of buildings and the rest of urban form elements. Conventional urban design processes recommended isolated buildings, sited in landscape without offering integration to streets and other public spaces, which resulted in un-integrated spaces and streets without a real understanding of human behavior. Therefore, the term Social Streets describes the type of street that promotes socialization among neighbors on the same street to build relationships, exchange needs, and knowledge, and receive help from closer social interaction. Many researchers have studied the public realm and spaces of social housing projects in Egyptian new cities, as well as the opportunities for place-making and their impact on the social and psychology of users, raising the gap in studying the role of planned streets in achieving sociality and social integration in the public realm. The research is based on creating a quantitative description of street systems in housing projects by applying the route structure analysis method using Arc GIS to the street network, which will result in reading the degree of connectivity for streets and studying building facades relationships to streets, which can provide a more understanding of the relationship between buildings and streets, that will reflect the degree of liveliness and sociability of the urban streets. يُعرّف التشكيل العمراني بأنه التركيب المادي للعناصر التي تشكل المناطق العمرانية، والتي تتأثر بالعديد من القوى الدافعة وغير المرئية. وبشكل عام فإن الفراغات العمرانية تتشكل كرد فعل على تكوين المباني وبقية عناصر التشكيل العمراني. معظم عمليات التصميم العمراني الحالية قد أدت إلى تشكيل المباني بمعزل عن باقي عناصر التشكيل الأخرى دون توفير التكامل مع الشوارع والفراغات العمرانية، مما أدى إلى تكوين مساحات وشوارع غير متكاملة قد لا تتناسب في أحيان كثيرة سلوك المستخدمين. ولذلك فإن مصطلح الشوارع الاجتماعية يصف الشوارع التي تعزز التنشئة الاجتماعية بين الجيران في نفس الشارع لبناء العلاقات وتبادل الاحتياجات والمعرفة. قام العديد من الباحثين بدراسة الفراغات والساحات العامة بمشروعات الإسكان الاجتماعي بالمدن المصرية الجديدة، وكذلك فرص صناعة المكان وتأثيرها على الحالة الاجتماعية والنفسية للمستخدمين، مما يعكس الفجوة العلمية في دراسة دور الشوارع في تحقيق الاندماج الاجتماعي في الفراغات العامة. يعتمد البحث على الوصف الكمي لأنظمة الشوارع في مشروعات الإسكان الاجتماعي من خلال تطبيق أسلوب تحليل هيكل شبكة الشوارع باستخدام Arc GIS ، مما سيؤدي إلى قراءة درجة ارتباط الشوارع بمداخل المباني ، والتي يمكن أن يوفر فهمًا أكبر للعلاقة بين المباني والشوارع، مما يعكس درجة الحيوية والتواصل الاجتماعي في الشوارع الحضرية.

Despite their perceived decline, local high streets in the UK remain valuable central and well-connected places that can foster ageing in place, yet their potential to sustain well-being in old age has been overlooked. Using qualitative methods, the paper explores what features of local high streets support older people’s well-being in three local town centres in Edinburgh, Scotland. The findings show there are three main domains of local high streets’ public realm that enable older adults’ well-being, namely the streetscape, the spatial organization and accessibility of amenities and services, and the provision of housing that can foster town centre living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last three decades, there has been a notable transformation in urban growth patterns in Kazakhstan's large cities, particularly in Almaty. While this can be traced back to marketoriented planning agendas, the increasing fragmentation of the public realm in cities can be linked to the recent residential development projects. The rise of these projects in post-Soviet neighbourhoods is often criticised due to their typology, as developers create them as gated communities. These patterns' socio and spatial fragmentation is associated with fewer opportunities for social interaction between Soviet neighbourhoods and the more recent exclusive communities. Therefore, this paper investigates the key issues present in the urban patterns of Almaty city that can hinder the creation of a more cohesive society. It presents a case study of other Soviet-developed neighbourhoods with similar development patterns. The study's methodology includes morphological mapping, observation of the use of the public realm and a survey of residents to support the findings. The investigation focuses on one of the typical urban patterns of mixed-use Soviet neighbourhoods and recent urban residential blocks, where an opportunity lies for perspective communities. The research reveals a lack of social cohesion between local communities due to monofunctional land use, poor permeability and accessibility that fragmented the city into closed neighbourhoods. The research dives into the core issues of Soviet and post-Soviet urban morphology's outcomes in the public realm and the impact on social life in these neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory budgeting has arisen as an interesting form of citizen participation in urban development and, thus, as a new way of exercising placemaking and grassroots democracy. In this article, we provide an analysis of projects in Lisbon (Portugal), Valencia (Spain), and Warsaw (Poland) with a focus on three key projects concerned with improving the public realm and their contribution to enhancing the network of public open spaces. Our guiding question is: What are the potential benefits of participatory budgeting to increase green spaces and urban governance? A comparison of the three cities’ participatory budgeting programmes provides an overview of their social and political goals and the contents that provide opportunities for citizens’ participation in decision-making. The cases of Jardim do Caracol da Penha (Lisbon), the Green Street Świętokrzyska (Warsaw), and the Green Plan for the Poblats Marítims District (Valencia) pave the way for a discussion on engagement, empowerment, and connectivity with the local communities through public spaces. Using participatory budgeting as a planning and political instrument at the municipal level, as the three cases show, can be a useful way to enhance and enrich the communities’ engagement with their environments. One aspect that emerged is the communication strategies implemented in the three cases. The analysis shows that the use of media and social networks to disseminate information and gather supporters for their ideas and this growth in political influence seems to be essential for participatory budgeting. The study is backed by desk work (comprehensive understanding of the local programmes) and field work to better identify the changes in loco.

This paper explores the current disconnect that exists between how US business districts are staffed and funded, and the increasingly complex way they interact with the surrounding community. It looks at the issues and challenges that have led to this point and explores a range of potential action items for countering this with proactive and holistic approaches. This includes consideration of the expansion of mixed-uses, post-COVID-19 evolution of live-work arrangements, the value of placemaking in the public realm, public–private partnerships, strategic investments and equity considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study of pavement regulation and usage in nineteenth-century Stockholm, probing how urbanites' interactions on and access to pavements were contested and negotiated, in the process shaping the publicness of streets. Utilising press coverage, it moves beyond a focus on infrastructure and political discourse, to capture urban dwellers' perspectives, claims and interactions. The article shows that, in favouring circulation, Stockholm's pavement regulations expelled or made subsistence-driven activities illegitimate. Pavement circulation also secured undisturbed, anonymous walking and the ability to maintain a distanced attitude towards others – to be private while in public. Yet pavements featured as a prominent public space not only because it was ordered and controlled, but because urbanites of all sorts fought for access. Next to allegedly "modern" usages, city pavements remained home to age-old but marginalised street practices, as well as middle-class women who had begun to claim their equal right of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public realm of Istanbul manifests a visceral fear and agony caused by several social–political conflicts and struggle which has impacted the everyday life of people. Through an artistic representation of public space perception and experience in Istanbul, we reflect on how the socio-political context impacts the everyday spatialities entangling individual and collective memory, current events and future un(certainties). Going beyond the dominant Eurocentric version of 'good' public space, in this provocation, we argue that, delineating these emergent and largely disruptive narratives can offer potential approaches for alternative city imaginaries to enable a collective sense of identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s the UK's city centre high streets have been losing market share to out-of-town shopping and e-retailing. The shocks of the Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 have hastened this and precipitated widespread store closures. The experience economy is increasingly promoted as a means to avert the 'death of the high street', and this prompts our study of its evolution. An exploration of the literature reveals the experience economy to be an interconnected phenomenon focused on the creation of a memorable event that elicits a sensory response via multi-dimensional innovation and design. Using this to guide our empirical work, we undertake a comparative mixed method longitudinal case study of five UK city centres. We initially chart the changing manifestations of experience uses before analysing supporting interviews and observations that reveal three interconnected layers of the experience economy: in-store commercial experiences; leisure and entertainment-orientated adaptations to shopping centres and department stores; and the wider regeneration of the public realm. Implications for city centre management are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a mixed-methods approach to investigate and assess the design of the public realm in Sharjah's old town or "the Heart of Sharjah", a regenerated and restored urban center, and to understand the features that contribute to a well-designed public realm in this specific context. A literature review is conducted to gather insights and identify key qualitative and physical features associated with user satisfaction and social engagement in public spaces. The physical features include diverse seating, shade greenery, water surfaces, landmarks, play zones, and economic activities. Similarly, various qualitative features were recognized including accessibility, adaptability, public participation, environmental sustainability, safety, and the creation of a sense of place. The current status of the public realm in the study area is later assessed using mapping and land-use analysis, utilizing Google Earth maps and on-site photographs for visual documentation. The identified features are used as evaluation criteria, and a systematic assessment of the design is conducted, highlighting areas where improvements are needed. Based on the evaluation results, recommendations are formulated to enhance the urban space and address the identified shortcomings, aiming to improve user satisfaction and promote social engagement. The evaluation findings indicate that the area lacks pedestrian accessibility, shading, various amenities, green areas water surfaces, and public engagement in design and management. This research contributes to the understanding of designing inclusive and vibrant public realms in historic urban contexts, providing valuable insights for urban planners and policymakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper investigates the potential of virtual reality (VR) technologies—specifically, building information modeling (BIM) ("Autodesk Revit") and game engines ("Unreal Engine")—to enhance public involvement in the design and execution of architecture and urban projects. The main research question focuses on comparing the effectiveness of these two methods in creating an interactive design model for participatory design in public spaces. Methods: The study employed a VR exploratory experiment with 33 participants, followed by semi-structured interviews to analyze two recent developments in London: the Sky Garden, and Crossrail Place Roof Garden. Participants interacted with the design models and provided feedback on their experiences. Results: The findings demonstrate that integrating VR with BIM software using the Enscape plugin effectively enhances user involvement, enabling real-time generation and testing of design alternatives. While both methods were found to be beneficial, participants reported a preference for the direct implementation of VR in BIM software. Conclusions: This research highlights the potential of VR technologies—specifically, BIM and game engines—as a co-design approach for public and social spaces in urban environments. It also identifies limitations and future research opportunities in adopting these methods for participatory design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinctive form of environmentally driven art and design practice has emerged in urban contexts over the last few decades. This practice has developed a unique discourse aiming to inform and rally the public to action. The global eco-didactic direction of this artwork not only demonstrates an alignment with pressing ecological issues but is driven by an urgent need to explain unsustainable anthropocentric practices. Adopting the public realm as an audience is key for these works, since this enables human encounters with the issues collectively, contributing to the potential of 'public space as a political forum'. This article poses the question 'are these works a means of revealing the Anthropocene?' A series of art and design installations are examined along with a discussion of the what these works aim to accomplish and how this can be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse around social media has gone through several dramatic twists and turns; from the early techno-optimism that envisioned a brave new borderless Agora accessible to all, to dystopian vistas of a chaotic “post-truth” political landscape of mutual distrust, hatred, and conspiracy theories. I will here attempt to combine Mueller and D’Ambrosio’s notion of “profilicity” with Arendt’s critique of “the social” and suggest that there are some problems specific to how we interact on social media that justifies skepticism regarding the new digital media as an arena for political activism and public debate.

In the last two decades, we have seen an increasing display of gestures and language of forgiveness in the public realm. Forgiveness has become a secular phenomenon. What do we mean by forgiveness? What is the role of forgiveness in the public place? Does it have the capacity to enhance the political life and well-being of a community? In The Human Condition, first published in 1958, Hannah Arendt offers an unapparelled reading of political forgiveness, described as a quintessential human faculty for the revitalization of the public and political realm. This paper seeks to investigate the implications of Arendt’s understanding of action and forgiveness for the life of the polis, in particular the promotion of a more hospitable public space. Situated within human capacity to act and to love the other in their uniqueness and despite their trespasses and failures, forgiveness contributes, as this paper seeks to demonstrate, to the enhancement of the political sphere by opening this space to “new beginnings.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging theme within the mega-events literature is the ways they affect the provision, regulation and design of urban public spaces. Parks, streets and squares host competition venues, and are also used for supplementary occasions and facilities associated with hosting mega-events. Using examples from the London 2012 Olympic Games and Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games, this paper examines the long-term significance of mega-events for urban public spaces. The paper contends that these events can be used as 'Trojan Horses', allowing new systems to be introduced under the cover of an event. It also emphasizes how temporary mega-events transform public spaces into venues for subsequent commercial events. Finally, the paper acknowledges more positive legacies, showing how mega-events can change how public space is imagined by users and by those responsible for managing it. Both cases highlight how events influence the ways spaces are used, designed and managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business improvement districts (BIDs) link the economic self-interests of property owners to public goals of open space management, economic development and urban revitalisation. New York City is home to more than 70 BIDs. This paper selects three representative case studies among New York City BIDs to analyse how the size of a BID relates to the roles it plays in funding and governing public-realm improvement initiatives. Specifically, by dissecting how small, medium and large BIDs deploy and generate resources for both recurring expenses and long-range capital projects, this comparative study argues that the relationship between budgets and capacities is not always linear. As the case studies demonstrate, although budgets lay the foundation for setting different operating priorities, it is the difference in governance factors, including stakeholder makeup, board representation, management and leadership, human capital and neighbourhood context, that charts different paths along which BIDs go beyond the limits of their annual income to lead long-term, consequential physical changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The viewpoint introduces the concept of "co-designing publics" by examining what lies at the potent intersection of the public realm and informal urbanisms, within the specific contexts of the cities of the global south. I define the public realm as interconnected spatial networks of public spaces intertwined with political structures that weave a city together, while informal urbanisms are the transactional conditions of ambiguity that exist between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable in cities. At their intersection are publics, who never simply exist because they are always created on an ongoing basis. In fact, publics are co-designed [i.e. co-created in inventive and multifarious ways] around common concerns or desire through volitional inquiry and action. I contextualise these discussions by paying particular attention to the cities of the global south, because place matters in shaping urban thinking and practice. There is an increasing interest in thinking and practicing from cities of the global south rather than just about them. The viewpoint then describes how these ideas were further investigated through grounded examples in different cities and articulated through interactive and collaborative events in the Co-Designing Publics international research network, funded through a grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. I then conclude with some thoughts on the implications of this work for urban theory and practice, which are applicable to cities in the global south as well as in the global north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apart from the traditional Kurdish gender regime, which originates from the Kurdish tribal structure and which to some extent restricts the visibility of women in society, the status of Kurdish women is considered to be relatively high in comparison with that of their neighbors, since Kurdish women enjoy relative tolerance in society. This includes the possibility of reaching high professional positions, their presence in public spaces, and entertaining guests in the absence of their husbands. Certain socio-economic and political transformations took place in recent decades, which improved Kurdish women's social standing, turning it into a symbol representing fundamental change in the gender role model in the Middle East. Although there are some studies on the status of Kurdish women in different individual Kurdish regions throughout the Middle East, not many reviews have compared the four parts of Kurdistan simultaneously, and there are hardly any specific analyses dealing with Kurdish women's interactions in public spaces. This review aims to investigate the status of women in Kurdish society in different Kurdish regions according to a comparative approach. Although the path of Kurdish female emancipation was initiated first in the region of Rojhalat in 1946 and the Kurdish region of Iraq was granted some opportunities toward national liberation in 1991, the Bakur in Turkey can be considered a successful movement, establishing a sustained approach to the liberation of Kurdish women from patriarchal structures. During the Rojava Revolution in northern Syria, this movement proved itself able to build an indigenous alternative to Western-type egalitarian societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shiraz, with its historical background, known as the capital of the Persian culture, once experienced a boom of international culture-led events using outdoor spaces as event venues. However, its outdoor vibrancy has withered gradually, and the use of public places as venues declined. Despite the existing dilemmas, a new wave of public place reclamation has created a strong trend towards using the spaces as outdoor venues. The main question of the research is what events are held in Shiraz year-round and how many of them are in public open spaces, and what events can be held in the public realm as outdoor. As in Iranian culture, the events and rituals follow the circular chronology of the Iranian, Islamic, and even Christian calendars; this article studies the events of a year-round time lap, making a clear typology in terms of places' type and form. The listed events have been classified using the CHAID model adapted to identify the variety and temporality of the events that could occur outdoors. Finally, after categorizing the events, the spatial dispersion of events in the Shiraz urban area has been analyzed to reintroduce the existing platform for holding events and, with the help of the 'Power of 10' approach, the need to create or equip spaces and add venues to hold outdoor events in twelve urban 'destinations' has been emphasized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the race for development especially in the urbanizing part of the world, much damage has been done to the natural resources, culture, identity, health, and its consequences are rampant in the Quality of Life of the people. It is imperative that we build systematic tools to regulate the development in a manner it is conducive to life and co-existence of all living beings in the current complex territorial system of urban environment. Urban Planning as a discipline has been in vogue for several decades now, and the interpretations of the traditional descriptive regulations in most circumstances have not brought the intended structured change to the urban environment. The Form Based Regulations will prove to be a viable alternative in providing the requisite structure and framework for development considering its versatility and clarity it can provide in shaping the urban environment at all scales without loosing the merits of traditional building codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imperative to address the challenge of transforming car-dependent cities and promoting sustainable mobilities requires that we engage with the relationships between urban morphology and forms of urbanity in public spaces surrounding transit nodes. While there has been a surge of interest in investigating the agency of urban planning and design in mitigating urban sprawl and its environmental impacts by creating mixed-use, dense, and walkable places, the extent to which the public space can enable streetlife intensity in proximity to transit remains underexplored. Through extensive urban mapping and comparison of two transit nodes in Tehran, this paper articulates the key morphological elements of building density, functional mix, and access networks, how they work in relation to forms of urbanity and informality in public space around stations, and what inferences can be made on how public space within station areas work in the context of rapidly urbanising cities compared to those in Western contexts. The nexus between functional mix, retail edges, and forms of urbanity has been found critical to the spatial configuration, performance, and transformation of transit station areas. Forms of informality have also been found integral to how public space works in the context of transit urban design. This paper contributes to the newfound accent on urban design dimensions concerning TODs in the context of less formal and more congested cities of the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper investigates the potential of virtual reality (VR) technologies—specifically, building information modeling (BIM) (“Autodesk Revit”) and game engines (“Unreal Engine”)—to enhance public involvement in the design and execution of architecture and urban projects. The main research question focuses on comparing the effectiveness of these two methods in creating an interactive design model for participatory design in public spaces. Methods: The study employed a VR exploratory experiment with 33 participants, followed by semi-structured interviews to analyze two recent developments in London: the Sky Garden, and Crossrail Place Roof Garden. Participants interacted with the design models and provided feedback on their experiences. Results: The findings demonstrate that integrating VR with BIM software using the Enscape plugin effectively enhances user involvement, enabling real-time generation and testing of design alternatives. While both methods were found to be beneficial, participants reported a preference for the direct implementation of VR in BIM software. Conclusions: This research highlights the potential of VR technologies—specifically, BIM and game engines—as a co-design approach for public and social spaces in urban environments. It also identifies limitations and future research opportunities in adopting these methods for participatory design.