Contemporary Spatial Publicness: Its New Characteristics and Democratic Possibilities

Abstract

In this study, we explore the recognition of publicness as understood by everyday users of public space. By analyzing news articles in South Korea selected from 1 January 2010, to 31 December 2018, this study examines a discourse which is largely missing in the existing studies-the subjective experience and framing of contemporary spatial publicness by its end-users. After analyzing the contents from a total of 583 articles in the KINDS database, we develop a general typology of how contemporary spatial publicness is represented in South Korea. Although the scope and background of questions surrounding South Korea's recognition of contemporary spatial publicness are different from that of Western countries, a similar debate has emerged about what publicness means in the context of the architecture and urban space around the globe. By developing different thematic dimensions in the representations of contemporary spatial publicness, we further discuss the implications for future research to examine the pragmatic sensibilities of individuals and utility of semi-public/private space.

Growing public spaces in the city: Community gardening and the making of new urban environments of publicness

“…Others have also provided alternative approaches to making sense of the relationship between publicness and space. Han et al (2019), for example, propose the notion of ‘spatial publicness’ to encapsulate the myriad spaces that are accessible to the public and the various forms of publicness that occur within them. Focusing on this broader conception of spatial publicness, they suggest, requires increased sensitivity being given to issues of ‘diversity, communication, cooperative relationships and consensus processes of participants’ (p. 13) bound up with acts of place-making.…”

An Improved Publicness Assessment Tool Based on a Combined Spatial Model: Case Study of Guangzhou, China

“…Each discipline approaches POS in different ways and examines its publicness from different perspectives while sharing common characteristics. Political scientists, for example, focus on democratization and ownership [20][21][22]; anthropologists on the historical construction and subjective value of places [23]; sociologists on the deliberative democracy and political community [24,25]; geographers on the sense of place and "landlessness" [26,27]; architects on the making of architectural space for social and cul-tural activities [28]; and urban planners on the greenery, sustainability and accessibility of urban space [29][30][31]. In the recent decade, researchers have called for a more pragmatic assessment of publicness.…”