The Public Realm as a Place of Everyday Urbanism: Learning from Four College Towns.

Abstract

The public realm is an important component of the American urban condition. Contemporary theories and practices of urban design often conceive public space as undifferentiated and universally accessible. Yet, public spaces are increasingly complex in western culture and require a contextual understanding of human diversity, human behavior, and human expressions in addition to physical form. This dissertation examines the everyday human experience of the public realm through the following research questions: (1) To what extent does the spatial configuration (embedded in campus-downtown formal relationship) affect people’s experience and understanding of public places? (2) In what ways do people conceptualize publicness? (3) In what ways do people’s activities vary with time and location across different types of public places? The multiple dimensions of the public realm are addressed through a mixed-modal case-study research design of four college towns: Ann Arbor, MI; Athens, GA; Tallahassee, FL; and Lansing, MI. (1) Historic morphological analysis and space syntax methods are applied to describe the spatial configuration of the public settings. (2) Multiple sorting tasks and open-ended interviews are employed to determine people’s conceptual constructs related to publicness. (3) Naturalistic observation techniques are used to document people’s activities in specific public settings. A comprehensive empirical understanding of the public realm, focusing on the role of human involvement and appropriation, is developed. The research reveals that (1) the spatial configuration of the public realm is highly formative of the perceived qualities of publicness, (2) the public realm is a human construction based on people’s environmental role and purpose, and (3) the public realm is a temporal phenomenon, varying with the formal and informal ways in which people perceive, appropriate, and contest publicness. The overall investigation demonstrates that the public realm is a place of everyday urbanism. The focus on people and their everyday experiences, in the imagination and realization of the public realm, allow designing and producing public places that are relevant, functional, and empowering.