Evaluating the Impacts of Publicness of Public Space from the Perspective of Public Space Governance, A Case Study of Sitting-Out Area (SOA) and POSPD in Hong Kong

Abstract

Public spaces, such as parks, squares, and sitting-out areas, are essential to urban vitality and social cohesion, while their governance faces challenges, particularly in high-density cities like Hong Kong, where land scarcity and privatization shape public space provision. Many privately managed public spaces are found to have stricter rules and access restrictions than government-managed public spaces, raising concerns about the true public nature of the spaces. At the core of these debates is the concept of publicness, which reflects a space’s ability of being public. However, while existing studies have made many attempts to understand and assess publicness of public space, there is still ambiguity about what publicness is. To some extent, this is due to the limited attention paid to the impacts that publicness of public space has in current research. Impacts of publicness reflect what truly matters in public space by demonstrating how these spaces deliver the social values and benefits that are expected by their users, and therefore, this gap has restricted our understanding of the role and value of public space. This study addresses this gap by developing an evaluation model for the publicness impact of public space from a public space governance perspective. Focusing on Hong Kong, the research examines the differences in publicness impacts between sitting-out areas (SOAs), the government-managed public space, and public open spaces in private developments (POSPDs), the private-managed public space. Three groups of SOAs and POSPDs were selected across Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories, with data collected through surveys, interviews, and observations. Five impacts are identified based on the review of literature and documents, including effectiveness, fairness, sense of ease, meaningfulness, and friendliness. The findings include thresholds of the impacts, which serve as a standard to help define whether a space is public or not. The interconnection between the impacts is identified and reveals how changes in one impact of publicness can influence others. The findings offer practical tools for public space governance and contribute to urban studies by enhancing the understanding of what makes a space truly public and its broader social impacts, ultimately supporting the creation of satisfactory public space.

Date of Award	11 Apr 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Jin Yeu TSOU (Supervisor) & Louie SIEH (Supervisor)