Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Gehl ArchitectsUrban Quality Consultants , 2009 Jan Gehl, Copenhagen, Denmark Email:
b
Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute , 2009 Anne Matan, Perth,
Australia E-mail:
Published online: 09 Jan 2009.
To cite this article: Jan Gehl & Anne Matan (2009) Two perspectives on public spaces, Building Research & Information, 37:1,
106-109, DOI: 10.1080/09613210802519293
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09613210802519293
Designs on the Public: The Private Lives of New Yorks Public Spaces
Kristine F. Miller
Downloaded by [Michigan State University] at 20:00 13 February 2015
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, US, 2007; ISBN 978 0816649105
Building Research & Information ISSN 0961-3218 print ISSN 1466-4321 online
http: www.tandf.co.uk journals
DOI: 10.1080/09613210802519293
Review
Review
Review
The books are easy to digest, with both authors refreshingly and unapologetically personal, backing up their
concepts with well-researched and documented
studies. Both books offer unique contributions to the
public life conversation, delivering practical, wellexplored and documented observations about public
life and the arenas that support them. The authors
strengthen the voices advocating for public spaces
designed for people, that are healthy, lively, sustainable, safe and democratic public spaces, that provide
a people friendly social realm, able to complement
modern, consumer private-orientated lifestyles.
Jan Gehl
Gehl Architects Urban Quality Consultants
Copenhagen, Denmark
jan@gehl.dk
Anne Matan
Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute
Perth, Australia
anne.matan@postgrad.curtin.edu.au
# 2009 Jan Gehl and Anne Matan
References
Carr, S., Francis, M., Rivlin, L. and Stone, A. (1992) Public
Space, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future on Los
Angeles, Verso, London.
Fraser, N. (1992) Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to
the critique of actually existing democracy, in C. Calhoun
(ed.): Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, pp. 109 142.
Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope, University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA.
Lofland, L. (1998) The Public Realm: Exploring the Citys
Quintessential Social Territory, Aldine De Gruyter,
New York, NY.
Endnote
1
Using Loflands (1998) definition of public realms as not geographically or physically rooted pieces of space. They are social,
not physical territories. Whether any actual physical space contains a realm at all and, if it does, whether that realm is private,
or parochial, or is public is not the consequence of some immutable culturally or legally given designation. . . . It is, rather, the consequence of the proportions and densities of relationship types
present and these proportions and densities are themselves fluid
(p. 11; original emphases).
109