Adaptive Public Spaces Key Ingredients for Optimizing Public Space Activation, Safety and Accessibility

Salma Nassar

Moderator

November 6, 2024 | 11:00 - 12:30

Voices from Cities - room D

Architecture Department Faculty of Engineering Cairo University

Egypt

English

Reference:

VC-D 7

WUF12

Voices from Cities

Summary

In theory, public spaces in the city are considered a valued asset and a common good and an essential need for cities’ sustainable growth and development. The quality of life in high-density mixed-use areas is often dependent on the existence of inclusive and accessible public places. Their benefits and realization are not limited to enhancing city livability and competitiveness through improving public safety and security, vulnerable citizen inclusion (like women, children, older persons, and persons with disability), and social cohesion. Public spaces fundamentally act as catalysts for local economic development andlocal revenue generation, increase land valuation, build social capital, decrease inequalities, and finally mitigate climate change risks.
. However, the erosion of publicly accessible open spaces in many cities worldwide has drastically increased, especially in dense and highly contested contexts. This phenomenon is rooted in multiple causes such as privatization, disuse, weak management, and sustainability plans. While the lack of social inclusion, community engagement as well as design of unresponsive spaces lead to the marginalization of public spaces in favor of other land uses and developmental projects.
The revitalization and reactivation of neglected public spaces can be key to creating safe, inclusive, vibrant and cohesive communities, through diverse innovative engaging methods, such as new partnerships and co-creation mechanisms. The resulting increase in municipal revenues generated from public spaces can be reinvested in improved service delivery and further improvement of public spaces. However, across any given city – especially in the Global South – the typologies of public spaces evolve and diverge according to multiple variable contextual inputs. The idea of a unified ultimate recipe for all public spaces is paradoxical and almost impossible to implement. In this sense, context-specific and needs-based public spaces are fundamental to ensure the increased provision of per-capita share of public spaces as well as maintaining a city-wide network of accessible inclusive spaces for all. The diverse nature of scale and spaces in cities require different implementation formulas from planning, financing, managing, maintenance, and stakeholder participation models to give room for innovative applications and capitalize on bottom-up applications.
The Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University is closely studying the shifting habitual spatial practices in cities and how to ensure safety by applying the safety mapping app , and design appropriate spaces, by drawing examples from the Arab Region and India. It additionally, capitalizes on the role of academia in bringing educational research and practice closer together through building partnerships and optimizing student fieldwork and research toward sustainable urbanization. This event will act as a platform to showcase and cross-learn from

Objectives

1. The proposed event discusses different types of interventions to regenerate public spaces, the panelists will present various approaches, from different points of view leading to viable, safe, inclusive public spaces.
2. Understand the linkage between adaptive planning models and sustainable public spaces.
3. Engage, and expose local governments and key stakeholders to a different array of activation and revitalization methods to address public space-poor and middle-class areas.
4. Explain how public spaces can be considered a revenue source for local government if well-designed and managed.
5. Create a knowledge-sharing platform for different countries to collaborate and build collective knowledge capital on availing public spaces to local communities through innovative responsive implementation methods.
6. Challenge current urban mechanisms on sustaining public spaces.
7. Activate ‘Research-Practice-Partnerships’ and stakeholder partnerships towards increasing the provision of public spaces in cities, by engaging students,.
8. Identify how International organizations (UN-Habitat, World Bank in collaboration with the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs: SECO) provide technical assistance to local governments and local city councils to consider public spaces as assets, revenue source and a primary resource for a better quality of life.