Who Owns the City?: A Response to Privatised Public Space

The following research discusses the changing nature of public space and how ownership has become an inevitable part of it. The aim of this research has been to discuss the complexity of the grey area between privately owned public space and public space, as well as the emerging issues related to POPS within the City of London. In which my...

Do only the physical qualities of a public space influence the way it’s being used or the activities it hosts and do large-scale socioeconomic events of the past decade affect their function?: Human Activity in Public Spaces Before and During the Pandemic

The scope of this thesis is set to examine the immediate relation of a city’s public spaces to the daily life of its citizens and portray how this relationship evolves. The location under examination is the city center of Athens, Greece. Specifically, focus will be given on two major public squares, namely Syntagma square and Omonia square....

The Public Private Produce: A contradictory mixed-use development of a private NSA office with public housing and sportscenter

Public space in Manhattan is mainly generated through a mechanism called Privately Owned Public Spaces, shortly POPS, allowing developers to construct taller buildings in exchange for the provision of public space. As a result of this incentivizing mechanism there are countless manifestations of public private contradiction in the city of New...

The materialisation of Jane Jacob's view "eyes on streets": Quantitative tools to measure adjacency, permeability and inter-visibility between buildings and streets

One of Jane Jacob’s key observations was that we need “eyes on the streets” from buildings to ensure safety. How can it be quantified? Research on urban environment by means of space syntax methods tend to focus on macro scale spatial conditions. However, micro scale conditions should not be neglected. In research on dispersal of burglaries in...