Understanding how people coordinate social interactions in public spaces is central to environmental psychology's study of human-environment relations, but research findings remain fragmented across disciplinary traditions with different epistemologies and vocabularies. This meta-narrative review synthesizes scholarship from ecological and environmental psychology, micro-interactional studies of public life, environment-behavior studies, and spatial justice and political recognition. We conducted iterative searches across Web of Science and Scopus (1908-2025), supplemented by forward-backward citation tracking; searching continued until new iterations introduced no new explanatory framework, citation lineage, or mode-relevant distinction. The final corpus comprises 119 key publications from 100 scholars that explicitly explore social interaction modes, types, or thresholds. Analysis reveals convergence on six recurring modes of public interaction: withdrawal, co-presence, co-attention, co-exchange, co-action, and assembly. The review compares how each tradition defines these modes and marks boundaries and shifts between them, preserving differences in explanatory approach. The framework provides a comparative vocabulary linking core concepts such as affordances, privacy regulation, joint attention, and attentional restoration to sociological, urban, and political accounts of public interaction. Analyzing spatial, normative, perceptual, and political conditions, the framework clarifies why similar spatial provisions can produce different interactional possibilities. ... Read more

Privately owned public spaces (POPS) have emerged as an incentive-based tool for creating and managing public spaces in high-density cities through private developments, facing both criticism regarding their inclusivity and recent adaptations in European cities. This paper examines the translation of public-private collaboration principles for space development and management to medium-sized cities, where traditional density-based incentives and agreements are not applicable. Unlike metropolitan areas where POPS emerged from high land values, shortage of public land for new public spaces, and established regulatory systems, medium-sized cities present a fundamentally different context: higher availability of undeveloped land at lower market values but limited resources. This contextual shift requires a systematic transformation of public-private collaboration approaches in the provision and management of public spaces and amenities, particularly in ensuring these spaces remain truly public, accessible, and inclusive for all user groups despite private involvement. Through a comparative analysis of public-private collaboration models, this study evaluates the current practices in the Netherlands and their adaptation potential for medium-sized cities, focusing specifically on mechanisms ensuring public accessibility and social inclusion. The paper advances public space governance discourse by examining implementation phases from planning to management and analysing varying scales of private involvement from temporary to permanent arrangements, maintaining public access and social equity. It develops conceptual frameworks for governance model based on different POPSs governance models that align with medium-sized cities' governance capacities while prioritizing inclusive design and management practices. We identify valuable lessons from Dutch experiences that can inform similar practices in other contexts. This research contributes to urban planning and governance in several ways; it proposes context-sensitive approaches that balance public benefit with private interests in private developments. Second, it provides strategies to ensure the creation of inclusive and accessible social spaces that serve diverse community needs in medium-sized urban developments. ... Read more

Since the 1960s, Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) has been studied as a significant development in urban space provision. Through a review of key studies (1980–2023), this paper traces how POPS scholarship has changed from fundamental critiques of privatization to evidence-based assessment of spatial practices. The analysis reveals three phases in the literature's development, demonstrating a shift from early concerns about intrinsic problems of private control to accepting POPS as a distinct type of public space requiring its systematic evaluation. The geographical expansion of research has explored how different cultural, institutional, and urban contexts shape the implementation of POPS and scholarly approaches to studying them. ... Read more

While parklets have thrived in many cities since the COVID-19 pandemic, different local contexts have framed different opportunities and challenges regarding their functions, forms, locations, management and benefits. Extending the mapping analysis in Chapter 3, this chapter examines how the placement and utility of parklets have been shaped by a wide range of urban design factors. To do so, it comparatively analyses the spatial distributions and functions of major clusters of commercial hospitality parklets in three different urban settings: the Mission District in San Francisco, Boxhagenerkiez in Berlin and Fitzroy/Collingwood in Melbourne. All three are dense, walkable, lively mixed-use neighbourhoods with good transport connections. Both San Francisco and Berlin also have numerous fully public, non-commercial parklets that have different spatial distributions. The chapter examines the varying size, centrality, density, accessibility and land use patterns of the commercial clusters that host parklets, and the specific types of businesses located in them. The analysis identifies critical differences in the city’s street networks, hierarchies and topographies, and their street widths, orientations and functional allocations. The chapter also maps and explains changes in parklet numbers and distributions during and since the COVID-19 pandemic. ... Read more

This chapter explores the potential of Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPSs) to fill gaps in delivering accessible public spaces and discusses their role in the reactivation of cities in post-pandemic times. It examines the spatial features and potential of POPSs for contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Based on field observation of four POPSs in Melbourne, this chapter identifies how various design and management practices can either encourage or discourage social uses and activities in these spaces.
The research results show the potential of POPSs to contribute to the City of Melbourne’s Reactivation Plan and the UN SDGs. POPSs provide opportunities for innovative uses that can bring life back to cities and also help businesses impacted by the absence of office workers during COVID-19 lockdowns. ... Read more

From the 1970s, a type of public space has been formed based on government and private sector partnership named as privately-owned public space initiated from the United States. Over the last five decades, the aims and regulations of this kind of public space have been developed, but they still have ambiguous design and management practices as policy-made public spaces. The idea of the increasing privatization of public spaces has been discussed as a concerning issue rather than a positive approach toward public space improvement.
Concerns about ‘reduction in diversity and freedom of forms of public life and the undermining of democracy have been debated by researchers and advocates in public space (Boddy 1992; Davis 1992; Kayden 2000; Banerjee 2001). Many authors declare it as the ‘decline of public space and ‘the end of public space’(Jacobs 1961; Sorkin 1992; Mitchell 1995). On the other side, recent researchers believe that public spaces have not experienced such extreme situations and have more optimistic viewpoints toward POPSs. However, they agree that changes in forms, functions, and appearance have happened in privatized public spaces (Németh 2009; Németh & Schmidt 2011; Huang & Franck 2018;). ... Read more