Seen, Felt, and Lived. Design Principles for Socially Sustainable Public Spaces

Abstract

Public spaces are increasingly expected to address complex societal challenges, from climate adaptation to social fragmentation. Yet, while the technical performance of public space has received considerable attention, its social sustainability remains less clearly defined and operationalized. This article, developed within the STEPS project funded by the Dutch Research Council, explores how social sustainability can be translated into design-oriented principles for public space. The contribution focuses on three interrelated dimensions of social life in urban environments: social cohesion, social encounter, and social learning. Social cohesion concerns the ties that connect people to places and to one another through trust, participation, and shared values (Aelbrecht & Stevens, 2018; Asadollahi Asl Zarkhah et al., 2025; Harteveld, 2017, 2020; Lai et al., 2024; Schiefer & van der Noll, 2017). Social encounter addresses the capacity of public spaces to foster meaningful interactions across difference, moving beyond co-presence towards genuine exchange (Askarizad & He, 2022; Ferreira et al., 2021; Horgan & Liinamaa, 2023). Social learning refers to collective processes of reflection, knowledge creation, and problem-solving that enable communities to develop civic literacy and transformative capacities (Bandura, 1977, 1986). Rather than treating these dimensions as isolated categories, the article approaches them as relational qualities that emerge through the immersive experiences in public space. In this perspective, public spaces are more than their physical form or functional assets. They are social infrastructures where belonging, encounter, and collective learning continuously take shape and give live to interactions of bodies in space. Building on a co-creative and interdisciplinary research process, the article proposes a conceptual and design-oriented framework that translates debates on social sustainability into operational principles for analysis and design. In doing so, it challenges approaches centred primarily on technical performance and advocates for a more holistic understanding of public space, towards subjective, symbolic, and culturally embedded dimensions.