Urban Open Spaces

Since the first human settlements cities are mainly characterized by their spatial pattern of outdoor open spaces that constitute both the space for communal life; recreational, cultural and social activities, movement, and means of transport. This pattern of spaces has undergone a myriad of changes and definitions through history. Nowadays, open spaces within the city are composed of greenspaces and ‘grey’ spaces, and generally classified as public spaces as being freely accessible. They may encompass all types of urban spaces such as streets, squares, alleys, waterfronts, ‘urban pocket parks’, gardens, parks, and in-between and incidental spaces produced by the city growth.

This pattern of spaces, either planned or unplanned, are spread over different scales of the city; on neighborhood, the city core, periphery level. Their quality, functioning improvement and regeneration present an everlasting challenge and debate for inhabitants, architects, urban designer, planners, and researchers and municipalities, due to all the transformations and emergence of inherent concepts linked to the city and public life.

Open spaces constitute a multilayered field of inquiry, Involving theory, design and different fields research studies. Several issues related to design features of these spaces such as aesthetics, comfort, health, social cohesion, safety usage are carried out by diverse research studies. All this provided a significant knowledge and has somehow helped in creating a normative framework for designing better spaces. However, numerous critics have pointed to the limitedness and the failure design and planning normative approaches in creating successful urban open spaces, as outcome the primacy of physical features on people- built environment interaction.

The understanding of people experience and use of space, in terms of perception ad behavior, has become a perquisite step towards more responsive design. Several theories and research studies, of urban design, psychology, and sociology, used various appraisal methods and tools to assess this experience through people’s environment perception and behavior coupled to spatial properties of the built environment.

Spatial syntax as theory and analysis method, instigated a new fundamental theory of space, explanation to people’s behavior in space (use, movement), and tools to measure quantitatively the spatial properties, through syntactic values. It brought a new insight on the notion of space, in which configuration and visibility are the main key-features to understand better how people experience the city- ‘physical city’ /’experiential city’. This latter is dependent on urban open space ‘local’ and ‘global’ properties, within the spatial network of the city.

This workshop aims to gather scholars from oversees, researchers and students to exchange knowledge about discussing urban open spaces issue from space syntax point of view, and to delve into experiences related to this matter, in both methodology and results. It also aims to sensitize students and the audience about the importance these spaces, by launching a national architecture competition for students and a call for posters inherent to the topic of this event