ABSTRACT

In recent years these sorts of stories have started to show up in media reports and blogs from around the world on a daily basis – and key word searches of “public space” in newspaper archives show an exponential leap in the number of articles since the mid-1990s. The specifics are often different, but the themes remarkably similar: citizens’ groups, grassroots collectives, sometimes even local governments themselves, leading a charge to create public space where it does not yet exist, to reclaim it from where it was lost, and to rejuvenate it from states undesirable or incomplete.