ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on different scholarly traditions including cultural geography, environmental psychology, urban design, and urban sociology to highlight the key tensions at the heart of the contemporary public space debate. In Chapter 1 it was argued that critiques of public space can often be placed into two camps, those who argue that public space is over-managed, and those who argue that it is under-managed. This, of course, greatly over-simplifies a complex discourse on public space that this chapter aims to further unpack. In fact there are a series of discrete but related critiques of the contemporary public space situation that the first part of this chapter identifies and organises. In so doing it also reveals a range of public space types that are used in the second part of the chapter to suggest a new typology of public space.
