ABSTRACT
Public space is a central concept in contemporary discourse in urbanism, spatial planning, and architecture, widely acknowledged as a structural urban and territorial system, an enabler of community life, a promoter of a sense of place and territorial identity, a catalyser of social cohesion and democratic socialisation. This chapter offers a particular line of exploration of the current state of art on the metropolitan scale of public space both as conceptual construct, and as an operational tool. The key characteristics of such approach are explored, namely the ways how splintered urban areas can be made understandable in relation to their biophysical support, how public space interventions at a ‘street level’ can be upscaled by articulating them on main metropolitan axes, or how a territorial cohesion perspective can help to connect and better integrate critical urban areas.
