Developing a model to evaluate the publicness of urban spaces

As one of the prominent elements in urban structures, urban public spaces include squares, streets, plazas, parks, etc. These spaces have been always important for urban design and their quality of publicness has been discussed. The recent inclination towards semi-public spaces has led to the decline of these spaces’ publicness and function and has dragged them down from their previous position which has resulted in the emergence of spaces with unfavorable publicness quality. The present study seeks to explore the concept of publicness and models used to evaluate it, present a conceptual framework, and eventually propose a model for the evaluation of urban spaces’ publicness.To compile the conceptual framework, evaluation models proposed by domestic and international scholars were studied and the proposed model for evaluating the publicness of urban spaces was thus developed consisting of four components, seven sub-components, and 30 indicators. 12 urban experts and professionals were asked for their opinions using the hierarchical analysis method to assess the validity and assign weights to the model. Then the scores were normalized for better and more accurate comparison and the mean scores of the expert group were calculated for each component, sub-component, and indicators in a range between 0 to 1.Results of experts' weighting and determination of the final coefficients of each indicator led to the compilation of the final model for urban space publicness evaluation with four components, seven sub-components, and 26 indicators. Two components of “physical configuration” and “urban life” are related to the substantial dimension of urban design but the other two components of “ownership” and “management” are related to the procedural dimension of urban design. Three indicators of the “physical configuration” component consisting of “furniture flexibility”, “green-blue elements”, “bicycle facilities”, and CCTV indicator of “management” component were excluded. Hence, the four components of physical configuration (0.33), urban life (0.31), management (0.2), and ownership (0.16) make up the publicness of urban spaces. This model can be used as a tool alongside other conventional methods to evaluate the publicness of urban spaces from the perspective of designers and users' lived experiences.