Good Public Space Analysis Revisited: Does the Perfect Public Space Even Exist?

Opinion piece by Marta Nosowicz

When I joined Humankind a year ago my first assignment was the development of Good Public Space Analysis (GPSA), something that excited me deeply as I would be able to contribute to the company’s goal of creating human-centered cities. From the very begging we established that our definition of good public space is a space that primarily facilitates health and well-being. But what does that even mean?

I took on the quest and started digging into the literature. Given how complex human beings are, it was difficult to position what we had in mind in the context of what had already been done. In the early stages of the development of the tool –its infancy, we could say–, we identified key activities related to health and well-being that people do in public and tried to place them against understanding how well a space actually affords their performance. We were still trying to understand what the meaning of certain activities is and how public space design actually connects to them.

The difficulty of trying to say that something is good is, of course, that there is a lot of subjectivity involved. The framework we designed is grounded in literature and observations but our goal with introducing the Good Public Space Analysis was something else than delivering academic results and hard data. 

Read the article here

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