Assessing the Publicness of Public Space: The Star Model of Publicness

This paper presents a model of, and method for benchmarking, the publicness of public space-termed here as the Star Model. The model is intended to be of value for comparative purposes (i.e. measuring the publicness of one place vis-a-vis another); as an analytic measure of publicness to be compared with more subjective interpretations of publicness; and as a departure point for deeper investigations of why particular places are more/less public than they could/should be. The paper is in four main parts. The first part discusses and then conceptualizes the nature of 'public' space. The second considers publicness as a multi-dimensional concept, identifying and discussing five meta dimensions-ownership; control; civility; physical configuration; and animation. The third explains the model and the integration of these dimensions into a pictorial representation of a place's publicness. The final part discusses the model's value and suggests avenues for further development and research.