Investigation into Shanghai Spatial Publicness
An Alternative Discourse on Public Space and Its Urbanistic Manifestation
The paper investigates Shanghai spatial publicness through the theoretical reflection on the essence of public space, empirical surveys of Shanghai’s social spaces, and architectural suggestions. When facing urban reality’s complexity, fluidness and polysemy, the pivotal concept "spatial publicness" inclining to indeterminacy, instability and temporariness can perform better than the conventional one "public space". The new notion can facilitate disclosing the vibrant but long-overlooked spatial potential in Shanghai and developing strategies and tactics for improving the local spatial publicness. Actually the paper seeks to answer the following questions: what is public space/spatial publicness? What is it in Shanghai? What can architectural and urban design contribute to it?