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This book is the result of a research project designed and carried out at the Department of Architecture, University of Florence. This book discusses urban public spaces and, more specifically, run-down, inactive micro-spaces that are barely used due to their location, dimensions, morphology or semantic characteristics. In literature, these spaces are often defined as "residual urban spaces." A large abandoned industrial area on the outskirts of a town or a small interstitial space in a historical centre can be residual. With respect to such a broad subject matter, the book seeks to radically limit the field, concentrating on public residual spaces found in the oldest parts of cities. The book reflects on this theme and introduces a method for reading and assessment of the residuality of public spaces in historical contexts (Residuality Assessment Process) which was tested in the historical centre of Florence. It is the authors' view that residual spaces, above all if designed according to a system logic, can go from being problems to potential activators of urban and social regeneration processes, offering a useful contribution to improve city life.

Public spaces.

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"I often ask people what their favorite place is in their city or town. What are the places they particularly like and think about as having a special meaning or memory? The answer inevitably is a public space, sometimes a large park to walk, play, or picnic and other times a local square or plaza with shaded paths and comfortable seating. Benches outside a café or on the sidewalk are commemorated with the names of those who spent time sitting with friends and neighbors. In residential neighborhoods, steps in front of an apartment building or library offer gathering places. Open school yards and church grounds are mentioned as favorite places to hold informal markets, clothing swaps, voter registration drives and bake sales to benefit local organizations. Many times, the response is accompanied by a smile and reminiscence about a day at the beach, historic monument, art museum, or an afternoon spent strolling a scenic walkway or bicycling along a nature trail. Young people look for streets and paved areas of parks that provide exhilarating skateboarding or basketball courts and soccer fields where pick-up games happen. Children enjoy lively playgrounds, while caretakers select locations with high visibility and protection from ongoing traffic. Teenagers prefer places they "own" and just "hang" to watch others away from prying eyes. The favorite spots of homeless people are out-of-the-way edges or deep-forested centers of parks and the interstices of buildings and roads. Tourists point to open areas with tables and chairs to sit and watch the ongoing action even with honking cars or densely packed walkways. Some people love busy avenues and marketplaces full of energy to participate in the buzz of urban life, while others prefer quiet alleyways, solitary meadows, and tree-lined boulevards".

Public spaces.

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This edited volume assembles contributions of leading scholars in the fields of statistical methods and applications in the social sciences. Multivariate scaling methods for categorical data, in particular correspondence analysis, are used to extract the most important dimensions from complex data tables and to visualize relationships in the data. The volume treats recent statistical developments, methodological considerations, and empirical applications. A special emphasis is placed on multiple aspects of space and their sociological significance: the reconstruction of "social spaces" with statistical methods, illustrations of spatial relations involving proximity, distance and inequality, and concrete interactions in urban neighbourhoods. The edited volume is meant to honour the lifetime achievements of Prof. Jörg Blasius (Chair of Sociology/ Empirical Research Methods, Bonn).

Public spaces. --- Public spaces --- Social aspects.

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Espaces publics. --- Public spaces.

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Since its publication in Spanish in 1998, The Grid and the Park not only revitalized studies on the history of Buenos Aires, but also laid the foundation for a specific type of cultural work on the city -an urban perspective for cultural history, as its author would describe it- that has had a sustained impact in Latin America. Public space, embodied in the grid of city blocks and the park system, here appears as a particularly productive category because it encompasses dimensions of the material city, politics, and culture, which are usually studied separately. From Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's figurations of Palermo Park in the mid-nineteenth century to Jorge Luis Borges's discovery of the suburb in the 1920s; from the modernization of the traditional center carried out by Mayor Torcuato de Alvear in the 1880s to the questioning of that centrality by the emergence of the suburban barrio, the book weaves the changing ideas on public space with urban culture to produce a new history of the metropolitan expansion of Buenos Aires, one of the most extensive and dynamic urban centers of the early twentieth century.

City planning --- Public spaces