Sections | The Journal of Public Space

The Journal of Public Space's issues are divided in three sections:
SPACE / SOCIETY / SYSTEMS
reflecting the interdisciplinary topics and perpectives on public space.
These sections are the core of the journal.
Submissions are open throughout the year on the online platform. Start a submission here.

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For questions or information, please write an email to the Editor in Chief Dr Luisa Bravo at: luisa.bravo@journalpublicspace.org.

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The Journal of Public Space contains also several special sections:

RMIT University: Master of Arts (Art in Public Space)

Section Editors:
Maggie McCormick and Fiona Hillary, RMIT University, Australia

This Section includes the work of artists from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, which is a leader in public art, public and social practice by taking a multidisciplinary approach to creative practice that engages critically with contemporary urban culture. The MAPS Master of Arts (Art in Public Space) program engages with practice based creative arts inquiry to explore key issues confronting global public environments. By making connections between theory, art practice and everyday life the program engages with issues central to international cultural, political and social debates and recognises the important role public space plays as a forum for these exchanges.

Youth Engagement and Education

Section Editor: Ellen Marie Sæthre-McGuirk, Nord University, Norway

The special section “Youth engagement and education” of The Journal of Public Space looks at public space in urban, peri-urban, and rural places in light of youth engagement and formal, informal and non-formal educational activities. It has a special interest in activities by, with, and/or for the young; such as public art, civil place and space design, and creative digital practice concerning placemaking. Placemaking in this context is understood as the shaping of public space to make it more safe, inclusive, and accessible and the generating of a sense of place. These interests are in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially Sustainable Development Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, and Sustainable Development Goal 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.

Placemaking: Theory, Practice and Tools

Section Editors:
Beitske Boonstra, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Guido Robazza, University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom

Placemaking aims at making places more livable and meaningful. Placemaking increases the interactions between communities and places through creative, participatory and design-led interventions. The rhythms, inhabitants, experiences, emotional attachments, personal and collective identities and the history of a place are actively explored, and people are inspired and encouraged to collectively reimagine and reinvent “their” public spaces. In academia and practice the attention for, and knowledge of placemaking is developing rapidly.
Placemaking can be goal oriented, aimed at creating impact on issues such as climate adaptation, healthy cities, conflict, inclusivity. Placemaking can also be process oriented, aimed at participation, self-organization, self-management, formality-informality interaction, temporality, exploration and experimentation.
The section on placemaking would include the mix of theoretical and practical examples in order to explore both how academic researchers are dealing with defining and contextualizing placemaking research and how the existing theoretical knowledge can be embodied in practical projects.
Contribution to this dedicated section can address the definition and theory of placemaking, goals and impact, governance, different forms and contexts of placemaking, and methods and (analog and technological) tools for placemaking. Academic contributions will undergo a process of double-blind peer review, while practice-based articles, reflecting projects on the ground and sourced from practitioners, will undergo an editorial review and will be publisehd as viewpoints.

Digital Placemaking and Urban Digital Media

Section Editor: Luke Hespanhol, University of Sydney, Australia

Digital media has become an integral component of the urban built environment in the past decade, with the increasing affordability and democratization of lighting technologies, sensors, pervasive computing as well as content creation and dissemination. A particularly emerging application of urban digital media is its use in the design of interventions that balance creative outputs and expressions with functional services.
While sometimes translated as ‘smart’ interfaces or systems, those interventions are often (although not always) of a non-utilitarian nature. Instead, they increasingly take the form of hybrid augmented environments standing as artistic, playful and participatory platforms that welcome and engage communities by articulating their shared stories, memories, cultural values and creative expressions. In the process, perceptions about the nature of public spaces are tested, new identities forged, and feeling of civic ownership and accountability nurtured.
The Digital Placemaking and Urban Digital Media section of the Journal of Public Spaces welcomes works reflecting those new creative approaches to the use of digital media in public spaces, particularly for the purposes of digital placemaking, community engagement, playful cities and urban digital storytelling.

Health, Urban Climate and Complexity in Urban Design and Planning

Section Editors: Silvia Tavares, Nicholas Stevens and Greg Mews, BASC Lab, University of the Sunshine Coast

This section is an opportunity to engage scholars in an open-ended discourse and practical knowledge building on community health and well-being, climate-responsiveness and systems thinking in urban design and planning. It welcomes contributions addressing new knowledge through research, practice examples and experimentation related to public spaces for all. It is framed around the pursuit to enable healthier communities and explores urban complexities to better understand the bioclimatic performance of environments – how well these environments support relationships between human and more-than-human habitation. We seek contributions that embrace complexity and experimental methodologies that can have impact and achieve an ontological shift towards transformative change in communities transcending the Global North and South. We appreciate theoretical and practical assessments that demonstrate entanglement with multifaceted aspects ranging from visualisation, communication, or arts-based expressions to achieve environmental conditions that contribute to bioclimates for health and wellbeing in the broadest sense.

Submissions are open throughout the year on the online platform. Start a submission here and do not forget to include in the 'Comments for the Editor' that you are applying for this section. For questions or information, please write an email to the Section Editors:
Dr Silvia Tavares on matters concerning bio-climate stavares@usc.edu.au
Dr Nicholas Stevens on urban complexity and system-thinking nstevens@usc.edu.au
Dr Greg Mews on non-linear public life methods and health and wellbeing at gmews@usc.edu.au