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Replacing space is a challenge in maintaining public open space after land consolidation. Mojosongo subdistrict, Indonesia, also experienced replacing space due to social, economic and physical changes after more 20 years of consolidation. This study aims to analyze the replacing space of public open spaces after land consolidation in the Mojosongo Berseri I Housing.

This research uses a qualitative method through a case study approach. Secondary data from document reviews land consolidation. Primary data were collected through observation and in-depth interviews using snowball sampling techniques with 35 informants. The analysis techniques used are qualitative descriptive, spatial analysis and pattern matching analysis through comparing empirical case studies with relevant literature.

Public open spaces have changed function and form. The “replacing space” carried out by the community involves converting public open spaces into built-up areas used for residential purposes and commercial activities. Driving factors for “replacing space” include increase in family members, economic pressures, inflexible building concepts, lack of meaning of space, no supervision/sanctions and not optimal space.

The meaning of replacing space does not only change “space” to “place,” but can also cause changes in the form and function of a place carried out by communities. Thus, space allocation is needed according to community needs, preferences and activities to create a sense of place that is supported by regulations and supervision.

This paper aims to investigate the utilisation of street food to redefine place management in public spaces in Egypt. The study examines the spatiotemporal effects of this approach, considering the preferences of both vendors and consumers alongside contextual design factors.

In this study, conducted in Cairo, Egypt, a spatial ethnographic approach was used to delve into the process of place management in areas hosting street food activities. Focus group interviews were conducted with a random sample of street food vendors and consumers.

The results of this case study confirm the significant impact of street food on its surroundings, emphasising the importance of the people–place relationship. Insights from group interviews shed light on essential questions regarding the timing, location and drivers of spatiotemporal effects around food activity areas, as well as the entities controlling these effects and their mechanisms. The findings underscore the necessity of harmoniously balancing the needs of vendors and consumers without detrimentally affecting the context.

The proactive insights gleaned from this study hold potential for replication in other cities, offering valuable insights into the roles and specialisations of actors involved in managing street food places. However, achieving a more comprehensive understanding of stereotypes and underlying themes is imperative.

This study contributes to filling a research gap by exploring strategies to integrate vendors’ and consumers’ preferences and designs into specific contexts. It provides proactive and preventive solutions to mitigate adverse spatiotemporal effects of street food activities within the studied context.

The health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic affected worldwide communities and public social spaces. Mandatory at-home isolation for 2 years, followed by libraries reopening after demanded security adjustments, changed Brazilian public libraries’ workplace dynamics, which now rely mainly on labor and engagement via social networks. Remarkably, a hybrid quality emerged and became the norm in everyday professional practices, generating a new ethos in the epistemic construction of the field of public librarianship. In this chapter, the authors aim to review the concept of the public library and its workplace dynamics after the changes triggered by a new post-pandemic environment, searching for answers to the following question: Have Brazilian public libraries become more or less inhabited as the result of the pandemic crisis? Applying a social and descriptive approach to examine the idea that bonding relationships with public social spaces contribute to building groups’ and communities’ identity, enhancing their history, relations, and memory, the authors debate if public libraries are anthropological inhabited places or non-places, proposing a perspective that connects the public library to the development of the individual and helps to understand space-time appropriation, focusing on identity construction. Exploring this framework, the authors identify the need to review the concept of the public library to represent its contemporaneous aspects of time, space, and collectivity and to include the many creative, affective, and symbolic dimensions embodied by all the individuals the library serves, based on the new experiences driven by disuse or resumption of use due to the pandemic.

This paper aims to explore the rationale, the process and the outcomes and risks of place branding in rural China.

An in-depth case study analysis, including interviews, has been conducted.

Place branding in the case of China is practiced and dominated through administrative entities by using subsidies and regional development programs to coordinate, organize and promote local agricultural resources. Although this government-led place branding has effective effects on rural development, it is unsustainable and unstable because it lacks sufficient market and stakeholder participation.

The effectiveness of place branding in China has been examined and proved.

The government’s role in place branding in China should be adjusted. The government should position itself as a service and auxiliary role. Simultaneously, it should strengthen market-oriented operations and stakeholder participation in place branding.

This paper is one of the first contributions to examine the impact of place branding as a rural development policy tool in China, and the in-depth case study examines and proves the effectiveness of place branding in rural China.

Design policy and regulations within our cities can significantly impact the accessibility and social participation of people with disability. Whilst public, wheelchair-accessible bathrooms are highly regulated spaces for this reason, very little is known about how wheelchair users use them or what wheelchair users think of current design standards.

This exploratory inquiry adopts an embodied approach to investigate the perspectives of powered and manual wheelchair users on public bathroom usage and design. The study encompasses twelve interviews, delving into how participants utilise accessible bathrooms based on mobility, disability, support levels, wheelchair types, urinary/bowel regimes and catheter use.

A thorough analysis of individual public bathroom elements (layout, toilet, handwashing and grab rails) discussed in the interviews reveals themes of safety, hygiene, planning/avoidance and privacy and dignity. Strikingly, many wheelchair users invest significant effort in planning for bathroom use or avoid public bathrooms altogether. The ongoing maintenance and regular cleaning of bathrooms, something not captured in regulatory standards, has been highlighted as something of critical importance to the ongoing accessibility and safety of public bathrooms for wheelchair users. This points to a relationship between the design and the maintenance of public bathrooms as influencers of health, well-being, community inclusion and the social participation of people with disability.

This qualitative research is exploratory and contributes to a growing body of evidence that explores how public spaces are experienced by diverse members of our communities, including people with disability. To date, there have been very few investigations into the embodied perspectives of wheelchair users about public bathroom design.

The findings can potentially drive innovative and inclusive approaches to bathroom design regulations that include operational and maintenance guidance.

The research aims to inform design regulations, standards development and practices of designers, architects, facilities managers, developers and planners, ensuring public spaces are designed to support more accessible, inclusive and socially sustainable cities.

Whilst wheelchair-accessible bathrooms have been designed and constructed for public use (in many countries) for many years, we know very little about how wheelchair users actually use them or what wheelchair users think of current design standards.

This study explores the social conditions for sustainability practices, addressing the processes whereby associational gardening practices in a highly segregated context may or may not create connections and capacities across urban social divides.

Based on organizational ethnographic fieldwork, the article explores urban gardens as potential meeting places in a segregated city, Gothenburg, focusing on collectively organized gardening projects in different socioeconomic and socio-spatial settings.

The study identifies the unintentional encounters embedded in the immaterial act of gardening, that is, digging, planting and actual gardening practices regardless of the harvest. Such practices were found to be important for social sustainability practices beyond the continuous reproduction of silos, at least in multicultural settings. Nevertheless, many urban gardeners create a green living room for themselves and their neighbours, and engagement with those outside their silos often becomes more of a symbolic act of global solidarity, especially in more culturally homogeneous areas.

The article fills a gap in the research by focusing on the social conditions for sustainability practices in urban segregated areas. By showing how gardening practices often reproduce cultural similarity, the study highlights the importance of revealing practices and places that facilitate unintentional social “bonus” interactions that nonetheless occur in two of the gardening environments studied. Unintentional encounters are identified as important dimensions of social sustainability practices.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the suitability of Botschen et al.’s (2017) Brand-driven Identity Development of Places (BIDP) framework to support places in developing their brand-driven identity and offering sustainable tourism models.

This paper applies design science research (DSR) to evaluate the BIDP-framework. A qualitative methodology is used, bringing together findings from four different case studies and from existing academic literature to make relevant suggestions for the improvement of the framework.

The findings indicate that the BIDP-model represents a valid artifact for the development of a brand-driven place identity, but that there is room for improvement.

This paper adopts a DSR approach in a managerial context and shows its validity for evaluating a place branding framework. Moreover, it provides implications not only for managers directly involved in place branding, who can benefit from the model assessment and its suggestions for improvement, but also for tourists and local communities, who will take advantage of more sustainable branding models that better integrate the needs of local actors.

The purpose of this research is to comprehensively describe the legitimacy of the public library in the 21st century.

The research involved a comprehensive literature review using the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database with keywords “Library” and “Legitimacy”, combined with citation searches and additional collections. In total, we analysed 159 research articles primarily from the 21st century, with some comparative analysis of pre-2,000 works. The final phase of the research investigated libraries’ legitimisation efforts across various dimensions, examining how they employ rhetoric and theories to maintain legitimacy amidst challenging circumstances.

Through this research process, five dimensions of public library legitimacy emerged; (1) Democracy, (2) Culture and History, (3) Communication and Education, (4) Economy and (5) Librarianship, with the most diverse literature being related to democracy, and its subsections intellectual freedom, neutrality, the public sphere, social justice and social capital.

The outcome of our results indicates that the evolving legitimacy of the public library in the 21st century has become multifaceted, compared to the elements of legitimacy in the 20th century. Contemporary public libraries can continue to utilise the dimensions of legitimacy identified in this study and can reconstruct their legitimacy accordingly.

This study aims to explore the role of urban streets as transitional edges in coordinating socio-spatial interactions within the urban environment. It will focus on how streets can revitalize their surrounding environments and shape sustainable urban living through their characteristics.

Employing the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework, this study systematically reviewed 67 international research articles published from 2013 to 2023. It delved into the functionalities of urban streets as transitional edges under various social and physical interactions, covering the multidimensional impacts of streets at the social, spatial and individual levels.

The results demonstrate that the physical and social dimensions of streets, through their characteristics as transitional edges, not only complement each other but also effectively promote social space interactions and sustainable urban development. As a key public space at the interface of social and physical realms, streets influence residents' daily lives and balance the socio-spatial environment.

Although this study deepens the understanding of urban streets as transitional edges, it faces limitations due to the scarcity of literature related to transitional edges, which may affect the depth and breadth of the research. Future studies are required to further verify theoretical findings through field research and case studies and to explore practical applications of street design to enhance data comprehensiveness and availability.

The originality of this article lies in defining urban streets as dynamic transitional edge spaces, redefining their dual role in urban design to connect physical forms and social functions. Through a comprehensive literature review, this study provides theoretical support for urban planning and design practices, emphasizing their application value in promoting urban social interaction and sustainable development.

This experiment examines targeted public diplomacy message effects during a crisis, focusing on effects of whether such messages provide a targeted solidarity call that build a sense of common purpose by comparing the other country’s past crises to Ukraine’s current crisis.

Using an experiment, this study investigates whether such targeting in Zelensky’s speeches increased foreign public policy support for Ukraine, the perceived agenda importance of the war and Ukraine’s legitimacy.

The results found that a targeted solidarity call in public diplomacy messages during an international crisis helps gain foreign public policy support. However, it does not significantly impact the perceived agenda importance and the country’s legitimacy.

There has been a lack of studies on whether targeted messaging is more effective than nontargeted one in public diplomacy literature. The study’s result implies that the inclusion of a solidarity call in public diplomacy messaging is more effective in achieving its strategic goal of receiving aid. This study, therefore, empirically answers the remaining question about the effectiveness of targeted messaging in public diplomacy and advances. It also advances theoretical connections among solidarity, targeted messaging and public diplomacy.