A Brighter City: Shedding new light on Privately Owned Public Spaces to improve Access, Use and Inclusion

Background: Local governments encourage developers of city-centre sites to provide publicly-accessible indoor and outdoor space at the ground level of their buildings, commonly known as “privately-owned public space (POPS)”. While these spaces have become common in contemporary cities, and a major venue for the social life of citizens, there are some criticisms of their level of publicness and the exclusion of certain ‘undesirable’ people and activities. Such spaces often prioritize consumption for targeted user groups, which can lead to erosion of the public realm and declining value and use of fully public spaces. Contribution: This research addresses the problem of how people can better understand and use these spaces by proposing the design and installation of distinctive graphic signs that would mark all of Melbourne’s publicly-accessible privately-owned spaces. These clear and simple signs will make the full extent of the city’s public realm more readable for a variety of demographic groups, and thus make these privately-owned elements of Melbourne’s public realm more inclusive. By designing to make the rights to access and use of such spaces in Melbourne explicit this work contributes to the evaluation and identification of POP’s in Melbourne and to the way in which POPS are evaluated more broadly. Significance: The significance of this research is that it identifies the importance of the quality and accessibility of privately owned public spaces, specifically in Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne, unlike many cities internationally that are well-known for their high-quality public realm (Seattle, San Francisco, New York City), does not have a signage system that explicitly denotes the public accessibility of privately-owned spaces. Its value is attested to by the following indicator: Shortlisted for the City of Melbourne and RMIT Design Challenge 2019 Co-designing inclusive, civic and sensorial moments in the city Melbourne, Australia