How public are they? Evaluating the public accessibility of privately owned public space (POPS) in Taipei city, Taiwan
Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
In modern society, public space plays an important role of the environmental quality of high-density urban areas. The quality of city life highly depends on the quantity, quality, and accessibility of public spaces. There are two types of public spaces from property right perspectives, public-owned and private-owned. The first initiative of privately owned public space (POPS) was taken place in city of New York in the 19th century. The rapid emergence of skyscrapers in the New York City resulted in enormous pressure to the surounding environment. To encourage private developers to provid more available public space, the New York City Government implemented incentive zoning with the legislation the 1961 Zoning Resolution (Kayden, 2000). This law became the precedent for what is now called privately owned public space (POPS). Similarly, to combat the difficulties with obtaining adequate funding and land for public space, the Taipei City Government provided additional floor area bonus as incentives in exchange for more POPS (Hsia, C. J., 1983) in the early 1980s. This new incentive zoning tool created 537 POPS between 1983 and 2010. At the same time, city of Berlin, Tokyo, Santiago de Chile, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Bangkok have also utilized similar incentive zoning to create abundant POPS which are provided, planned, and managed by private sectors. According to Webster, under the market operation of Capitalism, land has always been scarce resources, and public space will inevitably become a part the private sphere because of the territorial fragmentation and the shrinking of the “public realm” (Webster, 2007). Predictably, POPS have become considerable sources of public spaces in many cities.
Description
Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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