Quentin Stevens

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many parklets have been deployed onto kerbside carparking spaces throughout Melbourne, Australia, by street-fronting hospitality businesses, to provide socially-distanced outdoor dining spaces. These temporary parklets provide useful indicators of the varying capacities of urban streets to support street life and commercial activity. By examining the distribution of Melbourne’s parklets, this paper identifies numerous urban design factors that provide capacity for parklets, or inhibit them. The analysis shows parklets thrive on traditional, pedestrian-friendly shopping streets with narrow frontages and good access but low through-traffic. Car-dependent outer-suburban shopping streets and strip shopping centres also support numerous parklets. Key hindrances include commercial streets serving as arterial commuter routes and streets that already have extensive traffic-calming features. Minor side streets can provide parklet capacity, but many design conditions inhibit this. The paper challenges policy-makers, planners and designers to address a variety of impediments to creating more pedestrian-friendly street environments.

Since the 1960s, Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) has been studied as a significant development in urban space provision. Through a review of key studies (1980–2023), this paper traces how POPS scholarship has changed from fundamental critiques of privatization to evidence-based assessment of spatial practices. The analysis reveals three phases in the literature's development, demonstrating a shift from early concerns about intrinsic problems of private control to accepting POPS as a distinct type of public space requiring its systematic evaluation. The geographical expansion of research has explored how different cultural, institutional, and urban contexts shape the implementation of POPS and scholarly approaches to studying them.

This paper reflects on Malaysia’s twin capital cities – Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya – drawing on diverse insights about cities, images, absence and memory from Calvino’s Invisible Cities . The paper examines the contrasting spaces, aesthetics and symbolism of Malaysia’s two adjacent capitals. It explores how Malaysian identity and memory are framed within these cities’ historical, cultural and geographical contexts: their landscape settings of jungle and water; their translation of particular architectural and urbanistic styles; and their cemeteries. It examines how Kuala Lumpur’s commemorative sites have been displaced and transformed over time. Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya are explored as an illustration of Calvino’s idea of ‘Twofold Cities’: places that are described, and function, in relation to their twin, their opposite, or their bifurcation. Malaysia’s capital cities are also used to illustrate two themes that frame Calvino’s dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan: Cities and Empire, and Cities and the Orient.

A parklet is a raised deck with a street-facing barrier installed on top of one or more on-street car-parking spaces to extend the sidewalk space. Their design and use can vary, as can the social v...