Ali Madanipour, a prominent urban design scholar from Newcastle University, has developed an impressive research agenda beginning in the early 1990s that aims to evaluate, and argue for the significance of, public space as a vital element of city life. In Whose Public Space? Madanipour advances this agenda by bringing together a number of international researchers to evaluate public spaces in different cultural settings with respect to two criteria: accessibility and inclusion. These criteria are set against a backdrop of changes to the historical city resulting from global processes, an increasing influence of the market and decreasing social bonds. In the book, accessibility is conflated with ‘public’, broadly defined as ‘open to people as a whole’ and opposite to what is private. Acknowledging growing social diversity in contemporary society, Madanipour places equal emphasis on issues of inclusion, especially within different stages of design, planning, development and management of public space. While I find problematic aspects of Madanipour's universal conception of ‘public’ and ‘space’ (as opposed to the socially constructed nature of both), I will reserve this review for more specific concerns.

The first part of the book focuses on traditional city centres, mostly from Newcastle, but also from Taiwan and Nigeria. Here, the cases emphasize increased privatization of public spaces due to greater control by the private sector (Akkar Ercan); the use of planning tools, including public participation, as an instrument of displacement (Rogers); the limits of public space improvement as a strategy for city centre regeneration (Chen); and how historical events change material, social and symbolic patterns of public space (Bala Garba). The second half of the book draws attention to ‘peripheral’ public spaces that are often found in low- to moderate-income residential neighbourhoods. Included here are examples from European cities, South Africa, the Middle East and Mexico. The chapters in this section place emphasis on public space as the setting for everyday life. The thematic foci of these chapters include how marginal public spaces create a sense of entrapment for disadvantaged and vulnerable social groups (Madanipour); the impact of gated communities on the function and meaning of public space (Landman); the lack of fit between modernist spaces and the current uses and management of these spaces (Mandeli, Zamani); possibilities and conflicts emerging from the auto-construction of communal spaces (Hernández Bonilla); and the importance of political support and popular education in bridging top-down social reform and bottom-up participative public space projects (Michialino).

What unifies the case studies and is the key strength of the book is demonstrating the social importance of public space in a range of cultural settings. Accordingly, Madanipour states, ‘While the character and use of these public spaces may differ, the universal existence of some form of public space and its social and economic significance for the city cannot be denied’ (p. 14). Madanipour uses the concluding chapter to return to the question ‘whose public space?’ to make a salient point that processes of social interaction at a variety of scales determine the quality and character of public space. Key to this understanding is the importance of claims, and lack thereof, by different actors to explain the changing nature of public space. Regardless of who is making claims, Madanipour argues that those involved in city design and development should strive to create greater ‘publicness’ in public spaces. Few urban designers would intuitively argue against this point. However, what is disappointing about the book is that it lacks a strong theoretical basis from which to make such ‘claims’.

In sum, what is intended to be an international comparative study on the relationship between public space, accessibility and inclusivity disappointingly falls short on several fronts. First is the noticeable absence of case studies and references to North American scholarship on the topic. This is surprising as many, especially in the United States, have been critical of urban design and development with respect to the criteria that Madanipour presents to the reader. Works by Margaret Crawford, Clare Cooper Marcus and Randy Hester, to name a few, have been focusing on issues of accessibility, inclusion and exclusion, social justice and equality for some time now. Related to this, many of the observations made by the book's contributors are common knowledge and, at times, offer overly simplistic suggestions for practice. Given the spatial and cultural distances that exist among many international urban design scholars, perhaps it is too much to expect from this book. To Madanipour's credit, he has assembled contributors from a number of different continents. This is a good start, but more, and deeper, comparative work is needed in the future. A second and more substantive criticism concerns the lack of theoretical discussion concerning equality, accessibility and inclusion. It is not clear whether these issues served as the basis for the cases chosen or, alternatively, emerged after the cases were strung together. Regardless, the book would be considerably stronger if it drew from theories (and theorists) that are concerned with such matters. Iris Marion Young's book Inclusion and Democracy would be a good starting point. Moreover, a focus on the technical and procedural aspects of accessibility and inclusion misses the point when such concepts are political at their core. Similarly, the book's conceptualization of public space is entangled in the artificial split between place and process. As such, the book fails to advance the understanding of how to make public spaces legible and accessible to a greater plurality of social groups and identifying ways to transform decision-making processes toward greater transparency and inclusiveness. Without this theoretical foundation and knowledge of democratic practices, public spaces will remain as they often have historically – as spaces of dominance and exclusion.