This paper describes the effects of Seating for Socializing (SOS), a place-making project designed to revitalize open public spaces in Hong Kong which suffer from a lack of urban life. The study was conducted by combining quantitative and qualitative methods in order to understand the impact of this temporary urban design intervention in different spatial contexts. The results suggest that the use of bottom-up approaches and tactical design actions can be a valuable tool for promoting new social relations among the citizens as well as rethinking existing weaknesses in the conditions of the city’s public spaces.

The uncontrolled growth of urban areas worldwide is pushing a substantial part of the urban population to the fringes of society, confining them to the unsecure and unhygienic settlements that we call “informal.” These settlements lack in intelligible layout and essential services and infrastructures, thus representing a challenging issue for policy makers and urban designers in the development of renewal programs and strategies. In order to support the facing of these issues through an on-site upgrade approach, this paper argues that walkability deeply affects the functioning of informal settlements, so as to propose that they can be identified as “proximal cities,” which expresses the idea that the vital space in informal settlements has soft boundaries and follows a fuzzy logic. A quantitative analysis, based on a configurational approach, and a qualitative analysis, focused on the morphologic features of the settlements, have been implemented. A comparison of the results shows that this approach is suitable to provide a deeper knowledge on informal settlement and informal society under the assumption of their strict mutual connection. A primal definition of proximal cities, suitable for describing some properties of autopoietic urban systems, emerges from the evidence-based relationships between their spatial and social features. In this respect, a case study has been proposed and discussed.

Private ownership of publicly-accessible space is a phenomenon that is increasingly being adopted in new urban developments in many cities around the world. The purpose and role of these spaces, especially in Hong Kong, has been widely criticised for failing to effectively engage with the public realm of the city, a fact which, in addition to being a cause for concern for the Hong Kong government, has raised questions about the benefits of the programme. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this study examines 28 public open spaces in private development (POSPD) in the financial district of Hong Kong with the aim of both evaluating the spatial characteristics as well as understanding their potential contribution to the multilevel structure of this dense urban area. The research further establishes a new evaluation index as an alternative theoretical framework to assess other critical aspects which may affect their capacity to encourage social activities. The results of the study suggest that, although a large percentage of the POSPDs analysed are not providing positive impact to the district, they hold significant potential which, with new strategies in place, could greatly enrich the pedestrian and social experience in Hong Kong’s dynamic and complex urban environment.

This paper explores the link between the current vision of the “smart city” and the notion of urban autopoiesis understood as self-organized/managed urban systems. It seeks to highlight how the use of GIS analysis, applied to the study of informal settlements, can provide useful information to understand the smart city paradigm. The paper argues the key idea that a smart city should not be seen only as a high-tech urban environment because the transition to smartness will need major changes in its inner structure. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative GIS analysis methods, this study examines the case of the BaSECo Compound, one of the densest informal settlements in Metro Manila (Philippines), with the aim of both generating a comprehensive morphological analysis of this dynamic urban area as well as contributing to the configurational theory of the smart city. The results suggest that the analysis of autopoietic urban systems could expand our understanding of how the structure of the city could evolve to accommodate the needs of its citizens and creating more resilient and inclusive communities.