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Introduction
The provision of privately owned public space (POPS) has become an increasingly popular mechanism by which to supply publicly accessible space in light of strained municipal resources. While a number of cities - including recent proposals by smaller cities such as Austin, Calgary, Nashville and Tampa - have programs (Novak, 2009), New York City has actively engaged the private sector in providing publicly accessible spaces through the use of density bonuses and other mechanisms for nearly 50 years. The city's 1961 Zoning Resolution instituted an incentive zoning system whereby a developer received additional floor area in exchange for the construction and maintenance of a publicly accessible space on their lot. Since then, over 530 POPS have been created in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, encompassing over 85 acres of new publicly accessible space in the city.
While successfully increasing the total quantity of publicly accessible space, the quality of the resultant spaces has been called into question, as managers of POPS are often concerned more with profit and less with providing a public good (Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee, 1998; Kohn, 2004). Maintaining an appropriate corporate image requires an integrated set of legal, design and surveillance measures to signal appropriate behavior and use, and consequently the appropriate audience for such spaces. Owners and managers of POPS can affect the use of, access to, and behavior within public spaces by manipulating legal, design and surveillance techniques to create more exclusive, less democratic spaces (Mitchell, 2003; Miller, 2007). As such, the physical characteristics sends strong signals to potential users about who belongs and who does not, thereby excluding segments of the population deemed 'out of place' (Sorkin, 1992; Loukaitou-Sideris and Banerjee, 1998; Németh, 2009). This critique, although useful, is limited in that it does not take into account the regulatory environment in which these decisions are being made. The role of the changing policy environment in affecting the use, design and management of POPS has generally been understudied, despite the fact that many existing regulations governing POPS - and especially those in New York City - are the result of the action of renowned urban reformers like Jane Jacobs and William Whyte. This issue is particularly relevant for planners and policy makers charged with developing regulations that encourage the...