A ‘space-order’ publicness model: interpreting public space development in Shanghai’s people-oriented urban regeneration

Debates in public space research often revolve around discourses of loss of public space and its revival. This reflects the distinction between normative and non-normative approaches to public space and publicness. This paper argues that the non-normative approach better captures the complexity of visions and aspirations of different actors about space and the different ways space is produced and constructed as public. It builds a heuristic “space-order” publicness model and uses Shanghai as an urban setting to explore how this model can be operationalised to interpret public space developments. With two specific case studies in the context of Shanghai’s “people-oriented” urban regeneration, this paper shows that different compositions of arranged order and polycentric order create different layers of publicness, and that such orders in the material production and narrative construction of public space are rooted in the city’s distinct urban regeneration visions and agenda.