Sustainable Urbanism in Lowry Range - Essay Example

Contemporary planning and development approaches suggest that privately-owned public spaces will be the Twenty-First Century reality for public spaces (Wallace 2005). As a leader in efforts to provide attractive and inclusive public spaces, New Urbanism also continues a development trend of reliance on the private sector’s provision and management of public activity and public space assets. Conflict exists between Constitutionally-protected rights of access, assembly, speech and expression and private property rights to exclude persons and activity.

In the status quo, there are regulatory voids of excessive, ambiguous, and inadequate regulations that were attributable to direct private sector control and indirect public sector control. Analysis of the broader public forum regulatory structure for these spaces discovered that public use of certain spaces and certain commercial areas are especially vulnerable to these regulatory voids. Furthermore, it is important to note that express public use rights in the form of public access/use entitlements play a unique role in supporting the public forum status of privately-owned public space (Endress 2005).

Such administrative capacity is impeded by a limited understanding of the role of interstitial public spaces, by limited municipal resources for small park spaces, by strong commercial interests with small model development expectations, and by an entrenched property title bias toward bona fide public space assets.