Public Open Space's Contribution to Quality of Life: Does privatisation matters?

Abstract

Quality of life of people in urban area is the outcome of people interaction with urban environment. Many studies indicate that public open space is one of important urban environment elements which give positive contribution to quality of life. This paper investigates how privatization of public open space affects quality of life of people while many studies show degradation of "publicness" of public space due to privatization. Research ßnding indicates that people keep doing their social activities both in privatized and public area but physically segregated.Keywords: urban open space privatization, social activity, quality of life Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. Nasution, A. D., & Zahrah, 2(5) Oct / Dec 2017 (p.71-83) 72 https://doi.org/10.21834/aje-bs.v2i5.224 This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/4.0/). Peer-review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for EnvironmentBehaviour Studies), Faculty of IntroductionResearch in quality of life is important as part of contribution to enhance quality of life itself (Lever, 2000). Quality of life of people in urban area is the outcome of people interaction with urban environment (Das, 2008). Many studies show that public open space (POS) is one important element of urban environment (Shirvani, 1985) which gives positive contribution to quality of life (Madanipour, 1999).In fact, public open space tends to decrease both in quality and quantity. One trigger of this condition is privatization, when public open space owned and or managed by private sector. Some studies see the privatization causes negative effects, such as limitation of access, increasing of consumerism, social gap, decreasing democracy expression and social interaction (Kruppa, 1993; Kressel, 1998; Day, 1999;Kohn, 2004). The others see positive effects of POS privatization, such as increasing of quality and management (Melik, 2009;Slangen, 2005) which in turn would increase quality of life (Beck, 2009). This paper will discuss how privatization of public open space affects quality of life, particularly in developing country such as Indonesia with lack of public open space, both in quality and quantity. Literature Review Successful Public Open SpacePublic open space is outdoor spaces with free access for people (Jacobs, 1961;Madanipour, 1999), such as cafes, retail, bazaar, parks, streets and pedestrian paths. Public open space is success while it becomes conducive place for social interaction (Danisworo, 1989;Whyte, 1985), attracts many visitors to do their activities in there (Danisworo, 1989;Whyte, 1985), with wide range of activities occur (Rivlin, 1994;CABE and DETR, 2001), individual or group (Rossi, 1982;Gehl, 2002), informal and suitable for recreation (Whyte, 1985; Project for Public Space, 2000), democratic and non discriminative (Car, 1992), acce...

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