Urban Squares As Places, Links And Displays Av Jon Lang, Nancy (University Of New South Wales Australia) Marshall

<P>To attract investment and tourists and to enhance the quality of life of their citizens, municipal authorities are paying considerable attention to the quality of the public domain of their cities ¿ including their urban squares. Politicians find them good places for rallies. Children consider squares to be playgrounds, the elderly as places to catch-up with each other, and for many others squares are simply a place to pause for a moment.</P><I><P>Urban Squares as Places, Links and Displays: Successes and Failures </I>discusses how people experience squares and the nature of the people who use them. It presents a ¿typology of squares¿ based on the dimensions of ownership, the square¿s instrumental functions, and a series of their basic physical attributes including size, degree of enclosure, configuration and organization of the space within them and finally based on their aesthetic attributes ¿ their meanings. Twenty case studies illustrate what works and what does not work in diff