Dear all,
Currently, I am reading an old book “Life Between Buildings - Using Public Space” by Jan Gehl, and found many of his arguments are quite similar as Hillier’s idea of “visual community”. It is a nice thing. However, then I found his positive attitude on Oscar Newman’s “Defensible Space” (see his second chapter). He advocates the idea of the sequence from public space to semi-public one, to semi-private, then to private space.
This puzzled me a lot. As I remembered, Bill Hillier has criticized this Newman’s opinion unambiguous before. But Jan Gehl is the kind of scholar who made judgments based on careful observations, and he even gives real case-studies to explain how this kind of spatial pattern works. So, any one can help me to explain this? Or point me to some literatures which I can do some reading? Many thanks in advance, as this topic is related to my on-going PhD thesis.
Xiaoling Dai
PhD Candidate,
Tongji University, Shanghai
China
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