Exploring ICT for policy improvement of more equity use of privately-owned public open spaces

Abstract

Public open space, regarded as one of the significant elements which contribute to the city’s attractiveness and uniqueness, is essential to people’s physical as well as mental health. Privately-Owned Public Open Space, or Public Open Space in Private Development (POSPD), as a supplementation of public open space, has become common policy to moderate the intensification of urbanisation. However, some access restrictions, both physical and information wise, were deliberately designed by developers and property owners to reserve the POSPD for their own gains, which further hampers the public ownership of public space, leading to the failure of POSPD to bear the social responsibilities. Making use of ICT to extend the ‘publicness’ to the ‘internet-based’, this research regards the enhancement of ‘Smart Access’ as a way to revitalize the existing land stock. By redefining and rescheduling the availability of POSPD which have informational access problems, this research aims at proposing a policy framework of ‘accessible and interactive platform’ which could integrate public participation into the provision of responsive public space infrastructure to encourage the citizen to explore and better use the POSPD. Based on the ‘Spatial-Data-Infrastructure’ of Hong Kong, the accessibility and distribution of POSPD are analysed and simulated with GIS as the information base. Using the real-time user-generated data from volunteers as the information flow in response to the update of signage system, the proposed responsive POSPD platform will provide continuous positive feedback for policy improvement to help realize the sustainable development of the public open space.