| Summary: | Urban planners are facing the challenge of forming the community for the present and the future. Public places are a part of the community and are places in which people can stay and make use of the area. The public places are important in the urban society of today from a democratic perspective as well as a health- and security perspective. Gävle has an overall objective that reads, that all people should feel safe in public places and this can be created by more people staying on the site. The purpose of this study is to find out what defines a public place and how a public place is created, with a view to a broader understanding and knowledge of the subject. Seven public places in Gävle have been evaluated using a model that measures the publicity and is known as the OMAI model. The goal of the evaluation is to see if the model is suitable when planning and analysing public places. The model is based upon four dimensions: ownership, management, accessibility and inclusiveness. The evaluation was performed using two different method strategies: case study in the form of observations and survey in the form of questionnaires. What is common about all different public places is that they contain a public life constructed by individuals and that the individuals are the ones who determine if the place is public or not. The dimensions accessibility and inclusiveness are based on the experiences of individuals and are suitable for evaluating a public place. The dimensions ownership and management are based on hard factors and not experiences and can therefore not be considered suitable for evaluation of public places. The conclusion is that the way the OMAI model illustrates public places makes the model easy to implement but it does not work quite as well for evaluating the public life. A model that takes aspects concerning experiences of individuals into account would be better when evaluating the public life at public places.
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