Public Space for Marginal People

Public space is for public use (adapted from Moudon, 1987). A good public space must accommodative for everyone included the marginal, the forgotten, the silent (Badshah, 1996), and an undesirable people. They are informal street vendors; street people, different ability people, women, children, elderly, and others marginalized community. So far, these problems, as well as other social issues are clearly unresolved in the master plan of the city. "Cities for the Citizen' (Douglas & Friedmann, 1998) serves a slogan. Informal sector and the marginalized become the forgotten elements in urban space (Out of Place, [Yatmo, 2008]). Therefore, a formulation to solve the problems is needed. So, how to create accommodative public space for marginal people and marginal uses? Based on qualitative descriptive method, we will formulate the ideal public space for marginal people. Then the result shows that we need the certainty space for everyone. When there is a written proof upon the space for legality urban plan for the marginalized community, the issues are automatically resolved. When the physical aspects of space can accommodate the space needs of the Forgotten (Badshah, 1996), accommodative public space will be created. Thus, as society will be educated to learn and share, to respect the rights of other users in the city, and consequently the physical quality of the visual city will be better because there are no annexation of space and overlapping activities. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies(cE-Bs), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia