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“Public space is in essence a space that is freely accessible for everyone: public is the opposite of private. That is not to say that every public space is a public domain. Public domain entails additional requirements. We are interested in the question of wich spaces are positively valued as places of shared experience by people from different backgrounds or with dissimilar interests. “

“The rapid developments in the fields of information technology and telecommunications are an important factor, which mean that people are no longer tied to specific workplaces and that contacts in leisure time are organized in a completely different way. Due to people being reachable all the time by mobile phone, the notion of ‘meeting place’ has taken on a fundamental different meaning.”

“The language that we use to talk about reality influences the way we comprehend that reality.”

“Discourses often work as implicit mental framework in a discussion.

”Why do people value some places and not others?”

”we seem to think too much about public space in the sense of fixed and permanent physical spaces, and we give insufficient consideration to the way in wich public domain comes into being in places in flux, often extremely temporarily”.

“However, the periphery is not simply ‘non-city’. It has a much more forceful and independent power than is reflected in the city-periphery dichotomy.”

“In many cases the strategic location is determined by ‘accessibility’ rather than ‘centrality’.”

“It is the ultimate paradox: while urban planners strives to correct the formlessness of the periphery by ‘urbanizing’ it, in their attempts to regenerate the inner cities they adopt the organizational principles of the periphery.”

“If we regard city and periphery as a single urban field then we discover countless places that perhaps form the new public domains that we are seeking”.

“Urban life is no longer tied to the city as a spatial entity.”

“The urban would no longer be characterized by physical density and proximity”.

“’Place’ is a concept that has in fact been used as a criticism of the thinking of the Enlightenment (cf. Keith & Pile 1993, Jameson 1991). Space is not empty nor does it allow rational infill. "

“Places are, for example, associated with real events (which have taken place there), with myths, with history and memories. It is this very confrontation between thinking in terms of space and thinking in terms of place – often unobserved – that lies at the root of many conflicts about spatial development and the failure of projects for all their good intentions”.