The potential of privately owned public spaces (POPS) for youth social life in Dutch cities

Young people increasingly struggle to access ordinary places to be together in cities, as outdoor sociability is shaped by securitisation, behavioural regulation, and the contraction of youth-tolerant public settings. In this context, Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) as policy-mandated public amenities within private developments are a growing component of neighbourhood social infrastructure, yet their design and governance often make youth presence conditional. This paper examines how POPS in Dutch cities enable or constrain youth sociability by modelling the interaction modes that these built environments practically afford. We draw on comparative fieldwork across multiple inner-city POPS, combining behavioural mapping and timed scan observations, brief on-site questionnaires, and a structured site evaluation of micro-spatial and governance features. Observations record the spatial distribution of the six-mode interaction framework, withdrawal, co-presence, co-attention, co-exchange, co-action, and small-scale assembly and the transitions between them over time. We test how particular design–governance configurations expand or compress youths’ interaction modes, how long modes can be sustained, and whether situations can be impacted by design and management features.
Findings reveal how combinations of seating flexibility, sightline configuration, and management protocols either facilitate transitions from brief co-presence to sustained collaborative interaction or compress youth interactions into fleeting co-attention before dispersal. We explore how smartphone-mediated attention adds complexity, stabilising physical co-presence while fragmenting shared attention, making interaction transitions more fragile even where spatial design appears supportive. We argue that assessing POPS as neighbourhood resilience infrastructure requires moving beyond nominal publicness toward measurable capacities for diverse interaction modes: sustained active encounters, tolerated gathering, and upward shifts under everyday management conditions. We conclude with actionable recommendations for spatial design and management practices that expand the social possibilities. Our findings demonstrate that POPS can actively support neighbourhood resilience when design and governance align to sustain diverse interaction modes.