Highly visual and containing contributions from leading names in landscape, architecture and design, this volume provides a rare insight into people’s engagement with the outdoor environment; looking at the ways in which the design of spaces and places meets people’s needs and desires in the twenty-first century.

Embracing issues of social inclusion, recreation, and environmental quality, the editors explore innovative ways to develop an understanding of how the landscape, urban or rural, can contribute to health and quality of life.

Open Space: People Space examines the nature and value of people’s access to outdoor environments. Led by Edinburgh’s OPENspace research centre, the debate focuses on current research to support good design for open space and brings expertise from a range of disciplines to look at:

• an analysis of policy and planning issues and challenges


• understanding the nature and experience of exclusion


• the development of evidence-based inclusive design


• innovative research approaches which focus on people’s access to open space and the implications of that experience.

Invaluable to policy makers, researchers, urban designers, landscape architects, planners, managers and students, it is also essential reading for those working in child development, health care and community development.