1We present the second section of the special issue on rethinking the quality of public space from a sociological perspective. The primary objective is to observe the quality of public space in light of the changes and crises we have witnessed in previous decades through the analytical construct of refiguration (Knoblauch, Löw, 2017). Analyzing through refiguration has the advantage of capturing quality by considering the interdependence of structures, systems, levels and actions in maintaining multiscalar perspectives and subjective dimensions. The prevailing socio-spatial approach, partly oriented by the call itself, is based on the theory of relational space (Löw, 2016), which understands aspects of spatial ordering in processual, socio-material and discursive perspectives.

2Leaving the question of quality relatively open and focusing on recent empirical research, we intercept how quality was formulated by the researchers who responded to the call Re-thinking the quality of public space. Therefore, the first contribution of the special issues – first and second sections – is to highlight the commitment of sociology to understanding the quality of public space.

3Our contribution for the special issue aims to enrich the joint theorization of space and quality. It is challenging to escape the normative grip intrinsic to the concept of quality. However, our objective is to prevent the normative bias through a sociological analysis of practices. The authors of the special issue focus on the quality of spatial experience.

4Another consideration, which comes from the research presented in the sections, is the multiplicity of the dimensions investigated, and their overlapping interactions. Simultaneously present in various essays is the analysis of intersecting affective, imaginative, and technological dimensions. Innovative constructs such as the quality of the atmosphere and the quality of the hybrid have been introduced to overcome binaries of nature/culture, material/immaterial or those related to gender. Moreover, this allows us to read the quality of public space by tracing it back to over-managed or under-managed constructs (Carmona, 2010). Sociology is proven capable of mobilizing various complexities irreducible to political-managerial dynamics.

5Sociologically, quality seems oriented to grasp the practices of reconnecting subjects to spaces through not only transfiguring spaces into places, but mobilizing memories, imagination, and affections or distancing practices (Löw, 2016; Fassari, Blandini, 2024). Daily habits and routine practices play a crucial role in shaping spatial geographies in favor of sociality, especially for women and young people who want to express their rights to the city.

6Furthermore, quality in a sociological perspective, and possibly due to its epistemic nature, is almost always a contested quality. A quality produced by opposition to the logics of domination – whether of profit, security, or surveillance – which produce and reproduce hierarchies according to their own and defined ex ante orders of values (Boltanski, Thevenot, 2006). Individual or collective actors often contrast these logics with meanings and practices of reappropriation and resistance. Practices which are oriented by the desire for a spatial experience that combines the logic of subjectivity or belonging and solidarity. Although dominant and dystopian, no logic remains uncontaminated, overlapping with spatiotemporal practices of demarcation that create shifting contexts of meaning. If not openly conflicting, such logics are contested and renegotiated daily.

7Sociological quality is also a resistant quality. Resistant in the sense of bodies that produce oppositional spaces that are often interstitial. Spaces of life to be redeemed from the dominion of the univocality of the order of value in the logic of the strongest. In this sense, it is predominantly a heterotypical spatial quality in the Foucauldian sense of a space. An always contestable and reversible space that emerges from opposing logics in which it is possible to constantly practice otherness.

8In the research presented, an affective and aesthetic quality also makes its way, in which the experience of quality is as intense as it is less directly connected to the conditions of its production. It is as if quality resides in the potential of producing quality. Perhaps this affective, sensorial quality should be associated with a more reflective quality that protects it from possible perverse effects such as discrimination and racialization.

9The observation of the above types of qualities requires relevant analytical constructs, in depth research practices, and methodological creativity. In the special issue we find consistent traces made within this triangulation. Regarding the analytical construct that explicitly or implicitly interprets the quality of the public space in the essays presented, we confidently refer to the term “experience” (Dubet, 1995). Such a construct allows us to mitigate the intrinsic normative fold of the term quality, placing it within a relational frame. It emerges from the combination of multiple logics that guide the social experience of collective and individual actors and cannot be reduced to a single tension. Whether the tension is in freedom (subjectivation), recognition (community) or instrumental (strategy) (Dubet, 1995). From this point of view, it is an ecological quality, in the sense that it attributes the maximum interpretative weight to the relationality of logic that compose it.

10Sociological quality also does not appear to be prescriptive or taken literally. But it is experienced as an unfinished process.

11In depth research practices are necessary for the emerging conception of the quality of public space because they make a quality resulting from different representations recognizable, which is otherwise hidden among other things. Quality, understood sociologically, makes the connection between quality and knowledge increasingly indispensable.

12Further observation concerns methodological creativity in qualitative research on quality. The use of supporting socio-material, associated with traditional sociological tools define research that is predominantly a performative practice of space. This research is interpreted in hybrid mappings or results from mobile ethnographies, and qualitative methods include morphological analyses, visualizations in graphics and photographs, and visual research practices (e.g., photo elicitation and photovoice). Accordingly, in this special issue, the research highlights a lively presence of sociologists in the field and, as shown a desirable, greater involvement in encouraging the co-design of public spaces.

13Overall, a consistently desired quality emerges in the implicit request to access the co-design of spaces. This request for participation highlights how the spatial experience is a resource of meaning and subjectivation that cannot be ignored.

14Moreover, this leads to a final observation. We need to address how the quality of public space, in a sociological perspective, fails to assert itself in public discourse. The subversive and embedded routines described by sociologists struggle to converge into an affirmative discourse that is significant to the planning processes of public space.

15Sociologists are often called when the games have already been played. In this sense we hope that the special issue can strengthen the dialogue with decision makers as well as with other epistemic cultures involved in the no longer procrastinating social sustainability of public spaces.