Public outdoor spaces serving as the sociopetal venues for social capital production are a foundation of healthy communities (Stanley et al. 1090); however, they are not being routinely generated in the built environment of North America.  

• Is this lack of culturally-produced appropriate social settings an exceptional occurrence, considering the material culture of past human urban societies?  
• Alternatively, has properly scaled public outdoor space encouraging the production of social capital been a common feature of neighborhoods or towns in the past?  
• Is its existence a sporadic phenomenon associated with only certain cultures with identifiable characteristics or a more generally occurring generic archetype? 

By demonstrating and documenting the presence and attributes of neighborhood-scaled POS constructed by cultures through time and in diverse geographic locations, the lack of such spaces in our culture may be revealed as an anomalous occurrence specific to our culture and in need of diagnosis and correction in the face of current environmental challenges.  

The topic of this research will be urban neighborhood-scaled enclosed public outdoor space (POS) and the determination of its existence, as either a ubiquitous or as an intermittently appearing feature of cities, towns and communities since the advent of urbanization.  Public outdoor space is defined here to include certain enclosed exterior urban space, produced by a culture in the built environment and purpose-built for the unrestricted but regulated social use by the members of that culture.  This phenomenon of exterior venues appropriate for socialization will be examined through a diachronic cross-cultural set of urban public outdoor space (hereafter referred to as POS) case studies, both historic and prehistoric. 

• Introduction
• Theoretical Frameworks
• Culture and Settings
• Urbanization and Neighborhoods
• Cultural Settings and Public Outdoor Space
• Social Capital and Public Outdoor Space
• History of Public Outdoor Space
• Planned Communities    
• A Typology of Public Outdoor Space       

• Theory    
• Method
• Figure-Ground Method
• Figure-ground Method Examples
• Proposal

• Data
• Works Cited