Public Space Engagement and ICT Usage by University Students: An Exploratory Study in Three Countries

Abstract

The new mobile information and communications technologies expand human connectivity to reconfigure public spatialities and to give rise to novel needs for, and practices of, public space usage. The research in this chapter focuses on university students to explore how they perceive and use the public space of university campuses and how they use personal information and communications technologies in it. This allows for an identification of emerging patterns and practices of university public space usage, along with preferable characteristics, designs and ways of management. Data are collected from three case studies, the University College Cork in Cork (Ireland), the University of Thessaly in Volos (Greece), and the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Warsaw (Poland), enabling us to spot similarities and differences in the above trends, that would be attributed to culture and local conditions and lifestyles. © 2019, The Author(s).