This paper aims to describe the theoretical body of a new urban planning tool called the "sociotope map" (Swedish: sociotopkarta), developed within the planning practice of the Stockholm City Urban Planning Administration. Since the postmodern communicative turn in urban and landscape planning, dominated by densification and sprawl, there has been a great demand for a more efficient connection between the system world of planners and the life world of citizens, starting from the users’ space and perspective, not the planners’. In Lefebvre’s terms the sociotope map is a representation of the users’ perceived space. The key Marxist concept here is use value, or more accurately in environmental economic terms: direct use value. The Stockholm sociotope map is consequently a map of the commonly perceived direct open use values of specific open space, of the citizens of Stockholm. The map emphasizes that people share use values but that every open space has a unique set of values. Its representation of diversity of place (topos) is maybe just the level of reduction that makes the map true enough to the citizens and at the same time useful for the planners. This can explain its recent recognition in Stockholm and other fast growing municipalities in Sweden (e.g. Gothenburg 2004-2007 and Uppsala/Gottsunda 2006). However more experience and research still remain to completely understand this tool. The recent success can only be explained by the fact that there is a true demand. A society which is turning increasingly postmodern, globalized and individualized can hardly plan, develop or grow without knowledge of the common use values of urban public open space.

Although territorial issues are typically not part of space syntax research, territorial issues have always been part of spatial configurations. Already The social logic of space highlights the fundamental differences between the interior and (private) and the exterior (public). This paper expands this straightforward scheme by investigating a very particular territorial phenomenon in urban open space. When territories are contradictory or blurred, an ambiterritory (a no-man’s-land) is created. GIS-analyses show that ambiterritory is mostly found in post-war modernist morphologies.

A theoretical framework defines two types ambiterritory. Goods ambiterritory (Type A) are the mismatch of lived and perceived space in terms of the divergence of private and public territorialities defined by intervisibility and use. Territorial human actions are translated into material actants in space and create disturbed public ambiterritory (A1) and disturbed private ambiterritory (A2). Legal ambiterritory (Type B) appears when use value and property owner do not match. This creates public pseudo-property (B1) and private pseudo-property (B2).

A GIS-study was applied to the framework in ten city districts in Stockholm: three urban grid areas, one postmodern area, three villa areas, and three post-war modernist areas. The results are clear and unambiguous. Post war modernist areas and in-fills create extensive ambiterritory. In the modernist areas, 4-8% of open space (A1), 7-12% of public property (B1), or 14-15% of private property is lost to ambiterritory. These findings where confirmed by interviews with experienced professionals in public open space management. Ambiterritories are hence used by no one, left by management, creating an uncertain void that makes it costly for society.

The framework presented in this paper must be considered as an initial theoretical sketch, far from being complete. There are still many factors left out and uncorrelated. A fundamental difficulty is the limitations in getting quantitative empirical data. Hypotheses and preliminary findings nonetheless indicate that what has been called ambiterritoriality ought to be something worth further investigation and that GIS can be a very useful tool. There is also a need for problematizing the debate on public space and margins. Take for example the concepts so commonly used in urban research and urban design practice “semi private” and “semi public”, which clearly lack distinction. Space syntaxtheory has great potential to put territoriality into new light.

This article suggests new tools for understanding and measuring how urban design affects green space accessibility: how urban structure distributes open space to people and how it creates users and stakeholders. Two similar questionnaires from 2001 and 2004 reveal that citizens in some dense inner city districts experience higher green space accessibility than citizens in some low-density ‘green’ suburbs in Stockholm. This peculiar result was the starting point of testing old and new measures in 10 different city districts using a new GIS-application ‘The Place Syntax Tool’ (PST). PST makes it possible to calculate the open space accessibility from every address point in an urban area. A new measure, which considers range (1000 m), orientation (axial line distance), green space size (sqm) and number of use values, correlated considerably better to the questionnaires (R2=0.74, P<0.001) than any of the conventional measures. Correlation was also found when comparing another questionnaire that asked participants how often they go to their favorite green area and axial line accessibility to green areas (R2=0.77, P=0.018). Consequently, cognitive anthropocentric measures of accessibility and attraction can change the common opinion of open space and ‘green’ from a static to a dynamic urban entity.

One of the biggest challenges for future urban design is to cope with suburbia and sprawl. This paper investigates how sprawl can be compacted in terms of spatial morphology. New 'user-related' location density measures, like spaciousness and compactness, are introduced that integrate floor area, axiality of pedestrian network, and public open space. These and 'administrative' area density measures are applied to two modernist suburbs in Stockholm, Björkhagen and Rågsved (1946-1957), and four strategic densification scenarios: 'New urbanism', 'New regularism', 'New conservatism', and 'New modernism'. The results show that the suburbs can increase by 100% in Floor Area Ratio in the first two and but only 20-40% in the other two. Floor area accessibility, however, is influenced by network accessibility more than plot density. Public open space is needed to uphold spaciousness and compactness. To conclude, tree-like morphologies seem rational in peripheral low density suburbs with a lot of public open space, but when densified the grid becomes more necesary to uphold compactness. Even though densification by 'New urbanism' or 'New regularism' in modernist suburbia is improbable due to political reality, they point out possible ways to compact more efficiently modernist sprawl as well as the need for further research.