Mapping urban vitality: a framework for resilient pocket spaces and inclusive city systems

This article critically intervenes in dominant public space paradigms in planning and design of cities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), challenging the persistent reliance on top-down, large-scale planning logics. We argue that such approaches reproduce spatial exclusivity and socio-cultural homogeneity, reducing public life to a managed spectacle or passive consumption. In doing so, they sideline the lived relations and practices through which diverse urban publics engage with and creatively reconfigure spaces to come together. Moving beyond a peripheral view, we reframe pocket spaces as relational micropublics: vital sites for intercultural negotiation, affective placemaking, and inclusive urban vitality. This approach draws on four case profiles of urban pockets in Dubai and Sharjah, UAE, informed by experiential encounters and systematic observations across these sites. Through a situated analysis of everyday public spaces, the paper realigns multidisciplinary trajectories spanning cosmopolitan urban theory, spatial practice, and urban design and planning. An intersectional and relational lens advances an adaptive, context-sensitive approach to everyday urbanism attuned to the temporalities, proximities, and contingencies of superdiverse life. Building on this foundation, we develop the Urban Vitality for Inclusivity (UVI) framework, conceived as an exploratory and conceptual contribution rather than a fully operational planning tool. It makes a twofold contribution: thematically, by clustering UVIs as socially grounded relational phenomena; and spatially, by linking them to situated practices and adaptive micro-urban conditions. This heuristic matrix addresses the planning challenges of superdiverse cities, where universalist design tropes fall short and policy must navigate the plural, contingent conditions of everyday spaces to advance open-city sustainability agendas.