Social interaction in public space: A meta-narrative review

Understanding how people coordinate social interactions in public spaces is central to environmental psychology’s study of human-environment relations, but research findings remain fragmented across disciplinary traditions with different epistemologies and vocabularies. This meta-narrative review synthesizes scholarship from ecological and environmental psychology, micro-interactional studies of public life, environment-behavior studies, and spatial justice and political recognition. We conducted iterative searches across Web of Science and Scopus (1908-2025), supplemented by forward-backward citation tracking; searching continued until new iterations introduced no new explanatory framework, citation lineage, or mode-relevant distinction. The final corpus comprises 119 key publications from 100 scholars that explicitly explore social interaction modes, types, or thresholds. Analysis reveals convergence on six recurring modes of public interaction: withdrawal, co-presence, co-attention, co-exchange, co-action, and assembly. The review compares how each tradition defines these modes and marks boundaries and shifts between them, preserving differences in explanatory approach. The framework provides a comparative vocabulary linking core concepts such as affordances, privacy regulation, joint attention, and attentional restoration to sociological, urban, and political accounts of public interaction. Analyzing spatial, normative, perceptual, and political conditions, the framework clarifies why similar spatial provisions can produce different interactional possibilities. • Six modes of public interaction recur across four research traditions • Interaction modes: withdrawal, co-presence, co-attention, co-exchange, co-action, assembly • Modes specify coordination requirements, not just activity categories • Framework links affordances, norms, attention, and political access • Comparative vocabulary enables cumulative research across paradigms