Abstract: Shopping centres are a prevailing feature of today’s urban life, but their relation to the public realm is frequently criticised for subtracting ‘publicness’ from the urban environment. In the last twenty years there has been a shift away from the common inward-looking and enclosed shopping centre design towards designs that attempt to embrace the surrounding areas. This trend towards the opening up of shopping centres to their surroundings has led to the emergence of new kind of spaces, where the public space of the city and the private space of the shopping centre meet and overlap - what will be termed ‘interface spaces’ in this paper. In this context, the changing interface of shopping centres and the surrounding urban (public) space is reorienting the public/private spatial interconnectivity and consequently also the urban life experience resulting in the production of new public spaces. Through the case study of the recently developed Rouse Hill Town Centre, in NSW, this paper sets out to consider the effects that the blurring of the boundaries between public and private spaces can have on urban life and vitality.