‘Fourth places’: the Contemporary Public Settings for Informal Social Interaction among Strangers.

This paper introduces ‘fourth places’ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside ‘third places’ (Oldenburg 1989). Through extensive empirical fieldwork on where and how social interaction among strangers occurs in the public and semi-public spaces of a contemporary masterplanned neighbourhood, this paper reveals that ‘fourth places’ are closely related to ‘third places’ in terms of social and behavioural characteristics, involving a radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity, and social comfort. However, the activities, users, locations and spatial conditions that support them are very different. They are characterized by ‘in-betweenness’ in terms of spaces, activities, time and management, as well as a great sense of publicness. This paper will demonstrate that the latter conditions are effective in breaking the ‘placelessness’ and ‘fortress’ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make ‘fourth places’ sociologically more open in order to bring strangers together. The recognition of these findings problematizes well-established urban design theories and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space. Ultimately, the findings also bring optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into how to design more lively and inclusive public spaces. Keywords: ‘Fourth places’, Informal Public Social Settings, Social Interaction, Strangers, Public Space Design

From rhetoric to reality: which resilience, why resilience, and whose resilience in spatial planning?

This paper analyses contrasting academic understandings of ‘equilibrium resilience’ and ‘evolutionary resilience’ and investigates how these nuances are reflected within both policy and practice. We reveal that there is a lack of clarity in policy, where these differences are not acknowledged with resilience mainly discussed as a singular, vague, but optimistic aim. This opaque political treatment of the term and the lack of guidance has affected practice by privileging an equilibrist interpretation over more transformative, evolutionary measures. In short, resilience within spatial planning is characterised by a simple return to normality that is more analogous with planning norms, engineered responses, dominant interests, and technomanagerial trends. The paper argues that, although presented as a possible paradigm shift, resilience policy and practice underpin existing behaviour and normalise risk. It leaves unaddressed wider sociocultural concerns and instead emerges as a narrow, regressive, technorational frame centred on reactive measures at the building scale

Archipelagos of Fear:CT technology and the securitisation of everyday life

In this chapter, I re-examine the transformation of our cities under the impression of recent terrorist attacks from a critical perspective. I argue that a ‘discourse of fear’ enables a process that turns ever more of our public spaces into ‘safe spaces’ which are essentially ‘quasi-public’ only – quasi-public in the sense that they can be accessed only by those citizens fortunate enough to have the right credentials, thus excluding or ‘othering’ all those we deem to be ‘undesirables’, however defined. I point out that this exclusion already is a common practice – and not necessarily connected to the threat of terrorism. Rather, in my view a ‘hostile architecture’ has emerged that targets everyone who does not fit in. To defend my point of view, I discuss concepts such as ‘defensible space’, ‘architecture of fear’ and ‘archipelagos of fear’ in the shape of loosely connected inner-cities citadels and gated communities in the suburbs.</p