51 research outputs found
âFourth placesâ: the Contemporary Public Settings for Informal Social Interaction among Strangers.
This paper introduces âfourth placesâ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside âthird placesâ (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 âfourth placesâ are closely related to âthird placesâ 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 âin-betweennessâ 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 âplacelessnessâ and âfortressâ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make âfourth placesâ 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: âFourth placesâ, 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 âequilibrium resilienceâ and âevolutionary resilienceâ 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 âdiscourse of fearâ enables a process that turns ever more of our public spaces into âsafe spacesâ which are essentially âquasi-publicâ only â quasi-public in the sense that they can be accessed only by those citizens fortunate enough to have the right credentials, thus excluding or âotheringâ all those we deem to be âundesirablesâ, however defined. I point out that this exclusion already is a common practice â and not necessarily connected to the threat of terrorism. Rather, in my view a âhostile architectureâ has emerged that targets everyone who does not fit in. To defend my point of view, I discuss concepts such as âdefensible spaceâ, âarchitecture of fearâ and âarchipelagos of fearâ in the shape of loosely connected inner-cities citadels and gated communities in the suburbs.</p
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