Towards a plural approach: critically asking questions about urban space and context

Camila C. Obniski

The public realm of cities, in what concerns both its discursive and spatial characteristics, is central to both political and design theory. There are clearly distinct views in relation to what is known as the erosion of the public realm, especially in regards to urban public spaces, depending on leanings informed by public realm theory or poststructuralism. Another approach, informed by phenomenology, could be defined as an attempt to recognize urban space - what Hannah Arendt refers to as "the human world" - as a perceivable entity. Design theories informed by public realm theory engage in the observation and cataloguing of the elements which foster public social activity in public spaces, with the purpose of preserving them. Design theories informed by poststructuralism consider pre-industrial city forms to be anachronistic, and engage in the development of logic structures to inform composition methods which produce new forms, able to ignite the complexity and fragmentation of current urban realities. Design theories which focus on spatial composition, informed by phenomenology, are stripped from ideological purposes of preserving, eroding, or reinventing the public realm, city form, political society, public life in public spaces, and so on. This third approach focuses on cataloguing the compositional relationships which allow urban space to be perceived and dealt with as an entity in its own right. These three diverse views on understanding and producing urban context may appear contradictory at times; however they can also be seen as complementary in a critical, multi-layered approach to the analysis and production of the complex urban context of contemporary cities. This study critically situates design theories' different approaches to dealing with the public urban realm, in terms of their philosophical leanings; in addition to reviewing their processes of analysis and production of contemporary urban situations. In this particular study, urban situations are located in downtown Seattle. The purpose of this study is to gain deeper insight regarding the understanding and production of urban space and context, through the critical examination of urban places from a plural design theoretical perspective.

Towards a plural approach: critically asking questions about urban space and context

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details