Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemArchitectures of Encounter: Shaping Social Interaction in the Intercultural City( 2020)Globalisation and migration are producing ever increasing intensities of difference in Western cities. People from all over the world are becoming urban in search of a better life, bringing with them culturally distinctive ways of living and being that mark them as different. The sharper the differences, the greater the potential for discrimination, racism, prejudice and weakening social cohesion. Everyday intercultural encounters hold the promise of breaking apart fixed notions about difference. Despite renewed attention to intercultural encounter in open-public space, scholarly research has focused more on social agency with less regard for the agency of the built environment. This thesis explores how the built environment of open-public space shapes intercultural encounter in the everyday life of Western cities, to better inform policy makers and design practitioners. An actor-network ethnography is employed to study the agential qualities of the urban square typology in Copenhagen, Melbourne and Toronto, through document and artefact analysis, nonparticipant observation, mapping, and semi-structured interviews. The data is analysed using a constant comparison framework producing descriptions of human-nonhuman relations of intercultural encounter. This thesis makes four main arguments. First, all intercultural encounters are meaningful, and the built environment has agency to both enable and constrain these interactions. Second, affordances rather than humans or nonhumans triangulate intercultural encounter. Third, the programmes designed into public spaces have agency to enable and constrain intercultural encounter, albeit in conflicting and contradictory ways. Finally, symbolic representations have limited agency to enable intercultural encounter.