The idea of democracy, in Western societies is inseparable from the public space. As an accessible space for all, public space provides a realm for everyday activities, social interaction, communication, and the practice of democracy. However, in a country under the governance of a totalitarian regime, concepts like open dialogue, freedom of expression and debate, democratic encounter, and free social interaction are often suppressed. In Tehran, authorities dominate the official public spaces of the city. Surveillance and repression are vividly imposed on the everyday lives of citizens as well as the public spaces of the city. Therefore, a constant defiance and struggle has become characteristic of the lives of most Tehrani citizens, especially the youth. Through this struggle, citizens of Tehran have re-appropriated ordinary spaces of the city into a stage for practicing everyday activities and their rights to the city. This thesis is a study of Tehran???s public spaces and the role of both citizens and authorities in their creation. Official public spaces of Tehran are constantly monitored and subjugated by authorities, whereas subversive spaces offer alternatives for citizens to practice what has been repressed in official spaces. The defiance and struggle for rights, as it is manifested in the spaces of the city, is documented.

No description available.

This thesis attempts to contribute to the literature on urban public space. It focuses on urban China which is a non-Western social context and also undergoing unprecedented social, economic and cultural transformation since its market-reform in 1978. It suggests that the socio-spatial restructuring of post-reform Chinese cities has opened up new possibilities for examining the complex entanglement of social changes, spatial practices in the public and the reconstitution of social relations. This thesis first uses an ideal-predicament-practice framework to develop an overview of the extant literature on urban public space. It argues that in classic social theories public space is associated with two normative ideals, namely the ideal of political expression and the ideal of unfettered social engagement. However, since the 1970s most studies in Anglophone sociology, geography and urban studies have tended to focus on the decline of the public sphere. This rhetoric of decline is manifested in three major strands of research, namely the decrease of civic participation in public communication, the privatization of public space and the regulation of public space. In this thesis, I argue that this body of literature only presents a partial picture of the ongoing construction of the public realm. While it certainly offers a solidly critical stance in the examination of urban change, it does not need to lead us to the impression that the public sphere is no longer central to our civic and political life. Many studies in this literature suffer from two epistemological problems. First, many of these studies are undergirded by a closed perspective which reifies the binary oppositions of exclusion and inclusion, absence and presence. Being visible in the public is unproblematically seen as socially empowering, while exclusion is considered to reduce the social and political relevance of public space. Second, this body of literature also delineates the public sphere in terms of fixed types of spaces which accommodate fixed uses and produce fixed social and cultural meanings. Which has been dispensed with, as a result, is an epistemologically more open approach which actively locates and analyzes people’s actually existing practices and actions related to the production and construction of competing visions of publicness. Thus I argue that the social and political potentials of public spaces are never determined prior to social members’ active participation in the public realm. Public space is constantly made and remade through engaged practices which produce and construct the social and cultural turfs of space from below. Armed with this perspective, this thesis will use four chapters of empirical research to elucidate the complex socio-spatial dynamics associated with the production and construction of public space. Four stories are narrated in this thesis: 1. The emergence of grassroots leisure class in China’s urban public space and the possibilities which it has created for ordinary people to enact and perform their cultural identities. 2. Gay men’s cruising in Guangzhou’s People’s Park and the ways in which gay men negotiate a self-disciplining subjectivity in relation to their public presence and their “deviant” and “abnormal” cultural identity. 3. The construction of improvised grassroots public and counterpublic in the singing of socialist “Red Songs” and how this collective public culture provides opportunities for the production and reproduction of political identities and political discourses. 4. The regulation of motorcycle taxis and the ways in which visions of public space are intrinsically implicated in the constitution of dominant knowledge, social relations and power structures.

This practicum examines methods of identifying concerns regarding public spaces and pedestrian orientation through community participation. Walking tours and focus groups were carried out to gain an understanding of existing conditions related to the comfort and safety of pedestrians in public spaces. Public participation plays a vital role in planning processes for projects focused on improving pedestrian environments. The community is a valuable source of information because its members are most familiar with conditions and what changes they would like to see in the urban environments that they inhabit. Although this research focused on a particular neighbourhood in Winnipeg, the research methods used can inform urban design practices in general and can be applied to other neighbourhoods. To address participants’ concerns about public spaces and pedestrian safety, guidelines for public spaces were prepared. These included recommendations about changes and enhancements to public spaces that could improve the experience of pedestrians.

The objective of this practicum project was to explore the role of interior design in transforming unused urban space into public opportunities for gathering. This was achieved by extracting design guidelines from theoretical concepts of space and place, interiority, and immersion. In doing so, subsidiary concepts of interactivity, placemaking, boundaries and thresholds were also examined in order to help achieve the overall goal of transforming in-between space within the city of Winnipeg into meaningful opportunities for spatial and social interaction. It is the intention of the project that these newly designed spaces will help to foster spatial opportunities for pausing that will help to engage the users of the space with one another, the city of Winnipeg, and in turn create a sense of place.

No description available.

This practicum examines methods of identifying concerns regarding public spaces and pedestrian orientation through community participation. Walking tours and focus groups were carried out to gain an understanding of existing conditions related to the comfort and safety of pedestrians in public spaces. Public participation plays a vital role in planning processes for projects focused on improving pedestrian environments. The community is a valuable source of information because its members are most familiar with conditions and what changes they would like to see in the urban environments that they inhabit. Although this research focused on a particular neighbourhood in Winnipeg, the research methods used can inform urban design practices in general and can be applied to other neighbourhoods. To address participants’ concerns about public spaces and pedestrian safety, guidelines for public spaces were prepared. These included recommendations about changes and enhancements to public spaces that could improve the experience of pedestrians.

The objective of this practicum project was to explore the role of interior design in transforming unused urban space into public opportunities for gathering. This was achieved by extracting design guidelines from theoretical concepts of space and place, interiority, and immersion. In doing so, subsidiary concepts of interactivity, placemaking, boundaries and thresholds were also examined in order to help achieve the overall goal of transforming in-between space within the city of Winnipeg into meaningful opportunities for spatial and social interaction. It is the intention of the project that these newly designed spaces will help to foster spatial opportunities for pausing that will help to engage the users of the space with one another, the city of Winnipeg, and in turn create a sense of place.

NDLTD Innovative ETD Award 2007. No abstract available / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Architecture / unrestricted

Situated within the Wonderboom Poort on the banks of the Apies River, this architectural manifestation is a culmination of the exploration of how the forgotten or left over urban spaces can be revived to contribute to the creation of sustainable facilities and infrastructures accommodating ‘Third space’ within the South African urban context. These forgotten spaces include isolated and underutilised natural spaces, such as Wonderboom Nature Reserve. This dissertation briefly explores the shortfalls of traditional urban planning, while addressing how architectural interventions can contribute not only to urban fabric, but also how they create a platform for positive change through combining socio-economic programme and natural processes. The designer utilises Landscape Urbanism and similar theories as lens to explore appropriate interventions at various scales. This is not only an interrogation of site and context to identify the most appropriate site for intervention, but also an interrogation of form, function and the larger role architecture plays in the social and environmental context of the city. In conclusion it is evident that fragmented (lost/forgotten) urban spaces possess the latent potential to positively alter the status quo of South African cities, generating network continuity (whether natural, infrastructural or social) through the implementation of appropriate architectural intervention when rooted in sustainability theory. In this case the intervention will primarily be focussing on the continuity of public space, serving as a catalyst for future growth and improvement in the area and significantly encouraging the inclusion of the ‘human focus’ – setting a precedent for future development or intervention. / Mini Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Architecture / MArch (Prof) / Unrestricted