This thesis explores a broader understanding of infill development in historic surrounding. Historic structures are viewed as mediators for the new design to carry on the sense of place and provide continuity in the city. Continuity in the city scape is provided by forming relations between existing built fabric and new additions in the city, creating a synergistic whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Buildings and city scape are perceived as a living changing artefacts, providing link with past tradition, identity and perception of time passage. Accordingly, this thesis proposes a contemporary circus addition to the existing circus complex as an infill development, constructed through the negative spaces and defined by surrounding historic built fabric. This thesis is divided into four main sections. Chapter I reviews existing literature in the field of context and contextualism as a methodology for infill architecture. Chapter II covers research and analysis of circus concept, semiotics and historical development of circus. Chapter III includes the analysis of the site and existing Circus Building. Chapter IV describes the research design and infill strategy for contemporary building to come in alliance with the pre-existing surroundings. The design process aims to identify a set of complementary aspects and design objectives that would assist in analysis of the existing historic fabric within the evolving context and allow to form relation between new contemporary building and pre-existing context. How can a new structure embody the sense of the place and be a part of continues urban fabric. Consequently, the aim is to assess the compatibility of the new building in historic context. The main thesis question is how to fit in a contemporary circus building/ extension in a dense historic urban setting providing the progression of city scape, context and harmony with the existing buildings.

The presented research focuses on sociocultural ability to sustain the built heritage as a dynamic living place. A human habitat is defined as a genius loci site - manifesting intangible qualities of a material site, perceived both psychically and spiritually. From this perspective, the heritage conservation doctrine often does not correspond to spiritual qualities of genius loci ‘living’ sites. From the theoretical perspective the author defines the preservation of genius loci sites as a care for continuity. To sustain the continuity and to provide day-to-day life happening in the building, the main objective is the inside perspective of the dweller or doer, as through the commitment of human interaction the spirit of place brings the environment to a life. The case of Riga Circus Building, seen as a genius loci site, is accordingly sustained as a care for continuity. In order to provide for local communities to continue inhabiting the building, while maintaining the spirit of place, the author outlines several design principles. The research and its application into a real genius loci site resulted in four basic conclusions. First, that - genius loci sites can not be recreated deliberately, because they are ‘accident’, and not inventions. Second, as those sites are not creations, they are not able to accept radical changes, while minor ones are tolerable. Third, that the present conservation policy is, perhaps, able to protect the genius loci sites against threats, however, often it neither aims in maintaining continuity, nor is able for a comprehensive engagement in general domains of human interactions. Forth, the best possible way to preserve genius loci site, as such - Riga Circus Building, is to assure its continuity.

Culture houses in Slovak villages, remnats of the former Soviet Union and other countries of Eastern Bloc, provides spaces for events and meetings that bring people together. 2 The project aims to explore how culture and spaces for it can ground other developing projects in a particular physical, social and historical context and enable users to become active in the present transformation of place and to mediate more diverse life in rural areas. The project emerges from issues of recent extremism across different scales, a loss of identity, social isolation, lack of interest in what is common, followed by lack of action and care. I want to raise a question what our culture and customs are, whether they are still eligible in all its forms and if not, how it could be subverted collectively. The project aims to create spaces that can accommodate these events of exchange and sharing and where objects enabling conversations can be exhibited. By creating memories and attachment our relations and communities sustain. Based on the idea of trust and active involvement, I see a potential to challenge the image of rural areas in the minds of its inhabitants. The perspective of the collective and the individual in narratives, mappings together with a brief history and statistical values forms a base for interpreting different attitudes towards culture and the commons. The exhibited objects touch on issues of traditions, consumerism, male dominance, control, time and value working further on the aspects of culture, memory and change. The thesis is not after preserving the salvage paradigm which concentrates on the adjudication of authenticity in cultural revivals but instead, it examines themes and quesions which might be of interest and use to people living in the village and area nowadays.

Arriving at a new place, the stranger finds herself/himself facing the unfamiliar. In that situation, she/he is confronted with different tasks, duties and other difficulties in order to handle one own needs and desires such as settling down and creating oneself a home. This thesis aims to explore processes of arriving as well as its interrelation to concepts of hospitality. How does hospitality as a welcoming method facilitate and support the arriving stranger? The first part of the thesis focuses on general aspects of hospitality and its exploration. In order to approach, understand and narrow down the wide and extensive topic, a series of literature is considered and simultaneously connected to the context of my own experience and background as a newly-arrived international student. Therefore, subjective examples, in which I am hosted in and around Umeå, by different people or institutions and during the last 2 years, are investigated. Subsequently this thesis considers existing organizations and networks in Umeå, which operate with a welcoming approach within the realm of integration, cultural exchange, and social relations. It becomes apparent, that spaces and moments of familiarity are significant not just as a starting point for strangers to meet, bringing together differences and similarities especially through communalities such as food, music and dance, but also to provide structures for legal and further support. As a generous act, providing hospitality has the potential for facilitating needs of newly arrived people, enabling exchange and encounter to happen. It has the ability to become a tool for coexistence. Eventually, with concepts of hospitality, sharing and communality in mind, the proposal brings together existing organizations, forming a meeting point for new and already established inhabitants of Umeå in the town center.

This study has identified the meaning of home and its importance for the developing of personal identity of the ongoing growing floating population. The city of Umeå is the University pole in the Swedish region of Norrland. Lots of new students arrive each year and the University is not able to guarantee accommodations for everyone, furthermore temporary workers have the same problem of finding a dwelling. The challenging issue for the floating population in Umeå is the difficulty of finding an affordable and available dwelling where the rights of security, sanitary and civic belonging are assured at a reasonable price. Airbnb is the easiest way to find a temporary room. However, the use of Airbnb in Umeå is not explicitly permitted by the Municipality. The investigation of Airbnb has shown that nowadays a regulation is needed in order to limits its damages and exploit its potentialities. The goal is to relate the vacant spaces in Umea to an architectural design solution and to transform empty commercial buildings in potential homes through the involvement of Airbnb. This project proposes to use vacant commercial spaces, where both the rights of the people and the regulation of rental fees can be assured, through a careful and strategic regulation as transitory solution for these people.

Our right to privacy is often taken as being an implicit right, one that is rarely questioned as we move about the city. However, standing in marked contrast to this right, is the government’s need to surveil and control society in delivering the narrative to provide security for its citizens. Over the years, the UK government have continued to increase both the number and use of surveillance cameras, with an estimated of 4.9 million cameras in comparison with previous years projections of 1.5 million. 1Now, in the name of security, we are being profiled, categorized, and our rights undermined. It is the purpose of this proposal to educate, disclose such facts whilst exploring a different, more empowering function for surveillance, as part of an effort to gain our rights over the city. London is the most surveilled city in the world, and it is here in the neighborhood of Bow, that I have attempted to explore the possibility of managing some of the footage from CCTV cameras for the public benefit. My thesis will propose to change the way surveillance is currently utilized. By re-appropriating these devices to a network of various community actors and collaborators, so they can be part of a self-managed, evidence building platform, fore fronting social values of the everyday city, rather than surveillance and control of a dominant entity. Towards this end, evidence of underused car park will be collected so that they can be argued as ineffective revenue generators towards public assets. The final goal being to generate safety through use, rather than employing more cameras or applying further measures of control. The method for implementing this proposal, will take the form of using an independent and self managed digital surveillance platform, to store evidence of use. Utilizing this process as a means of empowerment within the neighborhood.

As a concern for how new city developments invest in commercial public space of economic activity rather than cultural activity and inclusion, part of a global trend and also the case of Umeå’s ambition to reach the population growth of 200 000 inhabitants by the year of 2050. The question to be asked in this regard is what kind of effect does this produce on the way we as local inhabitants can take control and be part of the creation of our own living environment? Or are we just victims of a life consumed by slow decay due to the capital dominance? In relation to this main concern, the project has been developing through the aspect of acknowledging inferior space and abandoned objects as a method and typology to analyze alternative ways to perceive the city off based the logic of clear function and use, but in terms of human interaction and subjective perception of space. The point of departure and important key element for this development derived from the early stages of research and influential work by Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic New Jersey, (1967) with a main quote on the description of Smithson’s work and the term of monuments, here defined by Ann Reynolds as: “how something plot out and charge a space with meaning” Learning from memory traces of an abandoned set of futures evoked the idea and strive towards creating space not tied to a specific use or function, but as a collaboration and juxtaposition between form and the viewer’s experience. In add to an understanding of a presence which ties together the past and the present as an indirect translation of the developed concept for contemporary Ruins, as the perception of void. The ruins association to object defined through the observer became a guideline towards the aim of designing nonhierarchical space, free of us and interpreted by the visitor within the city scape. Based on this foundation this thesis aims to examine the possibilities of architectural structures which can encourage and create conditions for new cultural and social meetings. The abstract concept of space and deliberate openness to interpretation can allow the visitor to take co-authorship of their own living environment based on their personal understanding and imagination of that space. The action is by deliberate disjunction between form and viewer’s experience forced by a superimposition plan as a design strategy for redeveloping the current Döbelns Park into a new culture park in the city context of Umeå, Västerbotten, Sweden. Fragments of the park will in add create a system of integrated monumental sculpture scapes, as a network of in-between small scale interventions adapting to specific site conditions together with implemented greenery. To secure areas within the city scape with access to greenery and social interactive meeting points, part of the Urban strategy.

We are living in a globalized world where everything and everyone is connected at all times and society is changing in a faster pace than ever before. Old knowledge becomes obsolete and needs to be continuously replaced by new one, creating the need for learning to be life-long. The American futurist Alvin Toffler claimed as early as in the 1990s, that in order to be literate in the 21st century one must be able to learn, unlearn and relearn - but still our learning institutions look very much the same as they did during most of the 20th century. We are educated at a fixed period of life and taught a predetermined skill-set by our teachers to prepare us for future work. The issues we are facing are serious, such as global warming, automation and digitalization, and we are in urgent need of both unlearning and relearning how to live. Creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship have become political buzzwords, wide spoken by governments around the globe when trying to tackle the issues of an uncertain future and the need to reinvent in order to adapt. They are the individual skills that both politicians and the market are craving. However, creativity has mostly been linked to creative and high-tech industries - as means of being competitive in the harsh 21st century global work environment. As a result, we have seen how an unjust and unequal system has developed, and the rise of a new class. The creative class, as described by Richard Florida, holds vast privileges over other classes; earning substantially more money, and playing a leading role in the gentrification processes of cities. This asks an important question of who can be creative and innovative. Are these skills reserved for the select few, or can everyone be creative and innovative? Perhaps a new, more social, civic and democratic definition is needed to truly fit the issues we are facing in the 21st century. How can creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship be learned, actively pursued and continuously practiced by each and everyone in ways that do not solely benefit personal interest, but society at large? The aim of this thesis is to explore the role of architecture in a society that demands creativity and innovation, and how it can act to empower the individual. It will discuss how society is changing, both in the broader context of western societies and in the local context of Umeå, and how learning institutions can adapt for continuous unlearning and relearning. How do we create frameworks that nurture creative possibilities, and grants equal opportunities for everyone?

This thesis derives from the comprehension that liminality has the potential for new social relations to form towards new social conditions. With an intimate approach and a deeper understanding of oneself, we can reach a more sensible understanding of others, which can bridge preconceived borders consisting of seemingly different realities that make the city a whole. The aspiration is to shift focus from the obvious preconceived reality towards a self-reflective and intimate occupation of space and being amongst each other. What architectural strategies and spaces can cater for this liminal stage to take form? To explore the concepts of liminality and intimacy this thesis investigates existing independent social operations and physical sites that through their occupation lead to new social relations and physical connections in the city. The methods are based on an inquiry of literature pertaining to this topic, practical curating of intimate space, as well as interviews and engagements with previous mentioned operations and sites. In the proposal phase three sites, or rather sets of conditions, are test cases to examine how liminal spaces can be reassured through an intimate approach within the context of Umeå, Sweden. The three sites are temporal to different extents and operate on different scales and time spans. This temporality gives the sites an uncertain character, which through the research has been found to be a potential for occupying space and use it in unexpected ways. Similar to the temporal character of the sites, the architectural strategies for giving value to these places should avoid a dogmatic and preconceived thinking of how people should use the place. If the potential lies in the undefined, then the proposal should embrace this uncertainty and thereby become facilitators of imagination and reappropriation to take form.

This text explores and area of architecture connected to co-design of city planning and design and various other subjects connected to civic engagement and social integration. The first part is compiled by research and theory considering the background of the project and ideas contemplating co-design, the role of the architect as facilitator, translator and assimilator and the user as expert and weighs the potential and risks involving these. The second part considers the organisation Tvättstugan – an institution for democratic city planning, existing actors of interest, the present planning process and how to navigate within it if one’s intentions were to introduce an alternative to it. The third part addresses the project Kvartersråd – a neighbourhood council and particularly describes the project and the process of co-designing a proposal. The first part of the thesis mention the designer and the planner as well as the architect since the ideas presented considering co-design encapsulate many professions and are not only applicable to specifically architectural processes of design. Later in part two and three the text focuses more specifically on the design profession of the architect. This text is part of a wider architectural master thesis that also consists of a presentation presenting models, drawings and other various artworks.