Over the course of history, we have become increasingly aware of values possessed by individuals and collectives alike not to be taken as being beyond all questioning, yet these values are often perceived as inevitable from the perspective of the individual. This gives rise to a conflict eternal and evident throughout social life, in the form of value clashes. Within the framework of the thesis, such conflict is referred to as the meta-crisis. As the, in the West, increasing polarisation and subsequent inability to understand and tolerate individuals whose values clash with out own, revealed as a permeating layer riding along with other ongoing crises. Discussion between individuals possessing different values has the proven potential to mitigate the meta-crisis. However, current spaces for discussion, within meatspace and the virtual alike, are turning excessively prone to producing echo chambers. This echoing characteristic is actively degrading potential discussion into antagonistic conflict furthering the meta-crisis. The Radical Middle sets out to discover the role of architecture and urbanism in preventing echo chambers from occuring in our increasingly pluralistic cities, in setting up clashes between different spaces of logic, and ultimately constructing conditions for perpetually mitigating the accelerating meta-crisis through discussion between different-minded individuals. A set of principles are discovered, including but not limited to how information spreads, an individual's propensity to congregate with like-minded individuals in particular spaces and relationships between class status and living condition as a model for predicting values across averages. The thesis concludes with a theoretical framework for the conceptualization and actualization of the Radical Middle - as a synthesis of its principles, wherein the whole comes to exceed the sum of its parts, perpetually mitigating the meta-crisis both within and without.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-184266 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Backlund, André |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Arkitekthögskolan vid Umeå universitet |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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