Eva Minoura: "Uncommon Ground: The urban form of the social territory" (Higher Seminar, December 11)
Implicit in any urban design is a negotiation between public and private interests. Such a negotiation is articulated and made legible in the facades, fences and even more subtle edges separating this from that. In the city, the complex interplay of open space, building and boundary produces a patchwork of subspaces, which we can consider as potential urban territories. The ways in which territories are used and inhabited, altered and appropriated is a reflexive process whereby territories organise and are reorganised. Shared open spaces are potential social arenas and sites of ‘urban life’ – places for recreation, play, gardening, and stewardship but also as sites of self-governance and innovation. However conceptions and configurations of such territories have changed over time due to more market-driven and ad hoc development. What were once intended as collective open spaces are today often appropriated for personal use or frequently not used at all.
Tid: To 2014-12-11 kl 13.00 - 15.00
Plats: E407
Medverkande: Eva Minoura, Björn Ekelund
In the interest of not ‘wasting space’ and in supporting agency and stewardship of space locally, i.e. by and for residents, a better understanding of how spatial and social factors interplay is sought. Parameters such as the scale and enclosure of space as well as legibility and materiality at the interface of public and private are investigated using both quantitative and qualitative methods. A theme central to the research is the role of the boundary – often reduced conceptually to being a mechanism of inclusion/exclusion. Within systems theory, boundaries are seen as necessary to regulate difference, a notion perhaps useful applied to social mechanisms, for instance as the spatial underpinning of stewardship. The research takes a morphological point of departure, looking to aspects of the urban form for its role in how social processes are sometimes supported and sometimes impeded by the design. Hence, something might then be ventured about why urban territories have inherently different potential to sustain social life, requiring more or less social organisation to uphold their function. Finally, it is the premise of this work that densification of existing urban fabrics is necessarily bound-up in territorial performance, thus offering possibilities for interventions as means to make spaces otherwise left over or under conceptualised more easily used and appropriated. The challenge for urban designers and architects, as pressure on space in cities increases, is to configure space in ways that support meaningful urban life.
Eva Minoura is an architect and doctoral student at the School of Architecture KTH in the area of Spatial Analysis and Design. Prior to her doctoral work she worked for ten years in private practice in Stockholm and New York City. Over time she found the lack of opportunities to follow-up how completed design proposals were seen by residents and end-users as problematic. This was especially troubling in urban design and development projects, due to the large scale of these interventions. When the opportunity to pursue a PhD presented itself, it meant being able to pursue these questions at depth in the context of the issue of what are termed urban territories. The research seeks to describe what are the spatial underpinnings of collective private space of yards and gardens in urban and peri-urban contexts. Apart from the doctoral studies, Eva works with urban development in the Planning Department at the City of Stockholm.
Björn Ekelund , Ass. Professor at Luleå Technical University and Architect at SWECO, will be respondent.