Connecting People, Place and Design

Angelique Edmonds

Description

Connecting People, Place and Design examines the human relationship with place, how its significance has evolved over time and how contemporary systems for participation shape the places around us in our daily lives. Divided into three parts – place, people and participation – this interdisciplinary volume examines people, place and design across the fields of architecture, design, cultural studies, sociology, political science and philosophy.

Part I, on place, considers the cultural, political and philosophical shifts in our historical relationship to place. Part II, on people, considers movement and migration and how it affects place relations. Part III, on participation, examines forms of public engagement and cultural systems for collaborative contribution to the design and creation of place. Improving people’s relationships with place requires connection, and in Connecting People, Place and Design, Edmonds demonstrates the importance of connection, underscoring that working together to nurture and sustain places that celebrate the diversity of our human species is one of the most critical issues of our time.

Introduction 

PART I: PLACE

Chapter One: Significance of Place 

Chapter Two: Modern Shift of Perception 

Chapter Three: Contemporary Debates, Including the Importance of Place to Wellbeing and Sustainment 

PART II: PEOPLE

Chapter Four: Order Imposed 

Chapter Five: Migration and Transition 

Chapter Six: The Importance of Our Spatial Encounter with Difference 

PART III: PARTICIPATION

Chapter Seven: Participation, Context and Design 

Chapter Eight: Design Collaboration and the Built Environment 

Chapter Nine: Participation, Incorporation and Approaching Difference 

Conclusion 

Index

Sujets

• landscape
• Index of urban studies articles
• Types of rural communities
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Indigenous peoples
• Design
• General
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 31 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789381337
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2020 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Sam Noonan (photographer)
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Indexer: John Liddle
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Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-132-0
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-134-4
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78938-133-7
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Introduction
P ART 1 : P LACE
Chapter 1: Significance of Place
Chapter 2: Modern Shift of Perception
Chapter 3: Contemporary Debates, Including the Importance of Place to Wellbeing and Sustainment
P ART 2 : P EOPLE
Chapter 4: Order Imposed
Chapter 5: Migration and Transition
Chapter 6: The Importance of Our Spatial Encounter with Difference
P ART 3 : P ARTICIPATION
Chapter 7: Participation, Context and Design
Chapter 8: Design Collaboration and the Built Environment
Chapter 9: Participation, Incorporation and Approaching Difference
Conclusion
Index
Introduction
As Barry Lopez describes: ‘Many of us, I think, long to become the companion of a place, not its authority, not its owner’. This book was inspired by a similar sensibility and humbling realization over and again that place is the locus of all possibility. Without place we do not have somewhere to live, place is our most enduring companion, the singular constant relationship for every breath from birth until death. Yet with the crisis of sustainability, the endurance of that relationship is under very real threat.
The significance humans attribute to place has been in constant change throughout many centuries of history. How we relate to where we are, and what importance we give to the places we occupy and visit, is fundamentally influenced by cultural, philosophical and societal beliefs about place, and each is a product of its era. Our relationship to place has been and continues to be, in perpetual motion, embracing constant change. And yet, we consider the ground beneath our feet to be the most reliable condition of life. This is not a paradox, for as long as we are blessed with a life, with a beating heart and breathing air in our lungs, there will be a ground beneath our feet.
Twenty years prior to writing this book, my interests were magnetically drawn to understanding Indigenous relationships to place. As an architecture graduate, I was struck by the limited options of conventional practice. My studies taught me that place was foundational to our existence and that we shape it according to our cultural histories and beliefs, yet the mainstream option to enter the business of architectural design services, circumvented much of that awareness and corralled it rather into a transactional service, where the aim of a project was most often predetermined by the profit motives of the fee-paying client and the practice of architecture sought to garner what meaningful outcomes were possible from within such constraints. I opted for something else and spent time living and working in two remote Australian Aboriginal communities in the early 2000s and completed M.Phil. and Ph.D. studies focused on the extension of what my practical experiences of living in those communities had taught me. The relationship Aboriginal Australians have with land is inspiring by contrast to contemporary exchanges of urban property sales. As I completed the doctoral studies, however, I came to the sad realization that broader public appreciation of Indigenous cultures would be unlikely until the crisis of sustainability was acknowledged and addressed. Until there is a greater interest to be a companion of place rather than its authority or owner, the appetite for understanding Indigenous relationships to land may be limited or fetishized for their utility.
Despite this, and after sixteen years as a practising, teaching and published academic, I find myself convinced that it is more important than ever that we enter an ethical and reciprocal relationship with everything around us rather than continue to work towards control of the physical world. The issue of our biological survival calls on our collective imaginations with an urgency we have never known before. As Lopez describes, ‘[w]e are in need not just of another kind of logic, another way of knowing. We need a radically different philosophical sensibility’. 1 The intent for this book was therefore not to create something definitive – the scope is too broad to do that – but rather the hope that it could be generative.
What follows brings together different fields of discourse to examine their connections and interrelatedness. Academic study has occurred in two of the main areas of the books’ content but has not been framed in relation to one another; i.e. academic study has occurred on (1) the significance of place and academic study has also occurred on (2) the global shift towards embracing a diverse range of progress indicators and growing demand for civic involvement in the (design) decision-making about the places in which people live. In exploring these in relation to one another, what follows also links the examination of our orientation to place, which has been discussed by philosophers and social geographers, to a contemporary examination of what the twentieth and early twenty-first century has accepted as frameworks for decision-making about place, its uses, the impact of priority for economic efficiency and outcomes upon the role place occupies in stabilizing and contributing to our wellbeing. Thus, the intent was to constellate some of the diverse knowledge and often transformative changes that have taken place with respect to people’s relationships to place. I believe that ways of seeing can change ways of doing, that influencing perspective could influence practice that could in turn influence progress.
The book’s subject moves amongst a diverse selection of aspects of human culture related to place. To cover all aspects from all peoples around the world is a scope that would require enormous volumes and take a lifetime to read. Instead, for practical reasons, I have selected among pertinent examples and contexts of approach to place, to draw together and sketch in outline, the changes in our perception as humans of the claim that place has upon our being. Our attempts to work together in addressing common issues regarding place, highlight what is at stake in the cultural diversity underpinning these perceptions of the early twenty-first century. It is therefore not the intention of the book to be comprehensive, as it no doubt excludes the work of a number of authors within the topic areas traversed. One notable area that the scope does not include is the rapid ‘hyper-urbanization’ occurring in cities of the global south, which are growing at rates so high that they double their populations every ten to fifteen years. Of necessity it is selective, partial and at times personal, as it considers the relatedness and correlative influence of different approaches in our human relationship with place. The personal influence reflects knowledge and insight gained by my own studies and practice in diverse communities, such as Aboriginal Australians, culturally and linguistically diverse client groups for health facilities, youth at risk of homelessness and community development work. It reflects my experience as a professional advocate delivering continuing professional development training seminars on the topic of social sustainability for the Australian and New Zealand Architects Institutes, and consulting for local, state and national government, leading participatory planning and design-led engagement processes.
Much of our modern knowledge is classified according to silos of specialization, yet as this book discusses, it is the connections between the specializations that help us understand the vital broader perspectives and systems of relatedness. Studying architecture for example includes both technical, material properties and structural study, as well as drawing upon anthropological, sociological, historical and cultural studies’ insight into human behaviours. In approaching an understanding of place, many disciplines and authors contribute to the depth of knowledge presented in this book. The following is not exhaustive but indicative of the diversity of disciplinary areas traversed, since a standard literature review isn’t applicable given the book’s scope. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau Ponty and Hans Georg Gadamer require us to acknowledge the embodying dimension of place and resist reliance on conceptual treatments alone. Geographer Jared Diamond offers insight into civilizations’ histories and evolution. Environmental writer Barry Lopez and cultural ecologist David Abram describe the affective and sensuous terrains that sustain us. Environmental historians such as Donald Worster and philosopher Edward Casey assist our appreciation of periods of perceptual change regarding what surrounds us. Political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott has chronicled how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Urban environmentalist Julian Agyeman and environmentalist Paul Hawken alert us to the importance of ad