This chapter summarises the three papers and relates them to each other. Each of the three papers is summarised, their main contribution identified and their main problems discussed. This is followed by a synthesisto show how they complement each other and contribute to meeting the research needs articulated at the beginning of the thesis.
Paper One Summary
The first paper investigates how shared space, representing an innovative urban design idea to generate sociality, is translated into a design concept for multi-functionality in the professional literature. It is concerned with the process of such ideas being passed on and translated in order to adjust them to prevailing ways of thought and practice. It sees this as a problem because this process of translation may, while making such ideas easier to implement, also distort them by removing their critical edge. The paper suggests the term domestication of challenging planning and design ideas, as a discourse analytical tool to examine this process. The term refers to conceptual adjustments that deprive ideas of their critical momentum in order to align them with dominant discourses. Ideas that are precarious and challenge dominant discourse are domesticated, in the sense that they are inhabited by prevailing thought and practice.
In the case of shared space, the relationship between the social and the spatial is translated into a functional unidirectional relationship in which physical design generates sociality The shared space literature does though not offer a clear answer to how such a social shift is enabled by the design. Rather, it implies these social improvements without elaborating on the socio-spatiality of the design idea. The leap from design to the envisioned sociality is not explained, only implied. One main finding is thus that the literature seems to bypass the lack of addressing this relationship. It does this by reformulating the idea in ways that fit better dominant ways of framing the social, as a mere function of public space.
The problem with domestication in the case of shared space is thus that it generates a design concept focusing on spatial performance, while the social implications of the design seem taken for granted.
Consequently, the relationship between design and sociality remains elusive.
Main contribution
The paper is a contribution to academic debates about how planning ideas are not only adjusted, but sometimes compromised regarding their key intentionality to bring change to practice. The term domestication is suggested as an analytical concept to describe this process adequately, that is emphasising the loss of their critical momentum when ideas are incorporated and adapted to prevalent practice. The identification of domestication is a contribution to debates about how ideas emerge, how
they are passed on, translated and become part of prevailing thought and practice. This debate and research take place in the field of planning, but this insight is no less relevant for the field of urban design, which sits at the intersection theory and practice, like planning.
The paper also offers a contribution for planners and designers who work with shared space or related concepts. It gives them a critical perspective on design guidelines for such ideas and can encourage them to reflect and consider what the initial motivation behind planning and design ideas may have been before their adaptation to dominant discourse. The paper also underlines the importance of practitioners being vigilant about how innovative thought is adjusted to common practice and assumption.
Critical reflection
The term ‘domestication’ is not yet well developed as a concept in the context of how ideas are passed on and implemented by professionals. It is fair to ask why I do not, for example, use a term like
‘standardisation’, ‘operationalisation’, or simply ‘professionalisation’. Such terms also describe the process of change that innovative ideas traverse when they are adjusted to common practice fairly well;
however, while these processes may be part of domestication these terms do not highlight the possible loss of critical momentum that may result from the translation process. Nevertheless, the term needs stronger theoretical and empirical foundation.
There are also methodological shortcomings in the domestication paper. It is not very clear how domestication is traced in the empirical material, the literature about shared space. The reader may thus not be convinced that domestication really takes place. This links directly to the above problem of domestication lacking a clear definition, which causes the difficulty of identifying it precisely in the body of evidence. I am convinced, however, that a process like domestication is taking place not only in the case of the shared space idea, but also in many other cases, especially if the ideas challenge conventions of thought and practice in planning and design.
Paper Two Summary
Paper Two is concerned with the weak understanding of socio-spatiality and an understanding of sociality as a self-evident product of design in the shared space literature. The paper tries to offer an alternative view by exploring socio-spatiality in a built shared space, St. Olavs plass in Oslo, Norway. It does this by operationalising a critical theorisation of socio-spatiality offered by Ash Amin (Amin, 2008). Amin presents a critical perspective on how many urban scholars have framed sociality in a way that is losing sight of its spatial and material embeddedness. Based on a perspective inspired by actor-network-theory, he introduces the term situated multiplicity to describe socio-spatiality in complex public urban space and presents different dimensions of this relationship, which he calls resonances of situated multiplicity.
The paper seeks to operationalise this approach by trying to identify these resonances in fieldwork data gathered through observations and interviews. The aim of using this perspective is to explore the socio-spatiality of shared space in a new way. I chose this approach because it has a strong focus on, and describes well, how the social and the spatial are interlaced and interdependent on each other in public urban space. Through this approach, the paper offers a new perspective on how a design like shared space
influences socio-spatiality and therefore offers a better ground to be able to understand the different forms sociality may take in shared space.
The main finding is that the interrelatedness of the social and the spatial does not comply with how the shared space literature presents the socialising effects of the design. Rather, users do not seem to behave as more socially aware or experience social responsibility due to the shared space design. Socio-spatiality on the square is characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity and user strategies to limit interaction as much as possible, most likely in order to be able to handle the complexity of the setting. While the square is popular, the mixing of traffic modes is not identified as a positive social experience.
Main contributions
The paper contributes to both scholarly debates about, and practitioners understanding of, the social dimensions of public space. It presents an attempt to operationalise a re-conceptualisation of socio-spatiality and thereby shows how one may understand Amin’s rather abstract approach in the more concrete terms of users in built space.
For practitioners working with shared space, the paper suggest a new view of how the design works, one that is distinct from the main debates about it. This view also raises important questions about certain issues that have previously been under-addressed, such as the extent to which the design idea can generate the envisioned social qualities stated in most policies and design guidelines.
Critical reflection
Amin’s resonances of situated multiplicity are used as an interpretative tool to investigate socio-spatiality, however, even though the concept of situated multiplicity builds on his previous larger work, the theoretical approach is somehow vague because it lacks reference to a strong empirical base. This makes it difficult to trace the resonances in the evidence. This problem came up when I was interpreting interview transcriptions simultaneously with a colleague who independently (but familiar with Amin’s work) undertook the same analysis. Even though we had agreed that we had a similar understanding of Amin’s theoretical framework, there were some clear discrepancies in how we interpreted the interview transcriptions, but there was also strong agreement. Most disagreement concerned those resonances that were less clearly formulated by Amin.
Amin’s approach also has a tendency to conflate the spatial and the social, because he makes such a strong claim about the social as a phenomenon that cannot be understood without an analysis of its spatial and material situatedness. In his view, which is in line with Actor Network Theory, the sociality cannot be understood without an analysis of how people sense and interpret the built environment. From this perspective the physical environment is the mediator of social relations. This approach influenced my analysis temporarily in so far as I tended to conflate the terms sociality and socio-spatiality in my reflections.
Paper Three Summary
The third paper aims to offer a better understanding of how shared space design influences socio-spatiality in built space. Viewing shared space representing an intention to change how people make meaning of a streetscape, the paper suggests geosemiotics (based on Scollon & Scollon, 2003) as a fruitful
approach to meet this aim. The approach offers an analysis of three different interrelated semiotic systems that the shared space design aims to alter. These three systems are called interaction order semiotics (how people make meaning of other people and what they do), visual semiotics (meaning-making of intentionally placed signs, such as traffic signs or advertisements), and place semiotics (meaning-making of spatial design and layout).
The paper analyses the interplay of all three systems at St. Olavs plass in Oslo, drawing on three different sources of evidence, a survey, on-site observations and in-depth interviews with daily users. It analyses each of these sources in terms of the three different semiotic systems and how they interplay.
The analysis shows that all three semiotic systems are interdependent and that their dynamic relationship makes socio-spatiality change steadily. For example, many users are ambivalent about place semiotics, not being sure whether the square is a roundabout or not, or whether it is a pedestrian zone or not. This causes a steady fluctuation of the interaction order because users act in many contrasting and sometimes conflicting ways. For example, as a result of this fluctuation the square’s appearance as a relaxed meeting point can suddenly change to that of a busy traffic intersection.
The fluctuating character of the socio-spatiality of shared space is not acknowledged in the existing shared space literature. It is, however, likely that this character is especially favoured on StOp through design elements that are not typical for shared space. The main one of those is the light fountain, which is interpreted and used in multiple ways. The sculpture seems to not only support but actually enable the vivid semiotic dynamics at play on StOp. This finding makes it reasonable to conclude that without the attractiveness of the light fountain, less sharing of different traffic modes would take place on StOp, despite its shared space design properties.
Main contribution
Framing shared space in geosemiotic terms is a contribution to shared space debates because it is distinct from existing work and presents new understanding. The approach highlights the interplay of the diverse semiotic systems at work when users make meaning of design and could also be used for any other study of socio-spatiality in urban space. Identifying and highlighting the interrelatedness of these systems is helpful to establish a comprehensive and systematic view of how a design may influence socio-spatiality.
The finding that there are other important elements than only the shared space design properties at play is also a contribution. It demonstrates the dependency of shared space on additional design elements that generate a wish to use and occupy the space that is supposed to be shared. This may have further implications for further implementation of the idea, such as the consideration of such elements in design guidelines.
Critical reflection
The main problem of this paper was of a methodological nature. The observer statements about meaning-making are based on their interpretation of empirical material that is not explicit about how people make meaning of their environment, but only shows the outcome of this process. This outcome indicates, however, how observers understand a setting. The different methods used (observations, survey, interviews) also give different perspectives that can support, or correct the interpretation of each of these sources.
Synthesis of papers
If design is driven by the intention to influence the social, then understanding socio-spatiality matters. In this thesis, I investigate the phenomenon of socio-spatiality in an urban design context at two interrelated levels, the level of professional discourse and the level of built space, through the case of shared space.
The thesis addresses the problem that, while urban design practice recognises that a causal relationship exists between the social and the spatial, knowledge of this relationship is elusive.
Design ideas, like shared space, that try to mobilise critical thought and practice regarding this relationship are often watered down in the process of translating and adapting them to prevailing thought and practice. The first paper I wrote suggests a concept to describe and explain this process: the domestication of new planning and design ideas. Domestication is less about how shared space should be designed, than about the rationale behind the idea and its justification in the face of established practice. It reframes the shared space idea as a solution to technical issues; those issues that are of valid concerns in dominant discourses. This gives the idea professional recognition, and therefore, one can interpret this process as a strategy to implement ideas into common practice. It equips the idea with recognised lingua but thereby also fails to bring critical theoretical and empirical attention regarding socio-spatiality into professional discourse. The first paper finds that socio-spatiality, rather than being mobilised as a major concern for street design, is side-lined through domestication.
This finding from Paper One was the main reason that I identified a need to investigate socio-spatiality in a built shared space. Domestication seemed to mainly strengthen the attention towards technical and business-as-usual concerns in traffic management, while the issue socio-spatiality was largely left unattended. The positive social implications of the design seemed to be taken for granted, but only based on an elusive and vague understanding. Hence, shared space literature only weakly examines the idea with regard to existing theory and research on the urban social and its dialectical relationship with the spatial. I therefore wished to consult this theory and existing investigation methods, to better understand how the design influences socio-spatiality and to contribute to the presently vague understanding of this phenomenon in professional discourse.
Papers Two and Three identify a socio-spatiality that diverges from how it is represented in most shared space texts. They support each other and show that the social in shared space can take many forms because socio-spatiality is unstable, contested and dynamic. The design has the potential to activate this dynamic to a stronger degree than more standardised and rigid designs that limit user agency. StOp, as a shared space supported by other design elements, invites different interpretations of socio-spatiality by multiple users. To use Amin’s terms, this shared space ‘situates multiplicity’. This understanding of socio-spatiality is not in line with the representations of socially homogeneous citizens from most shared space literature.
Amin’s approach of situated multiplicity seems, however, to pre-assume that socio-spatiality is in constant change. Therefore, I concluded from Paper Two that this approach does not offer a satisfying answer to the question of why these dynamics are so strong and therefor such an important aspect to consider for understanding shared space, or any other urban space. Further, Amin’s resonances of situated multiplicity are abstract and imprecisely defined, and therefore it is difficult to identify them in real world situations.
Even though the approach offers a new and fruitful view of socio-spatiality in shared space it is too vague to clearly describe and possibly explain how and why socio-spatiality in shared space takes certain forms.
The approach made me, though, consider that a semiotic perspective could help to understand in a more
nuanced way how users perceive and understand socio-spatiality in terms of meaning-making. This was why I embarked with a geosemiotic analysis of socio-spatiality, to complement the perspective that the second paper had already established. Geosemiotics turned out to be a promising approach to making socio-spatiality more researchable.
Overall, the three papers investigate two different interrelated dimensions of socio-spatiality within the context of an urban design idea. The first is the discourse dimension, focusing on the conceptualisation of the phenomenon in the professional realm. The second is a daily life world dimension focusing on people’s experience and meaning-making of socio-spatiality. The first is critical in how socio-spatiality is thought of by professionals, and the second about how it unfolds in built space. It is important to consider both dimensions as interrelated, because discourse influences how space is built and vice versa. Nuanced knowledge about socio-spatiality is needed to inform professional discourse, especially regarding the development of new design ideas intending to change sociality in urban space, yet these different levels are usually treated separately both in research and practice. The three papers I wrote about the shared idea as an intention to alter socio-spatiality support a comprehensive understanding of how these levels relate to each other. This is necessary to understand the challenges urban design faces, as a field sitting at the intersection of these levels.