Geographies of Encounter, Public Space, and Social Cohesion

Reviewing Knowledge at the Intersection of Social Sciences and Built Environment Disciplines

Bibliographic Data

ID22018189
AuthorsPatricia Aelbrecht (0000-0003-4270-0796, Cardiff University), Quentin Stevens (0000-0002-0912-0426, RMIT University)
Year2023
Volume8
Issue4
Publication date2023-07-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueUrban Planning (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2183-7635 • E-ISSN: 2183-7635
PublisherCogitatio (PUBLISHER • PT)
DOI10.17645/up.v8i4.6540
OpenAlexW4384447436
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited66

This article seeks to address long-standing questions in academia, practice, and policymaking regarding the role public spaces might have in promoting cross-cultural encounters and experiences of social cohesion in socially and culturally diverse urban contexts, and what theories and methods researchers and practitioners might use to objectively evaluate this. To answer these questions, this article carries out a systematic literature review of theories and methods for studying person-environment relationships from a range of social science and built-environment disciplines. The review provides a basis for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange to develop an innovative theoretical and methodological framework that draws together key analyses of social cohesion with recent urban design literature, to hypothesize how key social dimensions that characterise intercultural encounter and their social experience of cohesion link to physical, management, and use attributes of public space design. The proposed framework provides a multi-dimensional account of how public spaces with different design approaches are connected to different experiences of social encounters, which in turn impact varied experiences of social cohesion, paving the way for new knowledge about the geographies of encounters

Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Political science · Public relations · Public space · Sociology · Engineering · Place Attachment and Urban Studies · Urban Planning and Governance · Urban Transport and Accessibility

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Open DOIOpen Access