Words upon a place: Highlights from a Design Experiment on Sharing/Using/Experiencing Urban Places

The increased mobility of people across the world is a premise that needs to be taken into account and cities must be designed towards being able to maintain that. Placing newcomers in segregated places in cities is not the solution. The question is, therefore, how do we actually create places for interaction, together? This paper explores place attachment (Relph, 1976), territorialisation (Brighenti, 2010, 2014, Kärrholm, 2017) and Sennet’s (1993) argumentation about how we need to live more impersonal in the city through a design experiment ´Words Upon a Place.' The experiment is a part of a Ph.D. investing pivotal design parameters when developing public urban places which support interaction between people and a coherent city. It discusses the emergence of a place and interaction with people based on Actor-network Theory (Latour, 2005; Yaneva and Heaphy, 2012) and takes both physical, social and structural ´actors´ into account as design parameters. The design experiment ´Words Upon a Place´ uses the design process and placement of four interactive benches, situated in two locations in the Danish city, Kolding: The social housing neighbourhood, Skovparken, and the Library Park, to explore how arranging a physical design into two different urban ´arenas´ reveals knowledge about the two places in accordance to pivotal actors on the places. The method used is action research based on Archer´s (1995) explanation. The project was intended as a ´constructive research design´ (Koskinen, 2011). But the negotiation, we made turned the project into an action research project, where the researcher influences and works with the different actors in the process of obtaining increased knowledge about the two places. The experiment started with preparations for two workshops,- ‘Story Telling Cafe,’ where participants were asked to tell a story based on the place, to be incorporated into the benches. After the workshop, the benches were developed and placed in August 2017. The benches work as such: when one sits on them, a story from one of the two places is played. After just one week, the benches in Skovparken were destroyed. This incident gave rise to a conversation with the boys who did it to understand the reason behind. The design experiment shows us two fundamental points to take into consideration in the development of shared urban places. Firstly, the interaction among universities, design and architecture schools and the public life can be integrated by doing design and acting on design in the ´field´ as a design parameter on the same level as deciding for a form or a material. Secondly, ´together places´ are places open for negotiation. By nature, designers have a potential role identifying the typology of the public place that they deal with to point out the negotiators (or actors to be transformed) to create more democratic and equally voiced contexts and design solutions in the end. Therefore, these actions need to be taken by designers as well, not only by social workers-ideally in a strong collaboration between designers, social workers, and other related stakeholders.