Angela Kivle - Unforced coexistence: Possibilities to touch, leave, merge and diverge at the urban periphery

For more than two decades, Oslo’s open space planning has been driven by a vision of a greener, more democratic city. While planning strategies today emphasise the benefits of greener cities, they don’t make explicit how the designed environment of a neighbourhood’s open spaces enables people to coexist with ease. Without an awareness of how the designed environment enables people to not only interact but also avoid each other in a shared space, designers may overlook questions of inclusiveness in greening. This relational understanding is important for designers working on suburban greening initiatives, such as the daylighting of rivers and streams that are emerging in the multicultural neighbourhoods undergoing transformation on the urban periphery.

Unforced coexistence is a term I have developed in my research to describe how the suburban designed environment enables people to negotiate each other with ease. Using situated methods such as movement, direct observation, lingering over time, photography, drawing and narrative writing, I explored how users related to each other in two daylighting projects at Oslo’s periphery - the Grorud Park and Bygger’n Activity Park. Spatial analysis of the designed environment, walking interviews, with analysis of planning documents and landscape architecture drawings enabled me to understand the designers’ intentions. The theory of affordances, which has its roots in environmental psychology, provided a way of looking at the possibilities enabled by the designed environment for different users.

This study found that designers responsible for a suburban greening project explicitly articulated how the principles underpinning the designed environment were aligned with democracy, safety and multi-functionality. In addition, the designed environment enabled its users to easily negotiate each other through the arrangement of seating enclosures at different levels, widened promenades and riparian vegetation. This study also found that the designed environment supported an unforced way for different users to coexist along a suburban movement corridor by enabling choices for users to interact with and avoid each other. I call these choices to touch, leave, merge and diverge. These findings are important for designers working on suburban greening projects in area-based initiatives, where empowering people to take ownership of their open spaces can help to improve social cohesion in certain neighbourhoods. The findings of my study are promising for designers in two ways. Firstly, situated ways of exploring everyday use in suburban open spaces can provide insight into how we can move from a distributive to a more relational approach to justice. Secondly, by adopting this situated mode of practice, designers working towards a greener, more democratic city have an under-explored potential to make explicit the possibilities for being together and alone that the designed environment enables.