Browsing by Subject "public spaces"

Both public and private sector have increased their efforts to construct leisure functions for public spaces during the past few decades. In the literature, the process is known as domestication or pacification of public spaces - often with a critical outlook. Recently, many scholars have pushed more nuanced understandings of domestication where everyday homemaking of public space is also recognised. Leisure spaces are constantly being contested and negotiated which causes loosening of previously tight boundaries of inhabitation and encourages previously unattainable ways of homemaking. The thesis builds on these themes by looking at both looseness and tightness of domestication from the perspective of users. The strands of River Aura in Turku provided a case study area where leisure functions have largely replaced previous port and manufacturing functions. The city has branded the river as "the common living room of Turku" and has encouraged spending more time by the river. Many of the measures take advantage of the existing historical context, both pre-industrial and industrial, to generate artificial leisure identity for the city centre. The thesis utilized on-site individual interviews (N=44) and off-site group interviews (N=14, three groups) to analyse user perception of the riverfront leisure spaces. Most of the on-site interviewees expressed profound satisfaction over domestication in terms of seating, amenities, and atmosphere. However, they had detailed hopes to add more inclusive and adaptive furnishing at the riverfront. Therefore, their focus on domestication was usually on the practical everyday matters rather than on large-scale urban developments. Based on the analysis of the group interviews, the materiality and the circulation interact daily through loose and tight domestication. Meanwhile, the atmosphere seems to be a more fundamental feature formed by a long-term interaction between the materiality and the circulation. Thus, the users were quite ambivalent regarding any attempts to change the atmosphere and instead expected public sector to assist residents in transforming the materiality and the circulation according to their wishes.