DIVER-CITY: Designing for Just Publicness

Abstract

The development of a city is always accompanied by the debate of justice. London, a world city, changing towards a hyper-diversity scenario, is even criticized by different groups about their right to live in the city. The injustice show on both social and spatial dimension here and the inequality and injustice in London usually illustrated as limits applied on accessibility and living quality for disadvantaged locals. Hackney as one part of the most deprived area, which is socially and spatially segregated out of the active zone of London, as well as it is under the danger of losing its strong local identity due to the new trend of urban regeneration. A possible path for Hackney is to promote a new type of urban regeneration that focuses on and driven by the local diversities, which could be supported by the inclusive design on the public spaces. However, the current debates about the injustice with segregation caused by it are unlinked with the local context, while it is also missing a bridge to the current inclusive design practices. This thesis aims to define the design approach for cohesive living and inclusive development in Hackney local, which has the potentials to applied at similar towns and local places, cross London. Supporting this aim, on the one hand, a new scope with added values for understanding the diversity and justice in Hackney was established. It helped to assess the current publicness in Hackney as the active and inactive sides on- or back of- the high streets. On the other hand, the observations in this thesis bridged the gap between the debates and the local practices by delivering a series of behavior-space patterns. This thesis is finishing with a set design of spatial interventions with their new public cultures, showing the possible quality in local for developing the identical and inclusive public hotspots in Hackney Central.