Date

2023-1-27

Author

Alhanoush Alkhalaf, Mohammad Nasim

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Recently, participation has become one of the most significant concepts widely deliberated in different scientific and humanitarian discussions. The notion of participation started to be analytically explored in various disciplines, encompassing other conceptual and pragmatic frameworks that primarily depend on the political and social nature of human interactions. Yet, this theoretical and practical expansion was accompanied by manipulation, radicalization, and generalization of the notion of participation, limiting its understanding to exclusive professionals and high intellectuals. This has generated an urgent need to provide a comprehensive meaning of participation by reconsidering different ideological and pragmatic perspectives that validate participation in actions of controlling , representation, and decision-making. Thus, the study aims to comprehensively understand participation depending primarily on political, urban, and architectural concerns. Politically, the study analyzes participation inclusively concerning various representative and democratic systems acknowledging participation as a complementary political description and political practice. Accordingly, the study represents participation as a democratic model of political representations and practices where individuals vi participate in the political actions of expression, representation, and making decisions. Furthermore, the study aims to reflect upon the newly developed understanding of participation in urban production. The study focuses on reflecting participation as a democratic urban right, identity, and practice to assure individuals' participation in spatial representations and production of their own environments. That being the case, the growing emphasis on architecture's political and social interpretations, considering it as a political-spatial performance and a social-spatial representation, advocates the necessity to investigate the discursive relationship between architecture and participation. Accordingly, the study reconsiders the notion of participation to reflect the complex and pluralistic nature of architecture in different spatial productions, representations, and practices. The represented political, social, and spatial interpretations of participation provide a new discursive understanding of architecture as an open system supported by alternative principles, ideologies, methodologies, and technical experiments that advocate participation in architectural design. The study evaluates the chronological progression of participation in architecture and urban design through different experimental, communicative, technological, and pluralistic paradigms to propose an inclusive definition of participatory design as a socio-political matter of recognizing, expressing, adapting, and including political and social diversity in spatial production and representations. Concerning all previous aspects, the study's main objective is to deliver an extensive definition of participatory architecture that assigns more genuine meanings and characteristics to both participation and architecture. Eventually, the new understanding will provide a socio-political discourse that rejects conventional modes of architectural production and representations and offers new roles for both architects and users at the center of architectural practices.

Subject Keywords

Participation, Participatory Architecture, Decision making in Architecture

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/102549

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis