The Effects of Citizen Participatory Design to Place Attachment
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Chen, Ying-Hsiu
Abstract
Citizen participation was arranged into many public landscape design and planning projects to improve people’s attachment to the places. This kind of practice had been generally recognized, but only a few researches have tackled this issue to confirm the effects of participatory design on place attachment. Studies have mentioned that place attachment is influenced by people''s experiences and memories. But memories and experiences change dynamically in a person’s whole life. As a result, the main purpose of this study is to understand how experiences affect people''s place attachment in a long time.
Dong-Shan River Park planning project was choose as the study site. The project was held in 1989 as the studying case. It is the first participatory design project of public space in Taiwan. Many local elementary school and kindergarten students were invited in the project to decorate the river bank with mosaic collage. Snowball sampling technique was used to find 15 participants who had involved in the mosaic collage activity 20 years ago that accepted an in-depth interview.
In a previous empirical study we had proved that these participants have higher place attachment in caparison with other people with the same social background after 20 years. The current study focused on in-depth interview with the participants, and re-interpreted these people’s experiences and memories by the qualitative interview to know more about how these experiences and memories affect their lives and how the emotional bonding between the place and they are strengthen and deepen.
After having in-depth interviews with 15 respondents, we converted the records into transcript. We arrange and discuss about the relation between the participants and Dong-Shan River Park and I-Lan County according to their descriptions. We discover that the experiences of joining this activity is a very important memory for these respondents. And the respondents attach importance to their artifacts since they think that their pieces were fixed in the public space makes the experience more special. However, during the 20 years, the re-visit, the re-memorizing during the interview in this study, and the related interactions among the participants and their families and friends plus the initial participating experience all affect their emotional bonding with the place.
Lastly, we provided some suggestions to the planning and design organizations. Because of the importance to the participants, they should choose durable materials that are not easy to be broken so that it can definitely make permanent memories. In the mean while, we encourage that the planning and design authorities can hold some follow-up activities after this type of activities to increase the interaction among the participants and their own artifact and other coworkers, and improve the popularity of the place. By doing so, the experience of participation can be enriched, and the goal to strengthen the participants’ place attachment can be achieved easier.
Subjects
place attachment
citizen participatory design
experience
memory
Type
thesis
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