This article reviews Tom Spector’s Architecture and the Public Good, examining the relationship between architecture, professional ethics, and the concept of the public good. The analysis situates the mono- graph within broader theoretical discussions on publicness, capitalism, and the social role of the architectural profession. Drawing on Spector’s engagement with thinkers such as Habermas, Warner, Fraser, and Rorty, the article discusses the fragmentation of publicness, the shifting boundary between public and private spheres, and the ethical implications of architectural practice under contemporary conditions. Particular attention is given to the relationship between architectural aesthetics and ethics, as well as to the profession’s position within market-driven environments. The review highlights the theoretical scope of Spector’s work and its contribution to ongoing discussions on architectural ethics, professional responsibility, and the public dimension of architecture.
This article examines the spatial and social mechanisms that regulate interactions between marginalized and privileged bodies – both human and more-than-human – in urban environments. It explores how uninteraction protocols and architectures enforce segregation, maintaining the divide between the city and the cities. The study proposes interaction protocols and architectures as an alternative framework to foster more inclusive urban ecologies. Drawing on science fiction as a conceptual tool to envision alternative urban configurations, this study employs The City & The City by China Miéville as an analytical framework. The findings reveal that urban space operates as a complex ecosystem where marginalized and privileged bodies coexist under social and political tensions regulated by uninteraction protocols. These protocols, materialized through uninteraction architectures, enforce segregation and perpetuate dominant narratives of exclusion. We identify emerging counter-practices – interaction protocols and architectures – that short-circuit uninteraction and enable the consequent collapse of the city and the cities into a single urban space, unique but multiple, understood as a place for the free association of beings. The research not only expands urban exclusion studies to include more-than-human perspectives but also employs science fiction as an intellectual framework to analyse urban space. By integrating the imaginative contributions of writers and artists, the research mobilizes an interdisciplinary speculative thought as a methodological tool, allowing for a reconfiguration of urban analysis beyond conventional paradigms.
This paper is a conceptual paper that engages in theoretical discourse on the shaping of architecture and its impact on place. It undertakes a theoretical investigation on the theories that link between place and its architecture. Within this, the works of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language and Norberg Schulz’s Genius Loci of Places, emerged as the representative theories that comprehensively address the relationship between architecture and place. However, the research challenges Norberg-Schulz’s notions of perceiving the genius loci as a fixed and immutable quality and questions the presumed universality of Alexander’s Pattern Language, arguing instead for a more dynamic and nuanced understanding of the built environment. This is achieved through a theoretical synthesis of the two theories, resulting in forming an interpretive pattern language tool. While Pattern Language provides the idea of patterns, the phenomenological experience of Genius Loci provides the experience of existing places by their users. This unique synthesis is the intrinsic role of the tool that allows for the advancement of places’ interpretations. Thus, the study aims to contribute to both theories and to enhance their relevance in contemporary architectural theory. It will provide further interpretations of more dynamic issues that ultimately deal with the relationship between architecture and place. Finally, it will have implications for the practice of architecture and urban design in both new and existing contexts.
This paper examines the FIFA 2022 World Cup stadiums, understanding their role as urban artifacts that extend beyond sports infrastructure. It aims to evaluate whether these mega-structures function as active urban nodes or as symbolic objects within Doha’s horizontal, car-oriented, and polycentric urban fabric. The methodology combines spatial analysis, including figure–ground mapping and buffer analysis, with interpretive architectural theory drawing on Norberg-Schulz’s genius loci, Pallasmaa’s phenomenology, and Venturi et al.’s (1988) duck–shed typology. Findings indicate that although inactive between events, the stadiums remain visually and symbolically operative, indicating that their power lies in territorial presence rather than urban integration.
Play is commonly associated with childhood as a creative and productive activity that supports learning and innovation. However, its relevance extends beyond childhood and offers a critical lens for examining the consumption-oriented and rationalised patterns of contemporary urban life. In public space, playful activities often emerge as spontaneous and voluntary practices through which individuals engage with their surroundings, develop a sense of belonging, participate in shaping everyday spatial use, and move beyond purely functional or passive interpretations of space. In this article, owning space is understood not as a legal or formal condition, but as a situational and experiential process enacted through everyday use, interaction, and spatial adaptation by city residents. Such practices demonstrate how public space can be actively produced through use rather than passively consumed, and how everyday activities may resist tendencies toward standardisation and privatisation. This study investigates the relationship between play theory and urban public space through a case study of the Frankenberger Neighbourhood in Aachen. Moving beyond playground-based and child-centred interpretations of play, the research focuses on playful and social practices embedded in everyday public space use, while critically engaging with processes of privatisation and control. The study draws on systematic observations, behavioural mapping, visual documentation, and questionnaires designed to explore users’ preferences, choices, and expectations regarding public space. Together, these methods illustrate how residents participate in and activate public space through playful practices, how owning space is produced through everyday use, and how such insights can inform public space design. The article argues that urban designers and planners can support more inclusive and playful public spaces not by prescribing specific functions, but by enabling spatial conditions that allow users to shape, reinterpret, and co-produce space through their everyday practices.
