Urban Spaces Regenerated by Commercial Programs
Today, the impact of a growing secularization, the substantial increase of leisure time and the economic transformation based on consumption in a western context, redefine the value and use of the collective spaces and suggest to rethink the collective strategies for urban spaces. The main research question is how commercial programs affect contemporary collective spaces in a critical and qualitative way. This topic is the point of departure for the Ph.D. Research project: reframing the discourse of collective spaces and studying the effect of increasingly intense commercial programs on patterns of behaviour that eventually influence the design of collective spaces. Theoretical analysis combined with a systematic analysis of case studies will explore this very relationship and give critical insight of how collective spaces are used and can be designed in a sustainable way. The research project will detect and disentangle different patterns and urban systems by focusing on multiple agents that operate in the built environment and formulate some possible design strategies of how to intervene.

PhD project, Ferran Massip (prom. prof. Kris Scheerlinck, co-prom. prof. Yves Schoonjans)