Eatscape: Stage of in-between Drivers for Commensality.

This thesis was initiated with the question what architects and urban designers can learn by observing people eating in urban settings? Exploring this question, I, being an architect and urban designer, looked for finding tacit knowledge using explorations and site-visits. For this thesis, I performed eating as the mean of observation, exploration, research and design. I ate in places where the flow of people in that neighbourhood is substantially impacted by the act of eating. The observations were intended to build an understanding of the relationship between people and space. I especially tried to focus on what triggers the social interactions in these places? I explored how people experience the spaces as their immediate environment as well as extending the glaze into the impacts of the urban setting of these places. Even though design recommendations in architecture and urban design practices will be presented in this thesis, the central role will be the discussion on ‘the stage of the in-between’ as the driver for commensality[1] in ‘city design[2]’. It can be seen as the key result of this thesis. The stage of the in-between describes the suspending situation in-between the different scales, the in and outside, the intimate and public, the different urban programs, the different temporal moments and the social meanings. The driving force of being on the stage of the in-between lays at its ‘open-ended’ quality. It invites not only dialogues and interactions between people, but it also provokes creativity and participation of people who use those localities. This thesis will discuss the stage of the in-between as the driver for commensality through the exploration of the Eatscape[3] fieldwork cases.

[1] Commensality comes from Medieval Latin ‘commensalis’ – com - ‘sharing’ and mensa - ‘a table’.

[2] A design practice, which reconciles the intellectual abstraction of urban design and the formalism of architecture with the plural forces of the everyday city. (chase, crawford, and kaliski 2008b: 104)

[3] Eatscape is ‘eat’ and ‘landscape’, the landscape that composes of eat-related activities.