Resilient Collective Spaces: Rethinking urban spaces defined by commercial programs: disentangling the formal and informal mechanisms of urban projects.

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 main actors in the contemporary city and affect on how we experience and use collective spaces as part of our daily environment.

The morphological understanding of these collective spaces (Solà-Morales, 2008) as shared areas - that are no longer exclusively defined by public/private property structures but by different ways of sharing them- and the influence of commercial programs on the design of this kind of spaces, suggest to rethink collective strategies for all kind of shared spaces, independently of scale or size.

This research project focuses on reframing the discourse of collective spaces and studying the increasing effect of commercial programs on patterns of behaviour, that eventually influence the design of the collective spaces in an urban environment. 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.

Almost all commercial programs produce collective spaces, extending or intensifying in a way the existing urban fabric but they often only take into consideration security precautions, marketing strategies and developer standards. However, in most cases, these commercial programs also become social magnets, transforming into powerful elements that radiate in many ways onto collective spaces, adding identity to places and representing the socio-cultural structure of society. The main question of this study therefor is: Can we take advantage of the impact of commercial elements to regenerate our collective spaces in a qualitative way by changing how this type of programs are planned or designed?

The research project will detect and disentangle different patterns and urban strategies by focusing on multiple agents that operate in the built environment and formulate some possible design strategies of how to intervene.