In Time: Relationships Between People, Place, Emotion and Memory

Abstract

A person’s emotional response to the experiences they have play a role in how they perceive the spaces around them and shape who they are. An understanding of these relationships is sought through studying how and why people perceive their surroundings and effective ways of designing the environments people occupy to promote a positive experience. Understanding how a place changes over time and the affect that various changes have on people can provide us with the knowledge required to design cities that better fit the needs of people moving forward. Too often in our past, development was undertaken without regard for what previously existed. People were forgotten in the design process and decisions were made based solely on what would be easiest to accomplish. The freeway system is a perfect example of this as thousands of people were displaced in order to construct the multiple freeways that run through the City of Detroit. This way of thinking has begun to change recently, but the negative perceptions that came with many developments in the past still weigh heavy on people and on the urban context. People have a genuine distrust for large scale development. Architecture has an opportunity to address the faults of the past and become a facilitator for new development in an urban context. The question becomes what role can the architect play in revitalizing communities that have been cut off and neglected over time because of careless development? This thesis looks to explore the relationships between people and the physical environments they live in and the experiences they have in them to develop a space that is rich in vitality and returns connections that were forcibly taken away in the past.