Where Theory and Practice Do Not Meet

摘要

Teresa Hoskyns's The Empty Place: Democracy and Public Space adds to recent efforts to link 'critical spatial practices' to various theoretical frameworks and concepts. Casting an ambitiously wide net, she seeks to explore 'a set of complex relationships in political philosophy, spatial theory, and spatial and democratic practice' (p. 1). Rather than following the standard case study model, Hoskyns adopts an action-based research methodology whereby several trajectories from her own professional experience become opportunities to re-imagine the role of design practitioners. Thus, the subtext of The Empty Place is a methodological challenge to the design disciplines: namely, that research-based practice and practice-based research ought to deploy participatory methods to study reflexively the social relations and production of design practices/processes instead of presuming that the spatial politics of design can be examined through conventional architectural criticism.