4.3 Social interaction and Public open spaces

4.3 SOCIAL INTERACTION AND PUBLIC OPEN SPACES

When people see friends, meet and greet their neighbors, and feel comfortable interacting with strangers, they tend to feel a stronger sense of place or attachment to their community - and to the place that fosters these types of social activities

Face to face interactions is the basis of all social interactions. All different social interactions can be divided into two categories including verbal communication and non-verbal communication (or body language).

Erving Goffman, Canadian born Sociologist described mechanisms and rule that govern how social gathering are structured and how people interact in these situations as “the concept of occasion, situation, and encounter”

Figure 4.3.1 illustration of the above concept

The most important factor in social interaction is being “Situated” , which means that they have time-space convergence. The ‘Occasion’ provides the reason for gathering, which can be explained as ‘place’ . In relation to space and place theory, the situation is similar to space ‘space’ , which refers to the physical qualities of a physical environment. Goffman argued that any kind of focused interaction is ‘encounter’, which is constituted a major part of our daily life.