Citizen Informed Custodial Design: An Exploration Through Design and Practice
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2021
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In many places around the world, prisons are places of mass incarceration. It is argued that ‘prisons are the physical manifestation of a society’s goals and approaches for dealing with convicted men and women, and is a stage for acting out plans and programs for their future’. Modern prisons in many liberal democracies are described as ‘warehouses’ suggesting voluminous spaces of opaque penal practices under the mandate of State justice agencies. The opaque penal practice extends to commissioning the design of prisons and there is a sense of an inevitable trajectory for increasing segregation of the warehoused prisoner and the rest of society in the outside world.
I am a registered architect and having practiced design and research in prison environments for 10 years with Designing Out Crime University of Technology Sydney Australia, an emergent unease led to questioning whether the path we are taking as a society is in fact the one that we desire. My concern is whether there was, or could be, an alternative viewpoint that would inform prison architecture design and how it could manifest in practice. This practice-led thesis is a vehicle to explore an alternative design and practice approach to prison architecture that centres lived experience knowledge over the State authored design brief. It offers new design knowledge about prison design through a particular lens and a model for future architectural practice - The 'Embedded Social Knowledge Model'.
This thesis takes a constructionist epistemology to develop knowledge and, a phenomenological perspective across a diverse demographic of stakeholders in prison environments to receive knowledge. Conducted across three prisons and with external participation (all within the state of New South Wales, Australia), the research develops a collective description of concerns pertaining to the topic of ‘citizenship’ and ‘justice’ and its meaning in the custodial built environment. The research employs phenomenological methods and a descriptive mechanism called ‘scripts’ that articulate the collective concerns of the stakeholders. It then employs a practice mechanism, ‘design scenarios’ to evoke a vision of the concerns as they relate to prison environments. Combined, the scripts and design scenarios that address the meaning of citizenship in prison environments are a contribution to custodial design specific to this thesis. The research design employed through the research is formalised into a lived-experience design practice model and presented as a second contribution of the thesis to architectural practice at the completion of the thesis.
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