Meningsfulla möten? : om integration i utemiljön

Abstract: Integration policies have failed to make diversity into anything more than occupying the same physical space. People of different cultural background still do not share their lives to any real extent. Attempts made within planning and landscape architecture to catalyst the integration process have mainly been focused on structural measures, such as residential policies. As for outdoor environments, non-verbal casual encounters in the shape of crossing paths are assumed to lie at the heart of urban social integration.The aim of the thesis is to question this assumption and, as the thesis will show, there is literature supporting this aim. Looking at the works of Gordon Allport, Lewis Coser and some of their followers, I find intercultural contact to require more complex ways of interaction in order to reduce prejudice and to generate tolerance and understanding. Drawing on these findings, I study how the immigrant community may have a different way of using outdoor environments, based on cultural and national backgrounds and identities as members of a new society, but also based on discrimination and exclusion. These aspects of social life may in turn be helpful in the search for outdoor elements and places, which foster encounters with true potential for interaction and social integration.