Urban Affordances as Cultural Environment

Places of Power as Leads towards Culturally and Socially Sustainable City

Abstract

Urban environment offers distinct kinds of affordances. These affordances are available and visible in diverse ways for urbanites with individual backgrounds and circumstances. We argue that using the concept of affordance gives us an open point of access to understanding the different meanings of a cultural environment.

In the article, we analyse urbanites’ relationship to their environment based on material focusing on places of power. The material was collected in 2019–2020 and includes both questionnaire responses and focus-group discussions. In our analyses, we focus on Helsinki and look for the mechanisms informing the ways in which the respondents have evaluated their environment and thus defined the culturally and socially meaningful in their surroundings. Based on our material, we have categorised four different affordances: panoramic, functionality, material environment and linguistic affordances.

The power-of-place material shows the dynamic nature of the relationship between place-based affordances and those experiencing them. It also shows the social and cultural structures that rework individual experiences of the environment.