Towards a Culturally Inclusive Urban Open Space Design: Placemaking in San Francisco's Chinatown Plaza

Yiwei Huang (University of California Davis)

One of the main challenges in designing urban public spaces is that designers pay more attention to economic benefits and visual attractiveness than to the interactions between people and environment. Today, people with different backgrounds and cultures flock to cities, contributing to their political, economic, and social development. However, very little is known about how people with different ethnicities and cultures appreciate public open spaces. Research has also revealed that current public space design is sometimes exclusionary to people with different ethnicities or cultures. Landscape architects and urban designers who are familiar with universal design principles do not have any criteria to guide or even judge whether a space design is culturally sensitive enough. Even though they do know that various racial and ethnic groups use and appreciate open spaces differently, they have little understanding of why such differences exist and how to use physical design to facilitate cultural activities.

The study population is within a discrete, homogeneous ethnic community: Chinese Americans of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinatowns have a long history of being planned and built from the top down with a kitschy exaggeration of borrowed historic Chinese architectural elements to convey a benign otherness. This paper uses participant observation, behavior mapping, and in-depth interviews to understand how Chinese immigrants make sense of the misrepresentation of cultural elements during their daily life interactions on the Chinatown plaza (Portsmouth Square). The paper also investigates how physical design (space layout, facility types and locations, and spatial relationships between people and environment) supports and constrains cultural activities, which in turn affects immigrants' place attachment to the community open space.