Reengineering public space: Humanistic streetscaping of the Bulawayo Central Business District through tactile planning and design.

Abstract

The streetscape, a major component of the urban public space, is used and experienced by everyone. While multisensory streetscaping can make the streetscape more humanistic, many streetscapes have been blamed for being oriented towards the visual sensory mode at the expense of other senses. The minimal understanding of the tactile sensory mode, in particular, is undesirable because it is a proximal sense through which humans interact directly with the environment and is also directly attached to human pleasure and survival. This may partly explain why streetscapes often fail to satisfy direct human bodily needs. Motivated by a gulf in literature at the confluence of psychology and the design fields, this paper examines how humanistic streetscaping can be improved from the tactile planning and design standpoint using a Case of Bulawayo Central Business District (CBD). The study follows an exploratory qualitative design with a phenomenological strategy of inquiry where data was collected through semi-structured interviews and participant observation using purposive sampling. Drawing from the tactile human experiences through its sub-modalities of pain, temperature, movement and pressure, this study found that the streetscape in the Bulawayo CBD is not adequately humanistic in terms of tactile quality. The study concludes that tactile planning and design can create a bond between the humans and the street environment and is sure to inject humanistic characteristics to the streetscape and subsequently make cities more adaptive to climate change. The study recommends the re-engineering of public space through the introduction of a ‘tactile street roof’.