Friday Night, 2007: Northbridge: Age 25

Abstract

This paper compares aspects of three influential models of urban experience through an autoethnographic narrative approach. This paper seeks a way to describe an evening in Northbridge which engages substantially with lived experience, following Michel de Certeau. This position is contradictory to the perspective most often presented in architectural media, where spatial opportunity as gifted by the designer is the heralded influence. The primary research contribution of this paper is in the approach it brings to reading architectural space. There is growing interest in experiential qualities of architecture and urban space. Representational modes are needed that engage with places as they are lived and represent this subjective plurality. This paper is innovative in drawing on the rigour of autoethnographic approach to synthesise the researcher’s experience and contextualise this within the architectural discourse of urban experience.