Open Collections

Abstract

This thesis examines how urban spatial design interventions can foster spontaneous encounters by activating overlooked city spaces in Vancouver—vacant storefronts, thresholds, park memorials, and waterfront edges—through shared experiences. It investigates the relationship between the self and others by addressing the “vanishing nearby,” the erosion of empathy as people become increasingly detached from the unfamiliar lives around them in routine urban settings. Drawing on personal travel narratives and phenomenological theory, the project emphasizes embodied experience and spatial storytelling as means to rekindle attention and atmosphere in the city. The design interventions developed here are guided by my methodology, The Stranger’s Diary, which uses architectural drawing and poetic writing to record the spatial configurations and emotional textures of co-presence during my travel experiences. Together, these interventions frame “encountering the other” as a narrative act that reshapes how we relate to others, to place, and to ourselves in contemporary cities—places where meeting a stranger can feel at once unsettling and welcoming.