Jeong As Affective Imaginaries: Placemaking That Activates Public Life in Spatial and Social In-Between Spaces

Abstract

Drawing upon the cultural heritage of Korea, this research unfolds spaces of jeong, a notion of collective emotion between different beings that accommodates affective relations. The study finds an interesting confluence between jeong as a social threshold and urban street as a spatial threshold. It inquires into this crossroad through a series of design settings, particularly staged events and streetscapes.

In this research, jeong finds its contextual position within the relevant fields, including embodied knowledge and the concept of the gift as an intrinsic human practice. The conceptual framework of jeong provides a design rubric to analyse local and international place activation projects. The study discovers marginal spaces as design opportunities and cultivates spatial and social practice to activate material and social interactions.

The practice entails heuristic explorations, such as experimental making, embodied field studies, expressive drawings, and prototyping. It gravitates around everyday interaction and develops into process-based care, a praxis that acknowledges spatial gaps and grows jeong space. The research renders jeong-embodied place activation, a design plan that elicits a collective urban ritual for saturating the public life of city streets.