PhD Student and Research Assistant
BDes (Architectural Studies), M.Arch
I am a PhD student and research assistant with the Urban Informatics Research Lab, currently assisting with the ‘Personal Safety in the City: Design Solutions for After Dark’ study headed by Dr Christine Satchell. In addition to this role, I graduated from the Master of Architecture in the School of Design at QUT at the end of 2014. My Master research project aligned with Dr Satchell’s study, as it considers safety, fear and reality mediation in urban environments.
In 2015 I commenced as a PhD student, supervised by Dr Mirko Guaralda and Dr Christine Satchell. My topic ‘Safely Dangerous or Dangerously Safe? Individual responsibility, environmental awareness and physical presence and its effects on safety in urban environments’ . The topic investigates how design aimed at providing safety in urban environments effects us as individuals, as a society and whether or not the outcome is indeed a safe environment.
My interest in this particular area of research was born from a previous project which considered the relationship between our sense of home and our identity, in the context of the built environment. The way by which we attach meaning to buildings and places is a relevant project background for my current research interests.
Contact Details:
Email: a.svensdotter@qut.edu.au
LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/pub/anna-svensdotter/60/b10/2b2
Anna Svensdotter: MArch Abstract
Dangerous Safety or Safely Dangerous: and the effects on individual responsibility and environmental awareness.
My Master of Architecture project concerned the power relationships present in augmented urban environments and how the augmentation of these environments affects its users’ sense of fear and danger. The project aimed to better understand this relationship and its effect on people-place interactions by looking at how people’s willingness to interact with a place is relative to the safety within it. When urban environments are augmented to be safety conscious, designers commonly use various methods to claim (and therefore secure) territory. However, this method of deterring crime may foster a culture of exclusion rather than one of community inclusion. One example of such territorially controlled space is seen in the image below.
