Dd101 Tma4

Compare and contrast two views of how social order is produced in public spaces.




This essay compares and contrasts two views of how social order is produced in public spaces. It starts by looking at what is social order? To get an insight of social order in public spaces it discusses theories by Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault respectively. It then goes on to look at the engineers Colin Buchanan & Hans Monderman respective views of how social order is produced in public spaces. Then the essay compares and contrasts the views of Buchanan and Monderman on how social order is produced in public spaces. It then looks at the links between the views of Buchanan and Foucault and those of Monderman and Goffman. The essay then summarises what these views imply about how social order is produced in public spaces.

Social order is the process of organising and ordering social lives involving ideas of how people fit together and connect to each other and to material things in the society they live in. It is also about people knowing what behaviour is expected of them and what to expect from others and how these expectations interrelates to help them understand society. Social order is different for each time and society; however it is continuously made, remade and reordered to allow people to live together. To maintain social order individuals are told how to conduct themselves by explicit and/or implicit norms. These norms are defined as, ‘shared sets of values or expectations about how people will or should behave’ (Silva, 2009, p307). In addition people accept the rules to avoid disrupting the order because there are also norms to be followed when social order is disturbed and these rules are to repair and restore social order. As Evelyn Ruppert said ’….social order is a key principle of living together’, (‘Reflections on Ordered lives’, 2009, track 3).






















In addition, there are different views of how social order is...