Dr Beau Beza

Dr. Beza’s scholarship and teaching aim is to understand the social production of space and its spatial realisation. This aim is achieved through meaningful knowledge exchanges with communities, academics and students in, for example, Colombia, Nepal, Mexico and Australia where the co-production of projects are key to producing outcomes. His latest outcomes demonstrating achievement of this aim:

-Urban Space: Experiences and Considerations from the Global South. An edited volume analysing and discussing the “appropriate, negotiation and reconfiguration of Urban Space in cities”.

-Development and realisation of a Sensory Urbanism (SU) design research studio investigating the multi-sensory/temporal aspects of (urban) place. This studio led to the development of a SU prototype, involving Industrial Design and Architecture students from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia) and Deakin University’s Landscape Architecture, Architecture and Urban Planning PG students. The reporting of this SU prototype was published in 2019 and presented at the 24th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia. Currently, he is continuing this work with colleagues at the University of Sydney and Deakin University’s Mediated Intelligence in Design (MInD) Lab.

-Development & realisation of an intercultural design studio (Finding Common Ground) focused on urban redevelopment in Melbourne, Australia and Mexico City, Mexico as well as a conference paper and presentation at the International Urban Design Conference held in Sydney, Australia.

-Planning & realisation of a rural (urban) development and rebuilding studio. Since 2010 this studio continues to examine community self-help/self-organisation practices, in a rural urbanising community in the Mt. Everest region of Nepal. Outcomes related to this work include  a journal article published in Planning Theory and Practice (see, 17(2)) and a chapter titled Placemaking in a world where spirituality and community development meet – the Junbesi Valley, Nepal (see above book).

The above support a research framework that uses concepts established by Heidegger (1962, 2008; 1971, 1975) (i.e. being and dwell) and Lefebvre (1996) (i.e. an oeuvre and autogestion) to establish a philosophical foundation to Dr. Beza’s work. That is, ‘being’ and dwell are used to structure arguments of the existence of urban space. This is extremely important when, for example, examining space created in informal settlements as these settings (in Colombia, Mexico) are largely considered not to exist in a formal planning/regulatory sense and are ‘overlooked’ by city officials. Lefebrvre’s concept then allows for the “[ ] exceptional social capital and self-organisation practices [ ]” that display “[ ] distinctive socio-spatial qualities and dynamics that result from” the social production of space to be articulated. Yet, as the design profession is an experience based field Dr. Beza also employs Dewey’s (1934) philosophical deliberations to explain “[ ] aesthetic transactions in human living”. Which, in essence, allows him to use Dewey’s work to provide a bridge to relate the above philosophies to that of the human experience of urban space; which can also be used to link relatively contemporary arguments of place established by Tuan (1971; 1977), Relph (1976), Whyte (1980), and Hayden (1996).