As a conflict often visible in diverse communities, social polarisation challenges economic, cultural, and ecologic sustainability. In this research, this abstract phenomenon is studied from a spatial perspective that investigates the processes of building collective memories and identities through occupying a space. It examines how the social relations within a community are constructed and the boundaries negotiated in everyday encounters through micro-dynamics and appropriations of the space.

Consistently, the research focuses on leisure spaces that carry the potential for sustaining autonomous, spontaneous, self-iterating interactions between the individuals of a community. It takes two lost leisure typologies of Istanbul, both of which were ‘free’ lands activated through temporary occupations, as case studies: mesires (meadows) and plajs (beaches). It studies them through a phenomenological perspective by probing the relationship between the physical space, the temporary elements and their interactions, and the abstract meaning of the space. Together, these create the spatial identity that can be described, using Edward Casey’s term, as a “superstructure”.