Symbolic Strategies in Contemporary Public Space: Unpacking Design Intentions at Alun-Alun Surabaya

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-632-6_21How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Discourse; Intention; Meaning; Public Space; Symbolic Strategy

Abstract

Public space in contemporary cities is never neutral, and Alun-Alun Surabaya exemplifies how architectural meaning becomes a site of tension between official narratives and everyday interpretation. Positioned as a flagship civic project, the space carries governmental ambitions of cultural revival and urban modernity, yet its symbolic intentions do not seamlessly align with how people understand and inhabit it. To examine this gap, the study employs a qualitative-discursive approach grounded in Norberg-Schulz’s Intentions in Architecture and Markus & Cameron’s conceptualization of architecture as discourse. Institutional media releases and official social platforms were compared with user-generated Google Maps reviews and coded through Miles and Huberman’s analytic framework to trace how meaning is produced and negotiated. The analysis reveals a pronounced dissonance: while the government frames the site as a monument of heritage and civic pride, users predominantly experience it as a social and affective environment oriented toward leisure, encounter, and atmospheric comfort. This divergence demonstrates that architectural meaning is not secured by design intention but continually reshaped by lived practice. The findings underscore the broader implication that public architecture functions as a contested symbolic field, one in which authority attempts to speak through space, yet the public persistently re-authors what that space ultimately signifies.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - La Ode Muhammad Illyin Abdul Rahman
AU  - Murni Rachmawati
AU  - Setyo Nugroho
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/13
TI  - Symbolic Strategies in Contemporary Public Space: Unpacking Design Intentions at Alun-Alun Surabaya
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Research and Design (ARDC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 326
EP  - 344
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-632-6_21
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-632-6_21
ID  - Rahman2026
ER  -