Threshold Sites of Encounter: Dialogic (Place) Making to Enable Cross-Cultural Community Development—Lessons from Tuti Island, Khartoum, Sudan

This text explores a possibility for extending our thinking on enacting dialogical placemaking and its potential to contribute to cross-cultural exchange through co-joining making and place as threshold sites of encounter. Advancing our knowledge and practice of dialogical placemaking and cross-cultural interaction is significant owing to the increasing presence of cultural differences, and with it economic, environmental, and social disparities, in an ever-increasingly globalized world. To advance this intention, this text will, through qualitative research, critically reflect upon the experience of a postgraduate Design Studio project based around the regeneration of an urban community situated in Khartoum, Sudan. Preliminary conclusions drawn from this critical reflection will then be further tested and refined through a critical textual analysis. While posing some considerations about pedagogy and processes of cross-cultural interaction that inform placemaking, its primary intention is to consider a possibility arising from the work in the Design Studio project and critical reflection based on an analysis of it. Emergent is a conceptualization of places
of collaborative making and the collaborative making of places mutually informing each other as figurative and literal threshold sites of encounter across cultural difference. Through such action, a dialogic space is generated in which
further dialogue is enabled.