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BU2_TERM1_S(6-9) WHO LEADS ? (S9 BEING CRITICAL PRACTITIONER IN THE…
BU2_TERM1_S(6-9)
WHO LEADS ?
S7
SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVE DESIGN PROCESS
R1_Jeremy Till
THE NEGOTIATION OF HOPE
This article talks about why it is impossible there to be participation in architecture, and how every attempt is merely pseudo participation, as a 'placebo effect'.
"There is the nagging doubt that in dealing with the normal, using normal language, one might be seen as normal. "
It talks about not being able to give up that position of the expert because by doing so you will lose power. However there is possibility in transformative participation, in which participation is the space for negotiating hope.
The context behind this arguemnet can be listed below.
Participatory process has been recognized as an useful method. It gives feeling among individual citizens sense of belonging, feeling of having influenced decision making.
However there is a gap between full participation (ideal) and partial participation (reality). There is an imbalances of power. The power resides with the person with the most knowledge.
Therefore, there should be an alternative approach - transformative participation (TP) can be the one, since it is realistic enough to acknowledge the imbalances of power and knowledge.
Key aspect of TP can be listed below
transparent channels of communication between the expert and non-expert
opening up process to wider citizens by providing equal technical tools
can be an opportunity to reconsider what is often taken for granted in architectural practice.
However, transformative participation is too cozy, vague. By taking account of political nature of space from beforehand, it can be altered as "negotiation of hope".
The concept of "negotiation of hope" is based on the notion of design not as problem solving tool but as a sense making process, which mentioned by John Forester.
There is similar expression as "common sense". However, design is not to establish common sense, but to make sense of the actions of others.
How to make sense together? In architectural participatory process, conversation is key method to achieve it because
it moves the architect from being an observer to an engaged participant
it can drive to seek for the future spatial possibilities
it can bring into play social relationships
it can give rise to unexpected consequences
However, the word "conversation" is too vague. ALso it doesn't necessarily avoid the imbalance of authority.
So, instead of conversation, "storytelling" can be more equitable and focused conversational mode.
"The very act of storytelling, an act that presumes in its interlocutor an equality of intelligence rather than an inequality of knowledge, posits equality, just as the act of explication posits inequality".
Storytelling is suggestive, imaginative. it can be a means of describing one's place in the world = participation.
Hope is often associated with unachievable utopias, and participation is founded on idealistic notions of concensus. Storyteliling can avoid such cracks without losing possibilitties of participation.
Storytelling as an important way of carrying out participation "Stories thus become
conduits for the negotiation of hope, but because of their founding in everyday
experience that hope is not impossibly idealistic."
"Better instead to accept that no participatory process, no matter how well- intentioned, is going to completely dissolve
the power structures and inequalities of the various parties."
R2_Awan, Schneider, & Till
THE OPERATIONS OF SPATIAL AGENCY
SHARING KNOWLEDGE
How knowledge is developed and then shared, first within the academy then outside the world
Standard architectural education is firmly linked with culture and growth of the profession.
Stereotyping of people who enter the architectural course ( high achiever, ‘elitist’, male dominated profession, (Hugo Hinsley, AA lecturer wrote that in 1978)
Community design work during the course can be tool for understanding that architecture was not about supposedly neutral form, but about collaboration with others in an attempt to make architecture and architectural tools more relevant to a broader section of the society.
Understanding space and its production as shared enterprise refers to an understanding of built environment as collectively produced where some people might have and will have specific roles
To affect the shared production of space can take a number of routes:
First, everyone involved in the process has a share in this process and an equal right to its conceptual or intellectual ownership.
Second, Looking beyond the process of designing and/or building, spatial agents chose to understand their works beyond the initial completion of construction.
Third, provide support structures for others in order to empower a self-directed and self managed approach to the built environment
NETWORKS
Power of each participant might be limited but the conjoining of many individuals with limited power makes up a substantial force that can fundamentally alter the direction or course of an event.
-Example: Architectural NGOs, Shack/Slum Dwellers International, the Large Latin American Residential Network
MAKING THINGS VISIBLE
One of the key aims of spatial agency is the uncovering and making visible of hidden structures, they are political, social, or economic
As long as the power of these structures remains largely invisible and therefore untouched (studi teddy cruz, bureau d’etudes), often see it as their task to research, record, visualize, analysis the links and relationship between different nodes of actors (using maps, walks, tour, talks, drawings).
DELIGHTFUL INDETERMINACY
These efficient and determinate methods to think about and realise space,however, hardly to take into account the everyday, the ordinary, and the mundane
Example: Elemental ( their social housing work for Iquique - houses are conceived of as unfinished frames of slack space, there to be appropriated over time by occupants)
APPROPRIATING
In cultural studies, appropriation is linked to anything from
borrowing to theft of a part of a cultural manifestation
such as music or prose
In economics, it can refer to the
commodification of previously unowned resources
, e.g. water
In spatial agency, however appropriation avoids the potentially exploitative aspect of such action. It is used more
positively as a means of harnessing underused resources or else unsettling status quo
ECONOMY OF SPATIAL AGENCY
not driven by classical monetary economy model but by managing labour, time and spaces.
Combined labour and available resources material - to make effect with minimal financial expenses (architectural NGOs, coin street community builders)
NTIATING
For many spatial agents,
the project starts even before the writing of the brief, with architects and others as proactive initiators working through negotiation with others to get a project started
(e.g Burkina Faso practice Kere Architect and Baupiloten)
Identifying potential client, raising funds, negotiating permissions and procuring material
(rural studio works)
Start a project by initially raising their own money
and later supplementing these with sweat equity, governmental or private funding (Ecovillages network)
Inaugurate something new - initiate an alternate direction of thinking
- a new funding mechanism - a different proposal (Park Fiction work)
BEYOND ARCHITECTURE AND UNFAMILIARITY
Traditionally, the work of architects is to be concerned with the space within the given boundaries and ought to not go beyond.
‘Beyond’ is not the client’s concern and neither is it the architects’
This beyond is also about context of social, political, and economic terms, and about the consequences
By working with beyond, the everyday becomes an inescapable component of working in and with space simply because it propels the architect into territory of encounter and the unfamiliar
This attitude allows the unexpected to happen and also puts the architects into a position of constant negotiation.
Spatial agents take the negotiation of the brief as a core part of their creative responsibility
SUBVERTING AND OPPOSING
Many practices and groups take an extremely politicised stance and radically oppose, resist and refuse to work within framework set by power structure set by neo-liberal economy
Example: The New Architecture Movement - supported and made public many campaigns through the publication of its newsletter SLATE - which argues that a challenge to professional institutions had to be the starting point for a reconsideration of wider role of architects.
David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Peter Marcuse have consistently argued for the importance of radical opposition against the standard forms of spatial production
TOWARDS OTHER WAYS TO DO ARCHITECTURE
Spatial agency brings up series of fundamental questions about HOW and FOR WHOM the built environment is produced.
Action rises out of this question: individuals or groups bypass, penetrate or hijack institutions or other organizational structures.
understand the production of space as something that involves dialogue and always seek the other
recognise the radical potential of architecture and planning and work to raise awareness and to put critical and speculative ideas in the next generation
question status quo
understand making, writing, and acting tactical manoeuvre but also as informed and committed action which affects the course of events
Spatial agency shows how negotiation, tenacity, imagination, participative spatial encounters, and one’s own understanding as a morally responsible actor, might together lead to a different and more ethical understanding of spatial practice
R3_URBAN DESIGN FOR PLANET OF INFORMAL CITIES
Urban design for a planet of informal cities
Vinit Mukhija
To achieve successful outcomes, urban designers will have to develop new skills and attitudes. They will also have to be adept in participatory design, where urban designers do not design but educate, engage, and offer technical assistance. Getting actively involved in the endeavors of the Informal City and experientially learning-by-doing may be the best and only way to build up the necessary knowledge and craft of the discipline.
S8
NETWORK OF ACTORS IN SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF SPACE
R1_Mattila(2002)
AESTHETIC JUDGE AND URBAN PLANNING
Theme: Aesthetic Justice within the Environment
The author's understanding of planning
1.promotion of social justice is the central objective
means to produce aesthetically pleasure
Based on these, a philosopher Monroe Beardsley augured the importance of aethetically pleasure - as a source of aesthetic welfare in society.
However, aethetics justice tend to rely on particular type of people. The criteria of aethetically good environment is often defined by those people and high art world. Distribution of aethetic justice is not realistic (cannot be fair at all) as democratic society.
(injustice of cultural imperalism)
Instead, the author argued that aesthetic justice in environment shouldn't based on the fair distribution of aethetically good urban form, but on the fair distribution of aethetic welfare which can be best achieved by distributing more equal right to design the city.
To do that, rather than distributing, developing institutions/process which can retain sensitivity to different groups of inhabitants and allow public participation in planning and design practices.
R2_Friediani
RE-IMAGINING PARTICIPATORY DESIGN : REFLECTING ON ASF
R2_Frediani 2016
REIMAGINING PARTICIPATORY DESIGN
democracy and design, in which design has sometimes been approached as a means of improving or enabling structures of governance and at other times of opening up new spaces for contestation and trajectories for social change
participation is practiced with the objective of improving communication in the process of design and generating not only responsive results, but also sustained results over time
Designers can be facilitators or mediators, but also triggers. They can operate as members of a co-design team, collaborating with a well-defined group of final users, or as design activists, launching socially meaningful design initiatives. In any case, designers play a specific role in conceiving and realizing a variety of design devices.
Sanoff defines participatory design as “an attitude about a force for change in the creation and management of environments for people."
Meanwhile, Hamdi calls for participatory practices that build on existing potentials, strengthen community initiatives and organizations, and foster collaboration between governments and civil society groups. Rather than exhaustively exploring the product of design, Hamdi explores the process of design, understood as a means to generate collaboration and strengthen communities’ abilities to bring about positive change
DiSalvo makes the distinction between “design for politics” and “political design,” noting that the latter creates new spaces and themes for contestations and for revealing and confronting power relations while fostering new trajectories for action. “With this notion of revealing and contest,” he says, “we can begin to consider political design as a kind of inquiry into the political condition. That is, whereas design for politics strives to provide solutions to given problems within given contexts, political design strives to articulate the elements that are constitutive of social conditions.”
R3_Appadurai (2001)
DEEP DEMOCRACY _URBAN HORIZONTALITY AND HORIZON OF POLITICS
This paper describes the work of an alliance formed by three civic organizations in Mumbai to address poverty – the NGO SPARC, the National, Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, a cooperative representing women’s savings groups.
It highlights key features of their work which include: putting the
knowledge and capacity of the poor and the savings groups that they form at the core of all their work (with NGOs in a supporting role); keeping politically neutral and negotiating with whoever is in power; driving change through setting precedents
(for example, a community-designed and managed toilet, a house design developed collectively by the urban poor that they can build far cheaper than public or private agencies) and using these to negotiate support and changed policies (a strategy that
develops new “legal” solutions on the poor’s own terms); a horizontal structure as
the Alliance is underpinned by, accountable to and serves thousands of small savings groups formed mostly by poor women; community-to-community
exchange visits that root innovation and learning in what urban poor groups do; and urban poor groups undertaking surveys and censuses to produce their own
data about “slums” (which official policies lack and need) to help build partnerships
with official agencies in ways that strengthen and support their own organizations.
The paper notes that these are features shared with urban poor federations and alliances in other countries and it describes the international community exchanges and other links between them. These groups are internationalizing themselves, creating networks of globalization from below. Individually and collectively,
they seek to demonstrate to governments (local, regional, national) and international agencies that urban poor groups are more capable than they in poverty reduction,
and they also provide these agencies with strong community-based partners through which to do so.
They are, or can be, instruments of deep democracy, rooted
in local context and able to mediate globalizing forces in ways that benefit the poor.
In so doing, both within nations and globally, they are seeking to redefine what
governance and governability mean.
S9
BEING CRITICAL PRACTITIONER IN THE URBAN
R1_Loo(2012)
DESIGNING ETHICS
-Design has charted new human relations to the non human, non sentient, non living and technologically mediated realm of objects and construct environments
ORDER OF ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Ethical thinking needs to be problematized in design
because design mediates people to people relations. Human actions are right or wrong depending on their consequences, and based on the total good or harm they produce
Deontological approach urges us to consider ethics
as based on the type of action, where a wrong action consists of a moral violation and moral code
Actions are governed by moral requirements
or minimum character traits that are socially valued, such as truthfulness, humility or concern
DESIGNER AS AN ETHICAL SUBJECT AT TWO LEVELS
As a practitioners, whose actions can be described as subscribing to the commonly understood tenets that identify a discipline, designer is an ambassador for the moral obligations of the disciplines of design
As a human, where she or he is subject to more general, and universally accepted, values that govern relations with other human and citizens
EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONUNDRUMS
Ethics, is generally argued to involve both a theory of the right and of the good. The right relates to knowledge of a moral imperative and involves metaphysical ideas of justice, virtue and ethos, whereas the good can be defined in terms of value based on a positive benefit defined by action,
Design becomes ethical because it performs the distribution of the sensible, supporting possibilities for life opened up in this space of indeterminacy. “Distribution of the sensible, in a way that is foreign to ordinary forms of sensory perception; that is, it suspends the ordinary connections between appearance and reality, form and matter, activity and passivity, and understanding and sensibility (Ranciere 2009;30)
Agamben “coming communities’ (1992), that design, enacted through certain professional practices, is no longer limited to a concern for one type of person or community, but is a mechanism that is located at the centre of human life, that is, design as a human practice is so pervasive that it has the effect of defining how we live, what we can say, do or feel.
The designer assesses, critiques and selects iterations on the aesthetic grounds based on traditional representational categories such as beauty (whether transcendental or culturally imbued), function (including efficiency and economics) and, recently sustainability.
R2_BOANO(2015)
ARCHITECTURE OF ENGAGEMENT
Design (architectural and urban) can be seen as a larger cultural enterprise, an impure experience, dealing with the complex nature of people and places. In a wider context, the design practice can be seen as an expanding field rather than being developed in isolation
Without adopting a “beyond the expert culture” it is implied that the author does not want to dismantle architectural knowledge and practice completely, but aims
to displace it, to reposition it and re-situate it in a larger context of everyday life and its complex border.
1.informalities and the challenges of architectural design
When thinking on informality, the practice of the urban designer requires a further deconstruction and recalibration to gain a better understanding of how to deal with the urban project and more specifically to deal with the not-designed and the un-designable
Design epistemologies and Recalibration process
The social drift of design and architectural practices is not to be understood as simplistic act of expansion or justification (theoretical or geographical). More so, it is a starting point and a re-situation of urban conditions as both production of forms, spaces and constructed environments (material ecologies) and spatial processes and it complex political forces.
Two kinds of emphases are becoming visible here.
First an inter intra-disciplinary collaborations that explores architectural and urban design as a social process between different members with professional and non-professional backgrounds.
The other emphasis lies on community-based collectively design and built practices that flexible enough to accommodate contradictions and complexities embedded in the production and reproduction of cities and spaces, but stable enough to accept feedbacks from all the borders.
Expertise and weakness in conversations: towards an architecture of meetings
-idea of “contested urbanism” speaks to this type of perception that recognizes the need for a recalibrated, multiple, and critical approach to the urban problematic
People do not wait to be assisted. They do what they must to sustain. This means we pay attention as designer to the diagnostic of the potentials accepting the three challenges we identified
Firstly, there is the need to play against the non-critical engagement with the materiality of urban environments that could (re)interrogate design practice, design thinking and design education.
Secondly, we must move away from a certain narrow vision of architectural and urban design, characterized by the mere provision of solutions.
The third challenge is to deal with precariousness, scarcity and informality as constituent materials of the everyday urban planetary condition. (Bayat, 2009) nor conceptualize informality as an aesthetic of slums, but instead approach the issue as “possibility space” where space is both a source of oppression and of liberation
Design is conceived as holistic practice loosely refereed to imagining, making, strategizing, building and inhabiting urban spaces. Design is conceived as programmatic attempt to creatively strategize in a specific time and space, the transformative potential of an intervention
It is not about destroying it.
In the contrary, it is about recalibrating, repositioning, opening it and expanding in the everyday life of transforming and changing the world. We claim all of our experiences to contribute to this border pedagogy where nobody is excluded from a renewed dialectical discourse
R3_CITIZEN DESIGN: PARTICIPATION AND BEYOND
Citizen Design
Participatory and Beyond
Jeffrey Hou
Participatory planning in America was a result of resistant from slum clearance and urban renewal project - sets of function neighbourhoods were bulldozed to make way for construction
In 1964 - created Act of maximum participation, and then participation become required in all phase of planning (participatory as institutionalized requirement)
Institutionalization of participatory planning give impact for architects and planners in terms of reawakening moral and ethic of design process
Institutionalization of participatory planning forced them for rethinking fundamental values of DESIGN in favor of: human scale, social interaction, and cultural practices as well as democratic process & justice
For decades, in North America, participation has become a common practice in urban design
Citizens have been involved in multiple level of decision making (land uses, scale & type of development, forms and bulks of building)
From participatory design to citizen design
The practice of citizen design moves beyond participation as a legal and procedural requirement.
urban design not as an exclusive realm of professional practice but as a fi eld in which citizens can exercise their full rights and responsibilities, as well as their new skills and knowledge
R4_ROLE OF COMMUNITY ARCHITECTS
ACCA
Asian Coalition for Community Action
recognizes community as primary players in the design and implementation of projects to address their issues in collaboratiuon with state and other stakeholders
LEARNING TO WORK IN A PEOPLE DRIVEN CHANGE PROCESS
Unlike archtiects who prefer looking on solutions and physical transformation, community architects get involved in planning in a squatter settlement, they consider all the existing non-physical aspects such as cultural, social and economic dynamics of the community. They seek design to enhance the positive aspect of the dynamics.
Community architects can help community members to think ahead and plan on long term basis in terms of creating better living conditions and designing structures that will last, for later generations to enjoy.
LEARNING TO WORK IN NEW WAYS AS ARCHITECTS
CA designs process not projects
process important than product
custom designed approach to planning and housing design process and modfiy participatory tools to suit the unique situation of each community to come up with people based solution
ROLE OF CA IN PEOPLE DRIVEN PROCESS
Help people to absorb visualize and appreciate the change that is going to take place.
provide space for people to discuss and decide for themselves and let them resolve issues and manage potential conflicts
(facilitator - horizontal relationship with people )