‘Technology and Participation towards Sustainability’
Jon Broome
Appropriate technology enables participation to create sustainable self-build homes. A series of social self-build projects will be introduced and explored, all of which used the Segal Method of construction. There will be a strong emphasis on how these projects were instigated and organized; as well as the features of the post and beam construction and how it facilitated choice and a very open approach to the organization of the working groups and the work on site. Such a process requires and creates specific roles for self-builders, designers and authorities to play, and these are as essential to it as how the necessary pieces of the development jigsaw; land, materials, knowledge, information, permissions, finance and labour. Construction and organizational arrangements have changed and developed since the first schemes to meet the changing expectations both of potential participants and the authorities, and most importantly to maintain motivation. I will outline the benefits and barriers to this approach which currently exist in the UK context.
‘The Power of Social Networks’
Lucie Stephens
Two distinct network structures are being explored. Firstly, there are networks that exist to ‘get things done’ (instrumental) that are often focused on individual development. Secondly, there are those that exist primarily to ‘get people together’ (transformational) and are capable of bringing about broader transformational change for all of those involved. Current regeneration and community building initiatives tend to generate instrumental networks in order to ‘deliver’ solutions. The New Economic Foundation’s work with Local Alchemy and timebanking focuses on creating the space for transformational networks. Through the understanding of the language and models of social networks we will discuss comparatively ‘instrumental’ and ‘transformational’ networks, exploring the importance of variety of people, practice and motivations within networks. An emphasis will be put on co-production, and the implications of a social network approach to how the New Economics Foundation works with case studies from time banking, local alchemy, and bizz fizz.
‘In support’
Celine Condorelli
To architect: Architect in Italian is a verb, so that it can be applied through a variety of media and allows architecture to reside in a territory of strategy (where one architects situations) and interface.We could establish from this an architectural discourse which is about the adjustment of space and its inhabitation rather than the making of it. This process of transformation takes place within a complexly layered territory (where time is key) and consists of the recognition, adjustment and reinvention of specific relationships of power and control to allow speculations towards change. Initiatives are about action, and such architectural projects therefore do, rather than are, and are not manifest through communication nor representation but through the measure of their activity. The notion of openness - the lack of a final product as such, and the exposure of the process itself- proposes these sets of relationships to be changed, reconfigured and adjusted, and offers possibilities towards an authorship of the environment. Is this leading us towards the social, political, technological and physical architectures being the work itself or the site of the work? By looking at and adjusting the correlation between social, political and formal contexts are we looking at practices that establish themselves within the realm of mediation as a form of production? How can we use them to imagine evolving architectural practices?
‘Evolving Participatory Design’
Mathias Heyden
User participation and self-organisation create promising possibilities towards the unpredictable evolution of the spaces we live in. They open up the potentials of architecture and planning by bringing the diversity of economical, political, social and cultural structures and subjects into processes of active negotiation towards sustainable collective strategies in contemporary design.Focusing on the current means of informal, situative and everyday urbanisms, evolving participatory design argues for a diversity of reliable, initiative-led and direct-democratic actions. Sketching historical discourses of user participation and self-organisation from the 1960s on, this talk will examine present-day concepts and projects in contemporary Berlin, in particular the planning and building process of the former squat K77, today a commune of about 25 people.The tradition of Community Design Centers in the US and their range of theories and practices will also be discussed, and I will ask if and how this particular culture in the creation of the built environment can be useful for an architecture of initiative in Europe and elsewhere. In consequence I will argue for better political and economical knowledges, emphasizing a culture in planning and architecture which engages in hands-on-strategies towards a democracy, that can be promisingly sexy – if we play it ourselves.
‘Production of Desires in the Urban Field’
Christoph Schäfer
“Someday, wishes will leave the house and hit the streets.... They’ll put an end to the reign of boredom and bureaucratically managed misery.” This was the leitmotif for a group of artists, architects and musicians who joined a citizens’ initiative in 1994 in the harbor area of St. Pauli, Hamburg’s red-light district and one of the city’s poorest quarters. They managed to stop construction on the last remaining open space in the neighborhood and to have the city build a collectively designed park instead. The richness of the campaign and planning process was not just about open space, but about organizing a collective process guided by the individual wishes and desires of the quarter’s inhabitants. This “wishproduction” offered resistance to the dominant interests of economic policy propagated by “the ImageCity”. “Infotainment” (lectures, actions, concerts, raves, open-air movie screenings, and exhibitions) formed the basis for the planning process, reflecting the social, historical, and political importance of gardens and parks and the construction of public spaces. Various tools were developed for the initiative: a wish archive, a garden library, a clay modeling office, a wish hotline, a planning container, and an action kit (mobile planning briefcase). Ideas that informed this practice will be presented alongside a legacy from the experiences of Park Fictions.