Doina Petrescu – How to make a community as well as the space for it

A renewed approach to architecture and urban planning cannot be initiated solely by centralised structures and governmental bodies. Doina Petrescu highlights the importance of ‘other spaces’, the temporary appropriation and use of leftover spaces and urban interstices, spaces of relative freedom, where rules and codes can still be redefined.

Making community and making space for community cannot be separated. Planners and architects might start to consider the inherent social and relational dimension of the spaces they create, and to integrate their specific temporalities and mobilities into the design process. The Lefebvrian understanding of the ‘production of space’ being social and political is now widely accepted, far beyond Marxism and sociology, as a base for any sustainable approach in urban development. The question that remains is that of methodology and critical innovation, the degree of openness of the different professional and political frameworks that commission such approaches, which might leave room for unpredictability and bottom-up proposals issued from real claims. The architectural production of public space could start by identifying the claims for it. Sometimes these claims are modest and informal, but what is important is how to transform them into a brief, a challenge, and sometimes a proposal that will give room to the multiplicity of desires and needs of diverse sets of users.

An example is given by art and architecture group muf’s project Small Open Spaces that are not Parks, commissioned by the Stratford Development Partnership, on behalf of the London Borough of Newham, in 2003. This was a commission to work with residents to identify small open spaces suitable for investment, devising programmes and identifying sources of funding for them, and acknowledging the need to make provision for young people in the borough. Through extensive consultation, thirty four sites have been identified across the borough, including unexpected types of open spaces, that people felt were ‘public’ including a pedestrian bridge, a cinema foyer, underpasses, a strip of pavement outside a chip shop, an alleyway bridge, and an alley frequented by girls only. muf translated this street expertise into a brief and a proposal, which stated a typology of spaces that considered all the recorded claims. They concluded by building one of these typologies, a ‘social cage’ – a roofed sports area designed as both spatial and sporty. What is important is the multiplicity and smallness of these proposals, which express the scale of use, the modesty but also the precision of claims.

‘Stealth architecture’

In questioning the role of architectural practices in revalidating everyday life activities and giving back value to existent places, maybe a ‘stealth architecture’ could help: an architecture which would deal with architecture-related activities, rather than architecture-specific ones, which would consider architecture in terms of its specific means (tools, competences, processes), rather than its specific ends (constructions and buildings). What would it be, this architecture which ‘crops up in the everyday’ not to give it a form, but to inform it?

This is a question that I have also raised in my own practice Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (AAA), a collective practice including architects, artists, urban planners, landscape designers, sociologists, students and residents living in La Chapelle area of Paris. Together we conduct research into participatory urban actions. This practice allows for the re-appropriation and reinvention of public space through everyday life activities (gardening, cooking, chatting, reading, debating etc.), understood as creative practices in urban contexts. The aim is to create a network of self-managed places by encouraging residents to gain access to their neighbourhood and to appropriate and transform temporary available and under-used spaces. It is an approach that valorises a flexible and reversible use of space, and aims to preserve urban ‘biodiversity’ by providing for a wide range of life styles and living practices to coexist. The starting point was the realisation of a temporary garden, made out of recycled materials on one of the derelict sites belonging to the RFF (the French Railway company), located in the area. This garden, called ECObox, has been progressively extended into a platform for urban creativity, curated by the AAA members, residents and external collaborators, catalysing activities at the level of the whole neighbourhood. It literally has cropped up in the neighbourhood’s everyday life.

What is interesting for all the practices mentioned above, is that none are described as architectural in a traditional way. These practices are located ‘in between’, and their proposed devices are meant to increase this ‘betweeness’; to reveal what is different but also what is common within a multi-angled approach, by sharing methods and inventing cross tools. This sharing of methodology and hybridisation increase creativity and open up unexpected possibilities of thinking and acting in the public realm.

Public space of proximity

A renewed approach to architecture and urban planning cannot be initiated solely by centralised structures and governmental bodies. It must also include ‘microscopic attempts’ at the level of collective and individual desires within the micro-social segments of public space: neighbourhood associations, informal teams, self-managed organisations, small institutions, alternative spaces and individuals themselves. Urban development policies need to learn how to make provision for such attempts.

The micro-dimension of public works’ interventions (i.e. manufactured objects, improvised urban furniture, cleaning and gleaning, etc.), bring precision, detail and localisation with the public space. These activities are additionally effective in their attempts to change and transform space. The scale of proximity, the small scale devices and the walking distances that demarcate the area of intervention, bring another quality to the networks and the relationships between participants. They increase intensity of living.

As with AAA’s project in Paris, and muf’s project Small open spaces that are not parks, small scale can come to define the public space itself. Such projects are based on the temporary appropriation and use of leftover spaces and urban interstices, and commonly include waste space from the real-estate market, or due to the temporary neglect of the urban planning policies. These are ‘other spaces’, the ‘other ‘to what constitutes the ‘planned’ city. Studies have demonstrated that in big cities they function as an alternative to conventional forms of public space, that nowadays are more and more subject to surveillance and control. The ‘leftovers’ are spaces of relative freedom, where rules and codes can still be redefined. These ‘spaces of uncertainty’, to borrow architects Cuppers and Miessen‘s term, are the very opposite of the functional spaces of the city, and recast public space as heterogeneous, fragile, indefinite, fragmented and multiple. The status of these spaces inspired AAA’s strategy, the aim of which was to leave space for ‘others’, others than the usual actors of the urban planning process, visible and less visible users, through a process that would enable them to get involved in the decision making and take control over spaces in the area where they live. It is also a political process. The problem is how to avoid freezing functions in these spaces, while conserving their flexibility, their programmatic ‘uncertainty’, their fragility and indefiniteness.

Another way to create a public space of proximity is through sizing temporary dynamics. The AAA strategy tries to manage these different temporalities, politics of use, and ownership statuses to propose, instead, temporary inhabitations that will create new usages and new urban functions in the area. Temporality supposes mobility and multiplicity. The mobile furniture modules, acting as urban catalysts in the area, generate temporary agencies, and form progressive networks of actors. As the aims are continually evolving according to new spatial opportunities, participation becomes a process-in-progress. Usually, the participative process is solidified as soon as the goals are met: when a contested space is occupied, a project is built, etc. The role of the temporary activities is to keep the use of space and the process of decision open.

The sustainability of processes within temporary (art) interventions is one of the concerns with the regenerations programmes which target punctual interventions without considering the continuity with the dynamics which have been created by them. Allowing (both in terms of funding and politics) spaces to function according to their own dynamics, encouraging different temporary and self-managed agencies to emerge in time, this is a solution to stir public participation and make it sustainable and transformative process.

Further links

Mediation and construction of publics

Au rez de chaussée de la ville (in French)

Special issue: cities in flux, recent articles
Tags: activism, architecture, doina petrescu, participatory urbanism