Dag Boutsen
Architect with AUAI sprl. and member of the Board, Department Architectuur Sint-Lucas Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst, Belgium
True Participation
Theme: An investigation into the specific design-characteristics related to design-concepts produced in an adaptive way, and resulting to adaptive architecture and urbanism. (A practise-led PhD, just started)
Keywords: True participation, co-creative design, effective participation in the shaping
Questions: Where, when and how can ‘true participation’-design processes lead to innovative architecture? How can innovative architecture be produced by ‘true participation’-design processes?
The research question of the project
English pubs …
With as many as 27 village pubs closing every week, the Prince of Wales has taken up the cudgels on behalf of beleaguered locals across the country, pointing out the pub’s importance to society and local economies. He has invited Hilary Benn, the Rural Affairs Minister, to accompany him today on a visit to The Black Swan Hotel in Ravenstonedale, Cumbria, to see how an ailing pub can transform its fortunes. Two years ago The Black Swan was run down and for sale. However, under its new owners, Alan and Louise Dinnes, the pub has a turnover of more than £600,000 a year and is an essential part of the community. Mrs Dinnes said that they knew from the outset that they could not rely on drinks sales for an income. She said: We knew, too, it was important to be part of the local community. So we asked people what they would like us to do and got them involved.
Valerie Elliott, Consumer Editor in the Times, March 31, 2008
… and architecture
Marvellous! Because, similarly, both the importance of new architecture and especially housing to society and local communities as well as the necessity to ask people what they would like architects and authorities to do and get them involved, are the basics of architecture based on trust. This is where participative design and architecture comes in!
“Participation”…pardon my French!
Isn’t that something from the previous century?
Something a little bit vulgar?
A polemical device for defending cultural pluralism?
Denying the architect’s professionalism?
I strongly believe that participative design has everything to do with ‘everyday-architecture‘ as opposed to symbolic architecture. Both are necessary, says Patrice Goulet, but ‘the quotidian’ is a disaster nowadays.* The original thinking behind participative architecture is that the human habitat is a spontaneous creation and that therefore the role of the architect or urban planner should consist in allowing this creation, this auto-construction to take place. However today’s participative architecture has been narrowed down to a set of administrative and juridical procedures. Between those two extremes, both embedded in a false sense of democratic architecture, we do find a middle ground of some sensitive and emancipatory architectural approaches.
What do we mean with sensitive? We mean that all valuable elements have to be preserved. Unfortunately, a lot of architects link participation to a nostalgic and cramped view, straight from the seventies. The illusion of ‘civic’ and bourgeois architecture that is held by a lot of resident groups as well, the illusion of a past that has never been a present.
The purpose of my research is to define a new participative approach that preserves value. Paul Scheffer explains in his book ‘Het land van aankomst’** that he understands why immigrants and locals reject cultural differences and that it is too simple to categorize this rejection as xenophobia. In the same way, the time has come that we criticize and maybe reject neo-modern multicultural design and that we revalue the intercultural elements that define a new architecture of ‘the quotidian’. I will research the relation between the economic and social meaning of participative architecture and the choice of form and design. Complexity, references and symbols can promote acceptance, flexibility and innovation in our intercultural Western-Europe of today and facilitate the work of the architect struggling with different user groups, political divergences and urban complexity. A genuine participative approach can pave the way for a redefined and post postmodernism.
