Dissertation title:
A World of CO-
Tools for a more convivial and resilient city.
Topic:
Collaboration between public authorities and citizens in the making of the city
Themes:
History of urbanism
Practice of commoning
Public policies
Tools of conviviality
Social innovation
T
A World of CO-
Tools for a more convivial and resilient city.
Topic:
Collaboration between public authorities and citizens in the making of the city
Themes:
History of urbanism
Practice of commoning
Public policies
Tools of conviviality
Social innovation
T
This dissertation topic came out of my desire to showcase how at every scale we can act for our living environment.
We don't have to endure it but take care of it.
We don't have to endure it but take care of it.
(extract)
Impacts of the city
Our cities are growing faster and faster and are negatively impacting our environment and wellbeing. Indeed, like our planet we are suffering from smogs, climate change, environmental pressure, health issues and more… Cities growth have different effects. With higher and higher density our private space is diminished and thus affects our wellbeing. Moreover, housing prices keep increasing, generating movement of populations and reinforcing the economic gap between households. Being the main places of our ultra-connected world, cities are serving the global market. Capitalism and cities are deeply interdependent and have led us those last centuries to deeply affect our environment, prioritizing efficiency and productivity. Our cities have been shaped by this, by systems and regulations that we had to impose on our territories. Thus, as city inhabitants we cannot live in a city, but deal with it. However, changes happen and we are more and more conscious that us, city dwellers, have to take care by ourselves of our close environment. Step by step, through time and fight, cities will come back to us.
Cities as a market produce
Looking in the past, we observe that cities have always serve economic interests and above all have been shaped by its needs. A city is the place concentrating activities to facilitate exchange, production and trade. And the main problem nowadays is that the market has reached a scale at which people can’t intervene. Indeed, we have produced tools that we can’t control anymore and our only spectrum of intervention is regulation.
Impacts of the city
Our cities are growing faster and faster and are negatively impacting our environment and wellbeing. Indeed, like our planet we are suffering from smogs, climate change, environmental pressure, health issues and more… Cities growth have different effects. With higher and higher density our private space is diminished and thus affects our wellbeing. Moreover, housing prices keep increasing, generating movement of populations and reinforcing the economic gap between households. Being the main places of our ultra-connected world, cities are serving the global market. Capitalism and cities are deeply interdependent and have led us those last centuries to deeply affect our environment, prioritizing efficiency and productivity. Our cities have been shaped by this, by systems and regulations that we had to impose on our territories. Thus, as city inhabitants we cannot live in a city, but deal with it. However, changes happen and we are more and more conscious that us, city dwellers, have to take care by ourselves of our close environment. Step by step, through time and fight, cities will come back to us.
Cities as a market produce
Looking in the past, we observe that cities have always serve economic interests and above all have been shaped by its needs. A city is the place concentrating activities to facilitate exchange, production and trade. And the main problem nowadays is that the market has reached a scale at which people can’t intervene. Indeed, we have produced tools that we can’t control anymore and our only spectrum of intervention is regulation.
Since the greeks, city patterns have been designed to facilitate access to the central place of economic activity. Even, in its most organic structure like in medieval Europe, cities have been shaped by trade. Indeed, because of regulations and taxes, merchants (who were traveling) couldn’t always pass the city’s gates to make their business. They had to return back or wait for the next day, having to spend the night near the gates. This situation pushed them to settle their activity there, for a day or more. They weren’t protected as they would have been inside the walls but didn’t had to pay taxes. Being more and more to be pushed to act like this, this created a new prolific activity and the birth of a ‘faubourg‘. Indeed, people started to build inns around, houses, shops and thus creating a small town at the city’s door. This informal growth of the city followed economic, social and political behaviors. Medieval cities’ shape were thus determined by the interaction of private and public interest. “Urban form had to be suited to existing conditions - or rather, were shaped by these conditions“1. This is describing ‘environmental determinism’, the process of how the physical environment predisposes societies and states towards particular development trajectories. Our city development was thus, driven by an aim of productivity and efficiency.
Effects of cities on our environment
(...)
Effects of cities on individuals.
Cities are run by speed; a fast, constant and strong movement firstly regulated by us and now imposed to us. Punctuality, calculability and exactness are traits of its dwellers, metropolitans. Therefore, this environment impacts our human traits: excluding impulsivity, irrationality, instinctively and rising stress, anxiety and individualism, affecting our social nature.
Metropolitans are affected by the city speed but also by the space that it provides. Indeed, the bodily closeness and lack of space induces intellectual distance. Interactions with spaces are limited, controlled, designed on purposes which conduct often to forms of exclusion. The proximity with strangers is increasing our need for self-protection. The city makes us anti-social and we have developed specific behaviors when in a social context such as looking at the ground when crossing someone on the sidewalk. Those types of behaviors have been described by Lyn Lofland2 and demonstrate how irrational we can be. This is due to the space of the city.
It is 8.14am, I have my oyster card in a hand, my cup of coffee in the other and look at the screen schedule. Even if I know that I have 7 min before my tube arrives, I am going down the escalator, to feel the speed. Why? I don’t know, following others or maybe to put myself in activity. I’m on the platform putting myself in position to be the closest being able to jump into the tube. I’m waiting, holding my position and protecting my territory by my gaze. This is the morning competition… Will I finish my coffee before the tube arrives and thus being able to put my cup in my backpack or will I keep holding it? Doors are opening. The cabin is crowded. Should I jump? Yes, I’m in rush. I’m not. Why am I feeling like a sharp seeking for a sit? I should have chosen the corner… Later, I will be annoyed by tourists= at Kensington station who doesn’t know that there are two speed in the escalator and thus two very distinct routes. Please, let me pass.
This is a daily example of how we are socially and psychologically affected by our environments and the systems applied to it, in this case public transportation. We are alienated, and this is pushing us to forget about ourselves, our values and feelings. We don’t think, having our routine and being used to be pressured by our environment. Thus, so often stimulated, it is hard for a metropolitan to get surprised. This phenomenon has been described by Goerg Simmel3 as the “blasé outlook“. Blasé is a french world closed to the term “philistinism“ which describes the ‘manners, habits and character’ of a person whose anti-intellectual social attitude undervalues and despises art and beauty, spirituality and intellect. This incapacity to react with the required amount of energy to a stimulus (as we are naturally supposed to do), is one consequence of the city on its dwellers/users. To support this observation, scientific researches has proven recently that a urban environment is not only
affecting our attitude but overall our mental health and neural system. Indeed, according to the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany4, mood and anxiety disorders are more prevalent on city dwellers and the incidence of schizophrenia is strongly increased in people born and raised in cities. This was demonstrated by a stronger brain activity when exposed to a stress stimulus and affecting how we regulate our hormones. A group of researcher from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute5, has established that Metropolitans have a substantially increased risk for anxiety disorders (by 21%) and mood disorders (by 39%) rather than people living in small towns or in the countryside. Thus, it doesn’t mean that we don’t respond to our environment pressure as the ‘blasé’ attitude suggests, but that we trained ourselves to not showing it in a matter of self-preservation.
The Space of the city
(...)
Interventions on the city
A city grows according to external factors and pressure and its inhabitants could not be put apart. Every person should have access to basic facilities, a home and be able to express his freedoms.In this part, will explore what did planners and architects through time to provide a desirable environments to city dwellers and where was their mistake. We will observe too, what change is occuring now on urban planning and how urban communities draft the future of our cities.
Mistakes from the past
Richard Sennett explained in his book Building and Dwelling: ethics for the city (2018) that the word ‘city’ has two meanings inherited from the Latin Language. In french, we distinguish the ‘Ville’ from the ‘Cité’. The first referred to the built environment (which could be dematerialized systems too), the second referred to the mental life of a city and how people dwell with it. Where planners and architects always worked on is, the ‘Ville’. This is where their mistake is, they did not considered city dwellers as actors of the territory. Another mistake is about the notion of scale of intervention. Urban planning has been created in reaction to health issues in cities. The aim was to respond at a global scale because it is more economic (time and production), sustainable (because strong and extented) and efficient. However, a city is diversed and every areas has its own needs and challenges. Local contexts is from what we have to start.
Examples:
- creation of suburbs
- dark side of progressist urbanism - Defining urban community according to spatial and economic data
An attempt to define the nature of
urban communities
Previously we have shown how architects and planners have exercised their role. But now, a change is occuring. Their mistake was to intervene on the ‘ville‘ for the ‘cité‘ (Sennet, 2018) but they are now thinking of the ‘cité‘ as a force to transform the city into a more resilient, sociable and sustainable one. Rather than imposing a design, a new generation of planners is now rethinking its methods and putting the local at the center. But what represent the ‘cité‘? The cité represent the mental life of the city (Sennett, 2019) If we zoom in the city, we observe different communities related to a differenciated space. To build a urban community we need to understand the role of people and space.
A specificity of humans is their capacity to be social. Indeed, our human nature pushes us to interact with others, without sociability our species is dying. Indeed, if we don’t have social interactions, no information can be shared and thus no activity achieved. However interactions is part of the process of ‘socialization‘, and this process is not sufficient to describe the one which is needed to build a community. Indeed, we need to think of a process which is building ties between people for a meta purpose, and this is ‘sociability‘. Sociability has two meanings6: - Sociability is a psychological disposition to live peacefully in the company of others. - Or a social mechanism at work in established forms, thus, happening only inside a defined system.
In an urban context, the first meaning induces the fact that sociability has to create an environment of trust and sharing, and thus, build a community (community as a group of people
sharing material or immaterial goods). Goerg Simmel refers to «all the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into a ‘society,’» which he describes as a, «higher unity,» composed of individuals7. Thus, people, by interacting each other are creating the fertile environment for a community to grow and develop its identity.
However, an urban community is linked to a territory, or rather based on sharing this specific territory. This place determines a neighborhood’s identity and vice versa.
Henri Lefebvre explained through his concept of rhythmanalysis, that space and time are social products. The space is produced by sociability but is also the support of it. However, not every territory hosts a prolific community which could have the power to act for its commons. There is a part of mystery linked to people and their history to turn a place into a special one. One observation that we can have, is that we can define a community in opposition with its surroundings.
In Paris, one of the most livelihood neighborhood and well-known for its diversity is ‘Strasbourg Saint-Denis‘. My friend Marie grew up there and tells me that it’s because her neighborhood is very singular from the ones around that she really feels that she developed proud to belong to this place. Because she feels being part of her neighborhood she has specific behaviors in relation to this place. As an exemple, because her neighborhood is famous for its cultural diversity she feels totally comfortable by going to places such as shops which are the heart of cultural communities (enclosed). Indeed, Marie will feel less welcomed in a asian restaurant far from her place because she has not the confidence and trust than in Strasbourg-Saint Denis. She does not have the local codes of this place. Thanks to the community’s interactions and her knowledge, she learned to recognize her built environment and then join the local community by starting to fully interact with and within it.
However, an urban community is linked to a territory, or rather based on sharing this specific territory. This place determines a neighborhood’s identity and vice versa.
Henri Lefebvre explained through his concept of rhythmanalysis, that space and time are social products. The space is produced by sociability but is also the support of it. However, not every territory hosts a prolific community which could have the power to act for its commons. There is a part of mystery linked to people and their history to turn a place into a special one. One observation that we can have, is that we can define a community in opposition with its surroundings.
In Paris, one of the most livelihood neighborhood and well-known for its diversity is ‘Strasbourg Saint-Denis‘. My friend Marie grew up there and tells me that it’s because her neighborhood is very singular from the ones around that she really feels that she developed proud to belong to this place. Because she feels being part of her neighborhood she has specific behaviors in relation to this place. As an exemple, because her neighborhood is famous for its cultural diversity she feels totally comfortable by going to places such as shops which are the heart of cultural communities (enclosed). Indeed, Marie will feel less welcomed in a asian restaurant far from her place because she has not the confidence and trust than in Strasbourg-Saint Denis. She does not have the local codes of this place. Thanks to the community’s interactions and her knowledge, she learned to recognize her built environment and then join the local community by starting to fully interact with and within it.
“architecture thus constitutes not only an element of space: I think of it as being inserted in a field of social relationships, into which it introduces a certain number of specific effects”
Those places differentiated from their close environment and where specific interactions and systems occur can be described as ‘enclaves‘. An enclave is defined as a territory entirely surrounded by another one (unique). Foucault used this term to develop his concept of ‘heterotopia‘. An heterotopia is a space produced by the society and characterized by a discontinuity with what surrounds it (ex: cimeteries, hospital, cinemas…). Rules, behaviors, time… An enclave has its own norms, parameters of life are different in it. Stavroz Stavides used this concept to describe the city’s organization and develop his theory of the ‘urban archipelago‘.
It is what every metropolitan feels, some places in the city are more attractive than others. We can describe them as small islands, small cities within the city or as I described in the first part, ‘village‘. It is in enclaves that different feelings of belonging appear and with it ‘differentiated citizenship‘ (Stravides, 2016). They are thus, place for urban communities and especially active communities. It is where “citizenship is enacted”, and citizenship is the “glue that can bring a urban society” (Rogers, 1997). Following the feeling of belonging to a place comes the need of taking care of it. A place will never be one without its activty produced by its dwellers. A place is made of people and the power belong to them to sustain it.
It is in this contexts that grow urban communities which have the capacity to produce commons goods. Taking care of their environment, act for it and provide benefits to others is the role of those communities. This role is part of their nature (sociability).
Hopes from the present
From local to global
Building strong communities has the purpose of tackle societal and environmental challenges. Indeed, an issue appears from a specific context and thus at a local scale. Communities, in their nature are creating a space of trust, confidence and enabling opportinities for commons goods. Moreover, they are localized and thus, are in the best capacity to solve their internal challenges. The scale is local, but every daily innovation could be spread at a global scale. (eg. Transition Networks)
Case studies: - Esperienza Pepe (I lived their for a week), project for the architectural bienale in Venice by Wes we camp (France) under the curation of Encore Heureux Architects (France) - Public Practice (London)
- Metro Lab (Brussels)
Conclusion
Previously, we have described the consequences of our cities and their past growth on people wellbeing, their capacity to socialize and react to the surrounding pressure. In addition to that, cities and their interdependent networks have pushed to a deterioration of our environment. Therefore, we are constrained to feed cities by our activity and receive in exchange a damaged planet. Moreover, urban planning failed in its duty of providing a suitable environment to its dwellers by a misunderstanding of them. Thus, it is our role, as city dwellers to take on this transformation… and hopefully, the transition has already started.
People’s power
We are all expert
Before being city dwellers, people are individuals with their own culture, experiences and knowledge. We all are unique and the components which are making us specific doesn’t only define us, but qualify us. Indeed, we all have expertise in many fields, in thinking and in making. We have to assume that we are expert because it is our capabilities which will help us to act for our territories.
When I was living in Queens, New York, I was studying the neighborhood of Corona and especially its main plaza: Corona Plaza. In this district, 69% of the population is coming from South America and 25% are under 18 years old. It is thus, a very young population which includes non-english speakers and recent migrants in the neighborhood. Uprooted, Corona’s inhabitants were in need of cultural exchange. A group of women, in link with the community worker of the Queens Museum found out that many women in the neighborhood learnt crochet when they were in their home country. It is a knit technique using only one small tool and wires and easy to learn. Therefore, they launched a weekly workshop on the plaza, sitting around a table and offering their expertise and tools. This was a way for them to preserve their culture, transmitting to youngers but above all giving confidence again to women who forgot that they can make and be creative. This technique enables creativity and thus empowered those who take possession of it.
We all are expert and there is no shameful expertize. This example shows how an expert can reinforce social links inside a community and empowering people (by giving confidence and pride in this case).
Corona Plaza, 12 November 2018.
This day happened the ¡Coronate! festival which aims to provide a space
for cultural exchange for the latino community of the neighborhood. During this day, a stand was showing and selling the knitted work of women from Corona. They participated into making the music stage and thus show the identity of the neighborhood, colorful.
This day happened the ¡Coronate! festival which aims to provide a space
for cultural exchange for the latino community of the neighborhood. During this day, a stand was showing and selling the knitted work of women from Corona. They participated into making the music stage and thus show the identity of the neighborhood, colorful.
We are all creative (...)
We all have a role to play (...)
We all have a role to play (...)
People’s organization
The rigid structure
(...)
Territories have always been administered. There is an authority in place with which “citizens” have to deal with. There is rights and laws that are shaping our relationship to the territory and its members. Those authorities are in place to facilitate our interactions with them and with all the tools and resources that they have. In an urban context, local authorities (and their superiors) are the only one able to act on the territory. We need a form of organization to protect our liberties and centralize our need to decide on global actions. However, we have seen in part 1 that urban interventions should be easy and quick to realise, accessible (convivial tools), reproducible and create sociability. Thus local administration does not help to act for the territory and its dwellers because of their rigid structure.
Case studies: Bruxelles 2019 (budget BE)
To support local initatives and project on the territory, the ministry of the environment of the Region of Bruxelles proposes different calls for proposals related to different budgets. Their structure is too rigid, using an administrative vocabulary difficult to understand, asking for specific requirements (too technical and too early in the process) and not fitting with the organic character of local initiatives of citizens (to develop). Moreover, the support that their providing after, does not alwas fit with project needs.Last year I was doing an intership at Strategic Design Scenarios, a design agency working at that time on the research program ‘VILCO‘ (for VILle COllaborative). The research aims to understand how local authorities and citizens’ collective be better able to collaborate in order to develop the resilience of local dynamics in favor of the environment. One of our experimentation, was to organize a workshop to design new systems to support local initiatives which had their project accepted by the public administration. We design the workshop based the Region’s budget and designed tools to map potential new systems of support with:
- skateholders (citizens, project’s holders, the Region),
- cards (type of support: access to resources, consultancy, collaborative platforms...)
- fictif cash
- Vision box (to name and write the value/idea of the system-
The participants were coming from the administration of the ministry, citizens having already realized a project thank to the open call, members of different association and VILCO members (as facilitator).
By redistributing the budget, participants design very diversed systems closer from both the needs of citizens and administration. One of the most contrasted was proposing to not provide direct foundings to projects’ holders but use all the budget to develop different supports.
VILCO.
Is a research program supported by Innoviris.Brussels (Co-Create action). VILCO is a partnership between public actors, specialists in participatory process, designers and scientifics: Brulocalis, Bruxelles environnement, 21 Solutions, Fondation pour les Générations Futures, Strategic Design Scenarios
< http://vilco.brussels/>
The convivial structure (...)
Tooling people (...)
Convivial tools
The role of designers
Roles inside the urban community
Towards sustainable ways of life (...)
From collaboration to conviviality
From conviviality to resiliency
Conclusion
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