[The following is the written part of my paper from The Right to the City Symposium, 9 April, 2010.
This presentation also served as a wrap up of critical practice, comparing some of the work I have been involved in as a member of Urban Village Melbourne UVM
I have excluded many of the original images]
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"Failures and successes of community building in public space"
(Image: Ammon Beyerle)
Mid last year I begun a PhD at Monash University Art and Design, in Architecture (Supervisors Karen Burns, Shane Murray and ext Darko Radovic). The topic of my inquiry is Architecture and Participation: processes and potentials of participation in the design of sustainable little urban ecologies.
I’m a quarter way through my first literature review.
(Image composition: Ammon Beyerle)
One book, Architecture and Participation, edited by Peter Blundell-Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till in 2005 brings together papers inspired by a lecture series at the University of Sheffield in 2002. It provides a relatively recent theorization of the current field of participatory design in architecture. Seminal papers such as Arnstein 1969, De Carlo 1969 and Albrecht in 1988 are either heavily cited or actual chapters. My reading finds the majority of contentions set up in antagonism with modernism and form-aesthetic approaches to architectural production. It includes some diversity of examples, yet the focus of participatory design still revolves around:
1/ The authentic occupation of architecture by ‘the user’
2/ The decision-making process – conflict and consensus, community engagement and consultation
I’d offer, that my research, and the failed, successful practice of Urban Village Melbourne contributes a third focus, hopefully you can discover it in this paper.
I think I first meditated on this discovery through reading Jonathan Hill’s edited book, also from the Sheffield / Bartlett school: Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User 1998. Two characters stood out:
- Yves Klein an active, 1960s artist who, though his life, pioneered performance art; and
- Jane Rendell, the author of the final, chapter 13: “Doing It, (Un)Doing It, (Over)Doing It Yourself: Rhetorics of Architectural Abuse”
(Image: Ammon Beyerle)
A fuzzy title for this paper could be:
“Participatory pluralism and Being-in-the-same-World!”
(See www.urbanvillagemelbourne.net)
Some of the afterthoughts on this paper (and probably this conference) might speak aggressively against where planning is at in Australia.
Go with it.
On the main, what is happening in planning (our urban design industry) is a far cry from where this paper, and I’m guessing the next speakers on this panel squat.
It doesn’t mean we are all wrong.
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When in 1967 Henri Lefebvre, wrote Right to the City, the republic of France was 100 years and the double process of urbanisation and industrialisation was in full swing. The city was eating the country and urban society was being segregated and valuated by bureaucratic systems productive of capitalism. To combat a housing crisis HLMs – large public housing projects were constructed for the working class to inhabit. These perfect habitats were instant suburbs where women and children would doze, waiting for their husbands and fathers to return, exhausted and mindless after the daily grind, far far away in the city.
The city was no longer an urbanity of people.
(Image: Ammon Beyerle)
Lefebvre’s “ephemeral utopia” was one of the working class, a city assembled by everyday life, rather than the ruling aristocracy and new bourgeoisie. The centre of decision making should be in the city, (on the street we would say)and no-one other than the momentary philosopher would have the right to strategize, solve, integrate or conceive as whole, the form and history of this city. Indeed, synthesis was an act of everyday life and history of the city. The city was not a product but oeuvre (corpus, body of work, life’s work, craft, or work of art in the collective sense…)
This is Urban Village Melbourne (UVM):
(Images: Urban Village Melbourne)
I reflect upon almost 2 years as a member of Urban Village Melbourne, a small group of artists, designers and social workers, and what emerges is an appreciation of what happened, the afterstory, the historocité of a knowing but kind eye. The group has become many other things now, and the products only seem as fleeting objects in both broken and ongoing social relationships that have developed and developed, not only within the group, but with all that we came in contact with.
(Ammon Beyerle, abstract submitted to The Right to the City Symposium, February 2011)
What I found most difficult in preparing this paper was conceptually trying to bridge the gap between specimen and cosmos. I suggested in my abstract that the breakdown of Urban Village Melbourne was a microcosm of the dearth of participation in making public spaces in Melbourne.
I thought that the fights and heavy bureacratisation of our incorporated not-for-profit association mirrored not-for-profit tax law, the incorporations act of consumer affairs Victoria,
and the requirement for event permits and traffic management plans to occupy public space in the City of Melbourne.
In early 2010 we actually made an application to the City of Melbourne to loiter, sit and read a book, lie down, nap and think, play a guitar, stare at the sky, draw a picture, kiss a friend and hold hands in Bullens Lane, just off Chinatown.
What ensued was a bureaucratic choke order and a traffic management plan at $45 per day of occupation.
This is the project for Bullens Lane, China Town, Melbourne:
(See Urban Parklands Project, project co-leader Richard Bruch)
(Images: Urban Village Melbourne)
It may be obvious to you all here, but the difficulty I was having in analyzing what went wrong, and remarking that there was so many similarities between what is happening in the public space of urban society and a group of young friends, was that I saw them as separate. (Please bear with me here in this abstract moment.) Our actions were In-the-same-World as the city. Although simple, when I finally bridged this gap, the process of reconstructing relationships became both insightful relatively easy.
Our projects suffered a vicious cycle of active participation and aggressive apathy. Understandably, this disintegrated the legitimacy of our structure, principles and leadership, the purpose of each project and active participation of the members. Even our statement of purpose fell into amnesia.
This is the project for Cathedral Place - Chapter House Lane, St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne
Some images from public talks "Art and Social Space" (Architects for Peace, Words@blg50) and "Guerilla Architecture" (Process@Loop), 2010:
(Images: Architects For Peace and Process)
I would say that Urban Village Melbourne was about developing and practicing active citizenry. We saw the ever-enveloping will to commercially activate public spaces as a systematized conspiracy against urbanity. We combated this through resistance, namely art, imagination and creativity, sociality and human relationships, communication and identification. In reflection I’d also add the tactic of creating “ephemeral-experimental utopias”… Thinking naively that we were designers, architects, fixers, practitioners, we forgot we were In-the-same-World, and retreated our impulse to citizenry. We strategized, we planned and projected balanced solutions and Rothmann project logs, limiting and facilitating factors, internal stakeholder group and external stakeholder group. We forgot that we were also doing this for ourselves: active citizens of Melbourne.
This is an excerpt from our regular newsletter, The Bulle[n]tin, 2010:
Michelle Emma James, the second and final Urban Village Melbourne president, my partner both in life and business, wrote the following just after a difficult AGM of conflict and a fresh committee regrouping. I think it is poignant here:
At our first committee meeting on 4 June 2010 we started off with an exercise called Mapping our Asse(t)s, […] we discussed our interests within UVM, what we would like to contribute to UVM, and what connections we have outside UVM. […]
The idea of an asset-based approach is to think about the strength of an individual, an organisation, a community […] that already exists and to build on that. […] It is opposed to the traditional needs-based approach that focuses on the problems and negative aspects of a community or organisation that need to be 'fixed'. It allows people to think beyond labels such as 'disadvantaged' or 'homeless' (or in our case 'president', 'vice president', 'secretary', 'treasurer' or 'ordinary member') to achieve things that are more in line with what they are passionate about and/or want to contribute. (Jim Dier's book called Neighbor Power (Michael O'Hanlon + City of Yarra))
We are using this as one of the tools to work out what we want to achieve for the year, see where people's interests are beyond their 'roles' and finding out what assets and connections we can mine which might otherwise go underutilised. But of course, a map is only a map - we've also been spending time to get to know each other by having ice-skating trips, early morning coffees, and we're looking forward to our first UVM drinking session for this year at Bar Nothing this Friday night! We are very excited to be the 2010-2011 Committee, […] MJ 9/7/10
In trying to understand these practices, in particular an obsession with resolution of conflict, I turned to Chantal Mouffe. She wrote Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Ernesto Laclau in 1985 (which I haven’t read yet). What I have read more of, are her papers 1999-2001 that present a model of agonistic pluralism as a way forward in Democratic theory. She points out the difference between politics and the political (great lessons for anyone wishing to practice creatively in public space) and seeks to unlock the impass between Habermasian and Rawlsian conceptions of Democratic decision-making processes. Mouffe does does not develop procedural automata or necessitate a separation of private and public realms, nor does she remove passion from participatory citizenry.
She suggests that conflicting stakeholders who recognize each other can see each other as agonistic adversaries rather than antagonistic enemies. Indeed, the Democratic Paradox, and I would suggest here from our previous friend Lefebvre: the urban problem, comes from its very constitution, system and process. Democracy and the City are idealized to resolve conflict, to bring people together into integrated harmony in a balance of democratic sovereignty and liberal institutions. But these things can’t come to any harmony, and hence (my reading) a need to negotiated coexistence, complexity and pluralism – could we call this urbanity?
“When the city operates as an open system – incorporating porosity of territory, narrative indeterminacy and incomplete form – it becomes democratic not in a legal sense, but as physical experience. In the past, thinking about democracy focused on issues of formal governance; today it focuses on citizenship and issues of participation which have everything to do with the physical city and its design.”
(Richard Sennett, 2008, “The Open City")
(Urban Village Melbourne, image by Max Milne, see 'Holes in the Wall')
What the value of this work is, is the identification of antagonisms (aka potential agonistic relationships) and the simple creation of space for negotiation to occur: (aka face to face communication). The complexity of this idea was beyond the comprehension of our young group of friends in Urban Village Melbourne (and probably me too), evidenced in our persistent desire to design solutions or focus on formalized outcomes. Stepping back, the lunch only becomes a horizon (an ephemeral utopia?), under which many other wonderful things are free to happen unseen, subaltern, under the radar.
This is the timeline we presented to The City of Melbourne to acquit our Community Services Grant project for Chapter House Lane, 31 March, 2011
Lefebvre in the final chapter of Right to the City, his 8th point:
“For the working class, rejected from the centres towards the peripheries, dispossessed of the city, expropriated thus from the best outcomes of its activity, this right has a particular bearing and significance. It represents for it at one and the same time a means and an end, a way and a horizon: but this virtual action of the working class also represents the general interests of civilization and the particular interests of all social groups of ‘inhabitants’, for whom integration and participation become obsessional without making their obsession effective.”
(Henri Lefebvre, 1967, Right to the City)
Please: I hope this can go with you as an optimistic and en-lightening paper, may only be it a call to some anarchy of humble actions. Notwithstanding, I’d suggest that are we to think about, maintain and develop our sense of the city, and thereby I mean rights to the city as oeuvre, we might realise that active participation in its making is paramount, and the will to perfect integration is not.
Ammon Beyerle, Sydney, 9 April, 2011