One of the characteristics of 'places of meeting' that has been explored in this blog is the participative nature of the process through which such places ought to be designed.
This theme threads through a series of articles I came across from BBC reporter Jane Wakefield. The articles also illustrate the inherently social nature of designing cities, and in particular the way social movements are impacting trends in urban design.
Wakefield describes herself as a 'technology writer', so naturally her articles try to examine ways that new technologies can be harnessed to design smarter, more people-friendly cities. What I appreciate in her writing is that she doesn't come at these questions from a purely technological standpoint. Her articles capture trends not just about what planners are planning, but how they are going about the planning process.
In her article 'Building cities of the future now', Wakefield describes what she terms 'some of the most talked about projects' among efforts to build 'smarter' cities'. One of these projects is that of Rio de Janeiro. Though much of the city's redevelopment efforts are corporate led, gearing it up for its role as host for the World Cup and Olympic Games, it's interesting to note how ideology of the recent '99 per cent' movement has found its way into complementary 'citizen projects'. For example, the article describes how design group 00:/ is working with residents of Rio's slums to participate in the design of their own houses via an online site. Designs and assembly instructions for the "wiki-houses" are posted online and residents can upload their own ideas. Project designer Alistair Parvin is quoted on the inspiration behind this project:
For too long cities have been made by the 1% and consumed by the 99%. We wanted to see what it would take to create something that would allow the 99% to make cities for the 99%.Parvin's vision illustrates how the idea of universal participation - i.e. participation of the masses of society that make up the 99% - has penetrated social consciousness. Though the movement began as a statement about unequal participation in the economy, it makes sense to include the voices and ideas of the users of goods and services whether we're talking about the media, budgetary decisions, or the design of the places in which we live.
Another project outlined in the same article describes designers who are trying to listen to what residents want in the wake of the 2011 London riots. Engineering consultant Arup is leading a community-based project to regenerate Tottenham, the place where the rioting originated. The concept for the project is being designed in consultation with local residents, including individuals who participated in the unrest. As a result of these consultations, plans now include a community hub, which will feature a library, childcare and adult learning facilities. Explaining the rationale behind the approach, Arup's head of urban design, Malcolm Smith, said:
We started to understand the frustrations and listened to the way people see Tottenham and their personal observations about a city.In another article, 'What if you could design a city?', Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's Technology Senseable Cities Lab, references the Arab Spring when explaining why he would not design a city from scratch. Ratti says that historically, cities were always designed through a collaborative, bottom-up process.
The idea that an architect could design a city from scratch, in a top-down way, is relatively new. It embodies the 19th century dream of the artist with unbound freedom and imagination and the egotistic vision of the 20th century architect.The approach that Ratti rejects is one that sees architecture as a purely technical and aesthetic endeavour, neglecting the social concerns that lie at its heart. His ultimate verdict is that design processes need to be bottom-up, reflecting the movements and interactions happening there by the people that use them:
A good city cannot be designed in a top-down fashion. Spaces and fluxes overlap and intertwine in our interaction with the city, which can only be shaped through a distributed, bottom-up process. A chaotic self-organising movement, which resembles what we have seen during the Arab Spring and its fostering of new forms of participation, is rising in unexpected ways and with unknown consequence. Can these very forms, supported by social media and new technologies, now extend to urban design and planning? Could this be the beginning of a new urban spring?
Bottom-up process might seem more chaotic, but it seems to me that the participative nature of the planning process is only one characteristic of places of meeting. Other overarching principles, such as reinforcing community life and ensuring sustainability, could go a long way in bringing some order to the chaos without compromising participation.
Finally, in her article, How will our future cities look?, Wakefield touches on why such processes need to be participatory in order to be relevant, quoting technology analyst Joe Dignan:
Companies produce videos of glass houses of lovely people doing Minority Report-style stuff, but show me how this will help people sitting in their council flat 20 storeys in the sky?For places to matter to those who are intended to use them, people's voices need to matter in their design. While the ideas driving some of the planners and designers Wakefield quote seem to be pushing a new wave of participative urbanism - an urban spring if you like - champions of such approaches have been around for a while. At the end of the article, Wakefield references one of the pioneers of this people-oriented way of thinking about urban design, American author and urbanist Jane Jacobs:
Jane Jacobs...warned several decades ago: "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." Those building the cities of the future may do well to heed that advice.
