Metropolis

Public Space Workshop
Whose city? Strategies of participation and appropriation SEMINAR

Kathrin Golda-Pongratz / David Bravo

 

“Ad hoc means “for this” specific need or purpose.(…)
A purpose immediately fulfilled is the ideal of adhocism;
it cuts through the usual delays caused by specialization,
bureaucracy and hierarchical organization.”

Charles Jencks/ Nathan Silver, Adhocism.
The case for improvisation, New York 1972

“How could one combine the advantages of organisation and spontaneity? Through real or simulated participation by inhabitants, and through our efforts to exploit the variety suggested by the place and time, we are able to produce a diversity, which we push as far as the circumstances will permit …”

Lucien Kroll, The Architecture of Complexity, London 1986

This years’ public space workshop positions itself within an actual global context of ad-hoc revolutionary processes that take place in the public sphere, appropriate and reclaim public space and eventually change societal organizations. On the other side, we are observing an increasing authoritarian control and re-appropriation of the urban public space that determines the contemporary urban environment.

Parting from relevant theoretical sources and discourses, concepts of participation, civic rights, forms of micro politics and strategies of appropriation of urban spaces will be discussed. Our focus will be set on ad-hoc actions, community network organizations, informal and subversive strategies of civic involvement and acts of resistance towards imposed rituals and cultural codes, as well as strategic institutional, planning and architectural approaches to both avoid and oppress or enhance and challenge collective and participative initiatives.

Multiple national and cultural backgrounds of the workshops’ participants and our diverse experiences with ideological, political and social as well as spatial, territorial and architectural dimensions in the definition of citizenship and appropriation of the urban will guide our explorations and discussions.

Selected European projects documented at the CCCB’s Archive of the European Prize for Urban Public Space (http://www.publicspace.org) that have gained international attention, as well as specific urban environments and situations in the city of Barcelona, will serve as points of reference and departure for the discussion and possible redefinition of participative practices in relation to urban design.

The irreversible fusion of the digital with the physical public space, the conflictive definition of the urban space between singular authenticity and mass culture and the redefinition of the civitas in migrational urban environments are our background when proposing narratives, performance or intervention strategies and imagined or fictitious projects.