The term ‘participatory urbanism’ has become a buzzword recently, and several publications focused on participation and participative processes had been published in the past years. Thus, what is the reason to make one more publication about this topic? Is still any interest on the topic or themes left to discuss? Perhaps is precisely because of that, within all the noise that emerges when a term starts getting trendy and overexposed, when it’s important to find those spaces that allow serious discussions to get in deep and to have a critical debate. This is the spirit of MONU #23, entitled Participatory Urbanism, where the pros and cons of participation are confronted.

Markus Miessen has already written that participation can be a nightmare, when it gets trivialised, commodified or adopted by governments to take less responsibility on their actions. As Miessen explains, “Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility.” In this critical context, on the most recent issue of MONU it’s possible to find several thought provoking written pieces and projects which permit to have a wider overview of different interpretations of participation both in architecture and urban design, even challenging the preconceived notions we have about architecture.

On an interview with Bernd Upmeyer, Jeremy Till argues that in participative practices one moves into new forms of the commons and shared spaces, which from the start can be understand as a contradiction to the standard premises of architecture, based on individualism and control. The social responsibility of the architect and its political implication should be in the core of a real participatory process, according to Till. Nevertheless, the process itself can be used as well just to fulfill the architect’s obligations. But even with this fact on sight, at this point there is an optimistic approach that it’s defined by the idea that there is still hope for architects, there is special knowledge they can share and bring to the table, based on social and spatial skills that can be used to empower new forms of social constructions.

Participation as a process of confrontation is also described by Gonzalo López on his essay ‘Towards a New Urbanism’, where he’s focused on the different possible scales of urban movements to develop a theory about Open Source Urbanism, a concept that implies a direct involvement of the citizen. This is a shift from traditional large-scale urban planning into new ways of thinking, understanding and working in and for the city. Some of the movements remarked by López—tactical urbanism, co-housing, collective architectures, among others—are exemplified by the projects published on the same issue, such as the case of the alternative urban practices at Ostkreuz [Berlin], described by Nina Gribat, Hannes Langguth and Mario Schulze as a site for experimentation,—within a series of failed development plans—that have settled the ground for a new civic modus operandi, based on sharing services and social economic networks. It is important to note that the political and economic limitations are revisited in this essay, to avoid the simple or superficial fetishization of this kind of practices and to discuss as well its failures, problems and governmental manipulation. What is described as an ‘Absolute Present’ can be summarized by the way that terms like ‘flexibility’, ‘self-responsibility’, or ‘entrepreneurialism’ are used to justify projects developed under precarious conditions.

‘Make City’ in Times of an ‘Absolute Present’, by Nina Gribat, Hannes Langguth and Mario Schulze

What Is Affordable Housing? toolkit, CUP.

The work of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a remarkable example of how to take the participatory approach to a long term process. Founded in 1997, the CUP is a nonprofit organization initiated by a trans-disciplinary collective, including backgrounds on architecture, history, public policy, political theory, and graphic designers, that work together to visually communicate complex urban-planning processes. Damon Rich, one of the founders, talks about the motivations to start this project and how education has been a leading issue on the evolution and success of their work. The pedagogical approach makes possible to move from theory to action, developing projects which deal with important urban subjects—public housing, air quality, waste, and water, among others—taking them along with neighborhood organizations and advocacy groups, and are used to educate others.

‘The Utopia of DIY Urbanism’, by Uta Gelbke

If participation is a battlefield, as Damon Rich says, by reading this issue we are reminded that participatory processes, DIY projects, and collaborative approaches are the product of infinite negotiations between different actors, as Uta Gelbke explains in the case of the Holzmarkt Cooperative in Berlin. It is located between the Spree river and Holzmarkt street, where the Bar25 can be found a few years ago. This is a site basically known as a ‘hipster village’ and the the group that founded the Bar25 wanted to start an alternative attempt of self-organized project, including places devoted to serve organic food, cultural events and more. That’s how the Holzmarkt Cooperative was created in 2012, supported by professional planners and legal advisers, along with the Swiss pension fund Abendrot Stiftung, which provided the financial resources. The current importance of the area and the success of the project, are used here as a clear case study of how civil society empowered itself in order to be legitimized as an urban agent.

However, this is also a perfect project to remind the inherent contradictions of participation and to not romanticize all participatory processes per se. It’s important to remember that this kind of development often tends to generate the same kind of homogeneity and social limitations that the initiators tend to criticize, as the authors clearly state.

The richness of this issue of MONU lies in the fact that an agonistic overview is presented. Not a romantic, easy description of participation, but a negotiation full of dissent in it’s own pages, where the theoretical essays create a dialogue with the projects, sometimes contradicting each others, other times, complementing the information. At that is, at the end, the best way to escape from the nightmare of participation.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editor at Quaderns.

/// We want to thank Bernd Upmeyer for sharing MONU with us. All the info and the TOC of MONU #23 ‘Participatory Urbanism’, can be found at monu-magazine.com

The result is that foreclosures and forcible evictions have left thousands of homes empty and in the hands of financial institutions, while at the same time many thousands of people are denied access to housing by the requirements of the systems of access previously in force, such as that they constitute a stable family, couple or household with an income guaranteed by a permanent employment contract.

In light of the above, housing policies need to be rethought in response to the new conditions, and not only in terms of architectural design but also in terms of programmes, of the people and agencies involved, of systems of tenancy and economic models, and of the structure of the city.

All of this means that housing policies today need to be highly diversified and complementary, pivoting on a series of priority axes:

-The incorporation of empty homes for social use on a rental basis;
-The construction of homes with new models of management, tenancy and morphology-typology;
-Small-scale interventions attuned to the logic of the renovation and rehabilitation of neighbourhoods and actively embracing the different capacities and capabilities of the future residents, not only their ability to pay rent but also their potential for generating work.

In this respect, grassroots citizen’s movements have taken the lead in coming up with workable alternatives. The first of these, in legislative terms, is acceptance of the option of handing back the keys in termination of the mortgage in order to protect people against the situation of total and permanent exclusion, in time and space, in which households unable to meet the repayments find themselves; the guarantee of rehousing; and the fight against exclusion in the form of energy poverty.

Another crucial contribution is being made by experiments with new forms of cooperative organization, which involve active grassroots participation and will result in alternative architectural typologies and construction systems, given that they must adapt from the outset to a real diversity of lifestyles and economic and technical capacities. In this new context of a self-managed cooperative economy, if these homes are not flexible and sustainable then they are not possible. Among the characteristics that are beginning to reveal themselves in the new housing resulting from cooperative and participatory processes is a focus on austerity and efficiency in the space-durability-technology-beauty correlation, in so far as housing is clearly a utility that has no need of the superfluous and the merely cosmetic, the formal qualities of which derive from its essence and its process.

Social rent, directly related to people’s actual economic capacity, is the fairest legal way to implementing the right to adequate housing, in a society which ever fewer people have a permanent work contract, a condition of stability that was the basis for access to housing prior to the collapse of the former model.

This change in policy is essential to address the critical situation created by the system of social precarity that has been imposed by neoliberalism and poses a grave threat to people’s human and social rights.

—Zaida Muxí and Josep Maria Montaner. Montaner is architect and Councillor for Housing, Barcelona City Council; Muxí is architect and Director of Urbanism, Santa Coloma de Gramenet Town Council.

/// This text is part of the book Connection_Import Zurich. Cooperative Housing: New Ways of Inhabiting, catalogue of the exhibition with the same name, edited by Nicola Regusci, Xavier Bustos (CCP). First edition dpr-barcelona, 2015.
/// More info about the publication: dpr-barcelona
/// More info about Cities Connection Project, at their web-site.

Exhibition and book launch at COAC on October 22nd, 2015 7pm, Plaça Nova, 5, 08002 Barcelona.

In 1969 Reyner Banham in his book The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment marked the shift between the concept of interior to that of an artificial environment. Technology and new human needs in fact had become an integral part of architecture, defining a new paradigm to describe indoor space, that it was not any longer a concern of the singular living-cell but rather of its internal atmosphere.

The issue 21 of MONU describes the current development and the extreme consequences of what this Interior Urbanism means. As Brendan Cormier emphasizes in his article Some Notes Towards an Interior Archipelago: “90% of our lives are spent inside. Urban life is an interior affair.” This statement manifests the necessity to invert the canonical approach to read and plan cities, unfolding a new possible stream of research which considers how architecture affects our everyday life.

Climate, or the need to erase the atmospheric conditions, is one of the trigger factors of the production of interior urbanism. Michael Piper & James Khamsi in Endless Architecture: Accidental Manifestos for the interior state that “the interior has grown to become an endless type of urban form” which provides an indoor urbanism between the malls of Toronto producing a protected shelter against a hostile climate. The system grew until the inclusion of the public buildings such as the station and the city hall overpassing the threshold of the commercial status of this air-conditioned environment.

As described in the essay of Inge Goudsmit and Adrienne Simons, maybe the most extreme scenario of indoor urbanism is the case of Hong Kong, where for specific contextual constraints such as the tropical climate and the lack of space, not only the city developed vertically but also the public space defined a network of inner connections where common life develops. Assuming as cases, the extremes of Canada and tropical China, it seems that the necessity for a hospitable public environment, despite the climate, is nowadays an unavoidable condition for the contemporary cities. This need for well tempered buildings represents an important factor for the homogenization of architecture worldwide, even stronger than the cultural one.

Nevertheless the quality of this kind of space manifests the always present antithesis between public indoor life and social control. The fact that the interior pathways of Hong Kong became the place of constrained and channeled commercial episodes with no choice for the citizens is described as one of the risks of interior urbanism by Petra Blaisse in her critical claim for wilderness in urban spaces as pointed out in her interview Into the Wild. Both interior and exterior public spaces are assuming in fact the same connotations challenging their conventional opposite characters: if public buildings are assuming the spatial organization of interior landscapes, the exteriors are being ruled more and more in terms of use, as if they were buildings.

If it is true that certain internal conditions are able to create new urban spaces (as in the cases described above) the opposite is also true, that some buildings have assumed a character of indoor urbanity. One example is the article by Jonathan A. Scelsa Enfiladed Grids, The Museum as City, which highlights how museums are taking the configuration and the spatial experience of a city through the wise use of the intermezzo or the connective space between exhibition rooms such as in the work of OMA, REX, Jean Nouvel and SANAA.

This condition of blurring between interior and exterior is well described in the interview of Winy Maas, where the metaphor of a “3D Nolli”, in relation to the Nolli Map (1784) which first represented the enclosed publicly built surface as part of a continuum with the open spaces of Rome, is used as a tool to interpret a new generation of indoor public spaces like the Market Hall in Rotterdam. Scale and urban density, in the words of Winy Maas, are the “activators” of this kind of internal condition where the boundary between interior and exterior is totally blurred.

Reversing the traditional figure/ground opposition defined by Nolli Map, the poché which represents the private buildings unfold another, less porous, dimension of interior urbanism. In Some Notes Towards an Interior Archipelago, Brendan Cormier describes as an urban paradigm, the network of places that hosts the daily life of human beings. Far from the radical scenarios described by Archizoom in the No-stop City, our everyday life is not the one of the free man in an open indoor environment but rather it is confronted with the problems of ownership, differentiation and exclusivity, that define the gradient of permeability of this continuous interior. Visible and invisible boundaries restrict the possibility of wandering. In a moment in which, through the social networks, our lives have become public in almost every aspect, the interior has become the eminent space of privacy and thus intimacy and freedom.

In our opinion this different approach, so widely explored in MONU 21 in all its different aspects, represents a useful tool to overpass the dichotomy between the city as a system and the building as an object. If in fact we assume that there is a unifying field that relates to all the objects which compose the city, the urban dimension is no longer a matter of juxtaposition. 
With MONU 20 about Geographical Urbanism, this issue challenges the scale through which we are used to reading/to interpreting the city: from XS to XXL questions, there is a need to understand urban phenomena defining the new extents for urban life.

— Claudia Mainardi and Giacomo Ardesio. Both of them graduated in Architecture at the Milan Politecnico, they are both part of the collective Fosbury Architecture and they are currently working at OMA in Rotterdam.

EDITORIAL

P02 House and Contradiction
P04 Interview with Ada Colau

4 ESSAYS x 1 CASE
P09 Possible futures: Cooperatives, from ownership to use. A conversation.
P13 1967-1969, A cooperative housing block. A conversation with Martí Anson and Manel Brullet
P18 Property trust. Sebastián Adamo.
P22 Diyarbakir: Housing the city. Interview with Martino Tattara (DOGMA) and Caglayan Ayhan-Day, by Roberto Soundy.

ARCHIVE 
Cuadernos de arquitectura nº 68/69, “Revista de revistas”, 1967.
P27 Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Kazuo Shinohara.
P31 Critical metabolism. Interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto—Atelier Bow Wow.

2 ESSAY x 4 CASES
P36 Room Non-room. Peter Märkli, Atelierhaus Weissacher by Florian Beigel and Philip Christou.
P42 The house with equal-sized room. Xavier Monteys.
P46 De Vylder Vinck Taillieu. Rot Ellen Berg.
P50 Kuu Architects. Minus K House
P54 Pezo von Ellrichshaussen. Solo House
P58 Ted’A Arquitectes. Casa Lluís i n’Eulalia

OBSERVATORY
P63 Emiliano López-Mónica Rivera. Photographic diaries.
P66 Un parell d’arquitectes. Room, doors and windows.
P68 Vora Arquitectura. Mercè’s apartment.
P70 Rafael Berengena, Marta Poch. Casa AA.

SUPLEMENT

P72 Domestic fragments. Luis Díaz-Mauriño.

In their own words:

“It is a practice in which a deep understanding of territorial politics, and aquatic resources, designed atmospheres, and an expanded notion of environment are driving forces to generate future landscapes.”

This strategies and policies are explained using LCLA Office projects as a tool for better understanding how micro-tactical interventions can be a catalyst for change at a larger scale.

Tactical Archipelago. LCLA Office

We’re not going to describe here the projects included on the publication, as they are well documented at LCLA Office web-site, but to highlight the theoretical framework of the publication which includes interviews with Geoff Manaugh and Mason White, and afterword by Charles Waldheim.

Reading the very personal conversation between Luis Callejas and Mason White, it’s easy to understand the roots of the immanent presence of landscape at the core of a high percentage of their projects, where the limits of urbanism, landscape and architecture become blurred and diffuse. The work of his father Rodrigo Callejas and specially the series “Paisajes Agredidos” has a strong influence on Luis’ interest on the effect that certain devices and objects have on the landscape, that currently it’s possible to see on projects like the Tactical Archipelago or the project Weightless, developed with his former studio Paisajes Emergentes [Emergent Landscapes, is also a wordplay with Paisajes Agredidos].

The non-built environment around Medellín was more important than the architectural heritage as a basis of influence for the first projects developed by the studio. Their first projects were deeply speculative and driven by a positive skepticism, perceiving landscape as an architectural and technical device, with a notorious fascination for buoyancy, lightness, ephemerality, and weightlessness.

Weightless. Paisajes Emergentes.

The way that LCLA Office uses some of their project as manifestos against the seriousness of architecture is thought provoking. The utopian approach behind some of their proposals have also more philosophical roots. The role of utopian isolation is also a liberation from some controlled limits, as we can see in projects like La Carlota Airport Park or the Serrana & Quitasueño —based on the idea of an island within an island within an island—, which are just two examples of this desirable condition of isolation in a wide range of proposals.

About “islands and atolls”, Luis Callejas explains:

“Going back to geographic categories, I think the atoll is a better term to frame my interest in contained unpredictability. I like the determinacy on the external figure —the figure defined by the beach is clear, yet it is vulnerable to erosion and wear. At the same time the liquid interior gives me a perfect frame for vital and amoral play with live matter as a design medium.”

Other important presence on Luis Callejas’ work is fiction. The kind of fiction that uses technology, ecology, culture, representation, storytelling, and environment as a framework to develop architectural projects. As pointed by Charles Waldheim, we can talk about Callejas as a curator of atmospheres.

This understanding of emerging islands as future fragments of past continents can be found embodied in several small details along the book. Based on the way that projects are fragmented and interconnected through the interviews and the fluidity of representation, we can say that this issue of Pamphlet Architecture is an archipelago of ideas.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editorial team Quaderns.

/// We have published the work of Luis Callejas on Quaderns #262 Parainfrastructures
/// More info about LCLA Office on their web-site.
/// To buy Islands and Atolls, Pamphlet Architecture #33, go here.

Emilio Ambasz, curator of the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” [MoMA 1972] described the work of Gruppo Strum:

“The Gruppo Strum, rather than presenting a physical design of a domestic environment, chooses rather to go out into the street. Its “stand” represents any corner, where they freely distribute three different pamphlets —red, white, green— drawn in the form of photo-cartoons.

The first pamphlet (white) depicts the present conditions of urban decay. The red pamphlet describes the methods which may be adopted to change the present situation. The green pamphlet catalogues all forms of urban Utopias presently envisioned by designers the world over.”

We are publishing “The Struggle for Housing” because on this fotoromanzo, Gruppo Strum published their statements related with the housing crisis in Italy in 1972. Now, we have a similar crisis in Spain, where it has been estimated that there are more than 20,000 skeletons of unfinished buildings, mostly all of them, housing buildings. If we read Gruppo Strum texts and change the word “Italy” for the word “Spain”, it is possible to see how cyclical is our history and how the same situation in Italy provoked social and political reactions from the citizenship, such as here in Spain with the work of the group Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca [PAH]. They are actively working to stop and transform the foreclosure processes, and have being capable of stopping housing evictions and even forcing legal framework changes. In times when even the European court found that Spanish legislation about mortgages goes against EU law, it’s good to stop for a while and read Gruppo Strum statement:

“Many people in Italy do not have a decent home to live in, and some have no home at all. If they are not given one —and for the time being no one is likely to give it to them, they must get homes for themselves by organizing themselves into a political movement capable of overturning the trend of the current system in which their fringe existence and exploitation are functional [...] What they must procure, therefore, is not merely a home to live in but a city, so as to ensure for themselves a freer social life and one more in keeping with their needs. There have been many struggles for these goals in Italy. The white papers recount and illustrate these . facts, showing also how these struggles for homes continually reshape cities, by attacking and defeating the capitalist organization of territory together with the symbolic values of its formalization.”

Here you can read and download the complete fotoromanzo “The Struggle for Housing”

The Struggle for Housing by Quaderns

They have just released their issue #06 “ANGST”, that you can preview on this video:

Horizonte Issue #06 “ANGST” Release from Philip Zeller on Vimeo.

We want to remark that on this issue, there is a contribution by Guillem Carabí, “Repetition as a Strategy: Building the Angst” which you can read briefly [in Spanish for now], here. Guillem Carabí has also contributed to Quaderns #263 with his essay On the subject of refurbishment; Jujol and can Negre.

Evangelina Guerra Luján, or The Nomad as she likes to call herself, describe her project as follows:

“In 1974 Pablo Neruda published his best-seller “The Book of Questions” : poems in the shape of questions, observing whatever surrounded him , with the wonder of a child. Is in this spirit that the project “The ( New) Book of Questions? is founded: to observe and question the “territories in process” we live in, rather than to “answer” them. These questions will lead authors and lectors into the realm of further observation and, if lucky, further questioning. The aim of this “book” is to become a device or tool for thinking, observing and understanding the landscape, city, and space. The (New) Book of Questions will document , in the format of questions, different perceptions of the territory during a year [Nov. 8th. 2012 until Nov 8th 2013].”

But the unsolicited publishing project is going beyond the digital world. It has caught the attention of different people worldwide, including La Sala from Venezuela, where the on-line project is taking physical form by means of an exhibition.

Publishing is passing through an ongoing moment of critical restructuration. The downturn in book sales is making people to be more imaginative when using and sharing new formats of generate critical thinking and exchange knowledge. This project is open to anybody who wants to send a question regarding the territory, all submissions will be published in the digital archive and if you’re lucky enough, maybe you can be part of a forthcoming and unplanned exhibition!

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editor.

Quaderns – Guerrilla interview #10 | San Rocco – Kersten Geers, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Giovanni Piovene from Quaderns on Vimeo.

Our friends from San Rocco has recently been awarded with the Icon Award Emerging architect of the year. It’s quite interesting that the award went to a publishing project instead to a tradicional practice, and we like to think that the term “paper architecture” is being revisited and start having meaning again.

Kieran Long wrote on Icon Eye about the prize:

“San Rocco represents something vital about contemporary architectural practice. The network of architects, graphic designers and photographers behind the modest, black-and-white covered publication has come together around shared interests that buck the prevailing tendencies of architecture and propose a new model of practice. And all of this in what is supposed to be a side project in a time of publishing’s decline [...] Most interesting is how the magazine generates its content, through a call for papers in every issue, asking readers to contribute to the next according to a set theme.”

We leave you here with a brief conversation we had with San Rocco at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.