Arjen Oosterman

New Forms of Involvement

Five Contributions on Architecture and Urban Politics

The editors of Open asked five young design and research firms to submit a contribution in which they would outline their mission in regard to the current philosophy of social engineering in relation to urban space. BAVO, Partizan Publik, ZUS, Flexmens and Dennis Kaspori/Jeanne van Heeswijk each interpreted this assignment in a way entirely their own. Arjen Oosterman, architecture historian and editor in chief of Volume, provides an introduction.

In reading the texts in this special section, one encounters nothing less than a quest. Not only does the ‘spirit of ’68’ (and before) move the authors once more, sometimes as inspiration, sometimes as a standard, there is also an active effort to find a current translation of that impassioned social involvement – that seemingly disinterested struggle for freedom pur sang – that, from today’s standpoint, is difficult to correctly appraise according to the cultural and political frameworks within which the up-and-coming generation operated at the time.1

None of the five acting parties, however, can be faulted for oversimplification. Each seems duly aware of the difference between inspiration and imitation. Let us not therefore get bogged down in reflections on Constant’s homo ludens, Debord’s spectacle society or Le Corbusier’s sanitary citizen; what we are dealing with here is the socially engineered society, not the power of utopia. Let us not get mired either in the pathology of contemporary consumer culture. These days, the debate about the role of architecture all too quickly narrows to a rejection of uncontrolled commercialism in combination with overvalued individualism. Didn’t Dada once joke, ‘everyone his own football’?

Bespreekbaar maken – ‘making something discussible’ – do you know this expression? Making something discussible. A typical expression for the Dutch, a people of open curtains, a people that survive and progress by discussing differences and oppositions, by resolving things by mutual agreement, striving for ‘workable relations’, avoiding conflict, looking for consensus. In part by exposing to the light of day anything that even looks like it might stay under the surface, mercilessly and without embarrassment. Cards on the table, hands too, levelling the playing field, neutralizing potential inequality and hierarchy – we all have the best of intentions, don’t we?

This ‘making things discussible’ has acquired a special significance in this country since the start of the third millennium. Suddenly there turned out to be all sorts of things that were not discussed and were more or less collectively kept under our hats. And from the moment this became publicly evident, a veritable Pandora’s Box opened up. Suddenly, the rules of the game, which had been more or less perceived as firmly established, no longer applied. Things were not just made ‘discussible’, which after all implies a form of dialogue and therefore respect for ‘the other’; literally everything that bothered anyone could and can suddenly be broadcast to the world without proviso. Freedom has narrowed down to law.

‘Making things discussible’ is not simply a sociocultural question, linked to a place and time; it is also an expression of the organization, the internal logic of a society. It takes no effort to discern a ‘design’ in this. Not in the sense of some secret government agency that manipulates the population as it sees fit. But as an expression of an underlying structure. Once one figures that out, one can play with it, of course. And turn it upside down, apparently.

Many things had to be made discussible in architecture as well; there turned out to be numerous taboos and anathemas. And there too the liberation proves relative. It was witty and to the point when Sjoerd Soeters, in the early 1980s, advocated unashamed enjoyment by presenting the American architect and developer John Portman as an example, with his ‘If you like ice cream, why not have three scoops?’ It was useful that the Krier brothers exposed the relativity of the modern approach and brought attention to the rich variety of the ‘previously achieved results’ of the discipline. Whether this immediately needed to be celebrated as an irrefutable truth is another matter, just as the populism emphatically embraced by Soeters is at most an option. What matters here is that these and other investigations, experiments and pamphlets have had an astounding effect and influence. Precisely in the age of postmodern relativism, of the fundamental relativity of values, assertions and viewpoints, precisely in this era, society proves capable of tipping over by a significant number of degrees. Jo Coenen’s ‘history as friend’, in the hands of the royal duo of Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl, produces a formula that is being rolled out across this country at an astonishing pace. In short: social engineering in the sense of influence down to the physical level is anything but a thing of the past.

Yet this is not the concept of social engineering that is usually addressed in the criticism, which mostly focuses on social engineering, on government interventions whereby citizens or entire sections of the population are modelled according to a government-imposed norm or practice. Edward C. Scott provided an analysis of this, one still worth considering, in his Seeing Like a State.2 Ideally this cannot happen in a democracy, but reality proves otherwise. And this is where some of the ambitions of BAVO, Flexmens, Partizan Publik, ZUS and Kaspori/Van Heeswijk come from.

If everything is political, from where we live and what work we do to what kind of potatoes we consume, or actually the fact that we buy potatoes instead of growing them in our back garden, that we have a back garden and therefore are blocking a potentially more economically intensive use of this land and, socially speaking, separate (differentiate?) ourselves spatially, what is good or rather what is bad – if everything is political, there’s a lot to choose. Architects know this better than anyone: to design is to choose (and reduce). Yet the freedom of choice and the opportunities to actually ‘make’ things are apparently disappointing. As BAVO and Flexmens demonstrate here and elsewhere, things constantly have to be liberated, clarified, punctured and held up to the light in order to create room for . . . improvement. BAVO goes furthest in this. With implacable radicalism they accuse even their presumed philosophical allies of Misconception, Inadequacy and Failure. Like in the text published here. The danger lurks among their own ranks. We can forgive them that in the sharpness of their analyses they sometimes go a bit too far and see a potential hiding place for a policeman in every tree planted by the government – their contribution to reflection and debate on the urban condition from a political and philosophical angle is by no means diminished.

Partizan Publik and ZUS demonstrate a somewhat different practice. They too are highly conscious of the political dimensions of spatial action. ZUS explicitly calls for a repoliticization of urban development, although this seems to operate more at the level of governance than of ideology. Let the government once again be more clear about what the frameworks and choices are, in order to arrive at a more intelligent and more meaningful development of our spatial order. Ultimately, the solicited and unsolicited projects they propose are grounded in genuine concern about the condition and development of our public domain.

Partizan Publik is also highly cognizant of the link between politics and space. And like ZUS they opt to work on the quality of this public space through direct action and intervention. By making people aware, by making things visible, by contributing to transformation and reinforcement. As Partizan Publik has no designers within its ranks, this has not lead (so far) to designs; it is primarily about spatial politics. Yet what ZUS and Partizan Publik have in common is that they work on this ‘public issue’ through action. At home and abroad, for as the Partizan Publik project list shows, they are as comfortable working in Eastern Europe, the Middle East or the USA as in the Netherlands. A common element to all these projects is a strong interest in ‘post-conflict’ studies, because these contain so many potential opportunities and yet result in so many failures.

The duo Kaspori/Van Heeswijk occupies perhaps the most classical position in the social engineering debate, by offering residents the opportunity to act spatially from the ‘bottom up’, as it’s now called. Just as Aldo van Eyck described the architect as someone who helps create shelter and space, Dennis Kaspori and Jeanne van Heeswijk help create, for the most part, community facilities. Their work is based on a point of view about the activation of residents’ groups by addressing their creative capabilities and the confidence that this, at an individual and group level, leads to a more pleasant society. Involvement generates (shared) responsibility and creates pride.

What all five parties demonstrate is a renewed thirst to get to work, inspired by a sense of engagement. Engagement, remember that concept? Isn’t it terribly old-school, almost suspect? No, it is accepted again, or rather, a growing group of people who feel involved in spatial development is claiming space for it again. Creation is something you do.

Notes:
1. Just as dismissing the Bijlmer as a megalomaniacal failure of social engineering, and its current demolition and new construction as the final proof of this, demonstrates an exasperating lack of contextual insight, it is equally short-sighted to simply take the anti-authoritarian outbursts of the time as inspiration for how to deal with the fear-inspired orthodoxy of today.
2. In his study of social engineering, now more than ten years old, Scott demonstrates that the attempt to apply large-scale solutions to large-scale issues is doomed to fail. Monoculture is particularly criticized in his investigation of agriculture, forestry and urban-planning experiments. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998).