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ABSTRACT

This article examines the design decisionmaking process for the urban renewal of The Hague (The Netherlands), developed in the 1980s. The article investigates in particular the process related with the development of a plan (deelgebied 5) and a project (Punt en Komma), designed by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza. Using this case study, the article discusses the role of the architect as a social mediator, and its particular relevance in housing processes developed with citizens’ participation. Drawing on an intellectual framework defined by the concept of “open work” (Umberto Eco) and the dialectical relation between modernity and ambivalence (Zigmunt Bauman), this article suggests that meaningful communication between authors and addressees does not entail a complete elimination of the power of expertise. Instead, this article contends that stimulating the users’ confrontation with the ambiguities and contradictions of the design process is an import feature to enhance the quality of citizens’ participatory in design decision-making processes.

KEYWORDS

Housing, Urban Renewal, Citizens’

Participation, Architecture, The Netherlands,

Álvaro Siza

RESUMEN

En este artículo analizaremos el proceso de toma de decisiones sobre diseño, desarrollado en los ochenta, para renovar la ciudad de La Haya. Investigaremos en especial el proceso relacionado con el desarrollo de un plan (deelgebied 5) y de un proyecto (Punt en Komma), diseñados por el arquitecto portugués Álvaro Siza. Basándonos en este caso de estudio, examinaremos el papel del arquitecto como mediador social y su especial pertinencia en procesos de viviendas desarrollados con la participación de los ciudadanos. Inspirados en un marco intelectual definido por el concepto “obra abierta” (Umberto Eco) y la relación dialéctica entre modernidad y ambivalencia (Zigmunt Bauman), sugerimos en este trabajo que la comunicación significativa entre autores y destinatarios no implica la erradicación del poder de los conocimientos. Por el contrario, sostenemos que estimular la confrontación de los usuarios con las ambigüedades y las contradicciones del proceso de diseño es un factor importante que sirve para mejorar la calidad de participación ciudadana en los procesos de toma de decisiones sobre diseño.

PALABRAS CLAVE

vivienda, renovación urbana, participación

de los ciudadanos, arquitectura, Países Bajos,

Álvaro Siza

One of the targets in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals highlights the importance of citizen’s participation to develop inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities. By 2030, target 11.3 aims at, “enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries” (UN, 2015). This target explicitly relates the development of inclusive cities with processes of co-creation and meaningful communication. Indeed, to build the millions of new housing complexes needed to accommodate the rapid urbanisation of the global South we need to critically rethink the system of interrelations woven in design decisionmaking. In this context, to cope with this major societal challenge, there are lessons from the past that can be useful to accomplish a more sustainable urban development. In particular, the urban renewal movement developed in Europe from the 1960s until the 1980s can contribute important guidelines to tackle the urbanization challenges of the coming decades.

In the late 1960s, there was a widespread drive to create meaningful communication between social groups that lived in opposite sides of the political and economic spectrum. Grassroots movements for the empowerment of ordinary citizens gained momentum and would underpin the growing acceptance of citizens’ participation in design decision-making processes. In the 1970s, the visibility of this phenomenon increased in Western Europe with the emergence of urban renewal as an alternative to the welfare state mass housing policies employed hitherto. A common token of the new urban renewal policies was challenging the post-war emphasis on central planning, standardization, and serial mass housing production. Instead, these new policies championed a more situated approach, attempting to re-connect housing policies with its social significance, going beyond a mere productive and regulatory approach. This political agenda was designed to overcome the conflicting relations between the collective and the singular, and thus it has influenced the relation between the planner/designer and the citizen/user. This relation became more interweaved, and triggered a reconceptualization of the role of the architect in design decision-making processes.

In this context, thus, what was the contribution of aesthetic communication in the reassessment of the nexus between author and addressee in the design disciplines? What was the extent to which architectural expertise contributed to bridge the gap between the universal visual order of the architecture sponsored by the welfare state and the subjectivity of emancipated citizens?

To contribute possible answers for these questions, this paper will discuss the importance of communication in Álvaro Siza’s approach to design decision-making with citizens’ participation. I will focus in particular in the design process of the Punt en Komma housing complex, a project developed from 1984 until 1988 as part of the urban renewal of the Schilderswijk district, a multicultural neighbourhood in the Dutch city of The Hague. The paper will be divided in two parts. In the first part I will discuss the intellectual background against which citizens’ participation in design decision-making emerged as a counter proposal to the power relations consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s. The idea of open work, as defined by Umberto Eco (Eco, Opera Aperta, 1962), will be examined in detail. It will be discussed as a strategy of aesthetic communication that attempts to reconcile the author with the addressee, a key aspect to mediate the relations between the expert (the designer) and the user (the dweller).

In the second part of the paper, I will examine in detail Álvaro Siza’s project for the urban renewal of the Schilderswijk district, with an emphasis on the design decision-making processes of deelgebied 5’s plan and the dwelling layout of the Punt en Komma housing blocks. To illustrate the background against which these processes ensued, I will discuss the most relevant urban and demographic challenges of the district, in particular the tense social relations between the different ethnic groups living in the area. The fundamental aspects of Siza’s plan for the neighbourhood will then be presented and the contribution of citizens’ participation in the process will be discussed. The relevance of the Spatial Development Laboratory (Ruimtelijk Ontwikkelings Laboratorium, ROL, a system to develop full scale models of the typical dwelling units), will be further accounted as a novel method to involve residents in housing design decision-making processes.

Finally, the conclusion will highlight the importance of citizens’ participation in accommodating the social and cultural differences of the future residents and create conditions for multiculturalism and interculturalism in the city. Citizens’ participation will be conceptually framed as a medium for a process of communication between the architect as encoder-producer and the user as decoder-receiver.

PART I ARCHITECTURE, COMMUNICATION, AND THE POETICS OF THE OPEN WORK
The Poetics of the Open Work

In the 1970s, the capacity of the design expert to perform as a social mediator was contested. Fighting the figure of the design expert became a common trend in the 1970s, especially for a group of architects that Tzonis and Lefaivre called the populist movement. Although very diverse and unstructured in its ideological framework, this movement actively pursued a paradigm shift where the focus shifted from an ideal of ‘order’ and ‘expertise’ to one of ‘freedom’ and ‘pluralism’ (Tzonis & Lefaivre, 1976, p. 28). “While [Welfare State] architects saw the designed environment as a well-ordered regiment”, Tzonis and Lefaivre argued, “populists envisaged it as a well serviced supermarket” (Tzonis, Lefaivre, 1976, p. 29). In this context, the expert’s ability to engage in meaningful communication with the ordinary man on the street became a flagship for a new disciplinary approach in the design disciplines. The envisioned position of the designer-expert brought about a flagrant contradiction, though. While driven by an approach of liberation for the user, the populist movement fell prey to what Barry Schwartz called “the paradox of choice” (Schwartz, 2016). As Schwartz aptly demonstrated, too much choice does not always resonate with an increased autonomy, freedom or self-determination. It often means exactly the opposite. In this context, it is worthwhile to review briefly the relation between standards, norms, and openness in design decision-making.

While the critique to the Welfare State architecture gained momentum in the 1970s, there were earlier attempts to reconfigure the role of the architect in design decision-making. One of the earlier critiques to the standards and norms of Welfare State architecture emerged in the late 1950s and it was supported by the notion of open form and open work¹. In the 1960s, open form and open architecture became notable examples of a critique to the mass housing architecture championed by the welfare state². Throughout the 1960s, open form gained momentum as a strategy to promote meaningful aesthetic communication between the designer and the user, where the earlier neither dictates the needs of the later, nor is subjugated by them.

This attempt to reconceptualise the design agency of architects would gain a strong intellectual support with the publication, in 1962 of Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (Open Work)³. Among the essays collected in Open Work, “The poetics of the Open Work” could be singled out as a major contribution to discuss the role of the individual addressee in the reception of the work of art (Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 1984)⁴. In this essay, Eco highlights the notion of open work as a rejection of definite messages. He emphasizes the initiative of the individual addressee in giving aesthetic validity to a work of art introducing his particular perspective (Eco, The Poetics of the Open Work, 1989, p. 4). However, Eco brings about a subtle yet meaningful variation to the concept of openness, defining a work of art as a closed form and open product. Closed in its uniqueness and wholeness and open in its predisposition to be interpreted in infinite forms while preserving its specificity. He concludes, then, “every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself”. For Eco, the reception of the work of art is an act of freedom and, as such, an imposition of a single sense at the very outset of the receptive process should be prevented. To open up the possibilities for interpretation and performance, Eco champions the ideas of suggestiveness. He goes on contending “an artistic work that suggests is also one that can be performed with the full emotional and imaginative resources of the interpreter” (Eco, The Poetics of the Open Work, 1989, p. 9).

Suggestiveness thus embodies a certain amount of ambiguity and ambivalence, which become important qualities to challenge dogmatic directional centres (Eco, The Poetics of the Open Work, 1989, p.11)⁵. Ambiguity and ambivalence would become the key characteristics of “works in movement”, a sub-group of open works where the collaboration of the addressee in making the work of art is vital, because they are structurally unplanned or physically incomplete, such as Calder’s mobiles or Mallarme’s Livre. Eco suggests incorporating indeterminacy as part of the poetics of the open work. “As in the Einsteinian universe”, Eco argues, “in the ‘work in movement’ we may well deny that there is a single prescribed point of view” (Eco, The Poetics of the Open Work, 1989, p. 19). Eco’s poetics of the open work is based on an organizing rule that allows numerous different personal interventions, resisting, however, indiscriminate participation (Eco, The Poetics of the Open Work, 1989, p. 19). In this article, I will explore the ambivalent character of Eco’s notion of open work to define the intellectual background for a discussion on the interplay between architectural expertise and citizens’ participation in design decision-making processes. The potential and the shortcomings of the idea of open work will be used to examine the extent to which the designer qua author and the user qua addressee can negotiate sovereignty in the design process, without falling prey to the perils of authoritarianism or populism.