Keywords: "Projects" (5×)action (1×)Communication (1×)Design (3×)Dokumentation (7×)Expertinnen des Alltags (1×)matters of form (3×)medium (4×)Minimal Structure (1×)notation (3×)planning (2×)problematisation (1×)Rothenburgsort (1×)stadtteilöffentlich (1×)Uncertainty (1×)
Dominique Peck has joined the Research and Teaching Programme Urban Design’s academic staff at HafenCity University in 2015. Being a UD alumni, his work has a focus on project management, design development and transposing formats in research, teaching and practice. Dominique was co-project managing the live project Building a Proposition for Future Activities and is now focused on his PhD Project Re-positioning Project Management in Urban Design.
Bernd Kniess is an architect and urban planner. Since 2008 he is Professor for Urban Design at HafenCity Universität Hamburg where he established the Master Programme Urban Design. He is interested in the negotiation of the contemporary city, whose planning principles he aims to diagrammatically describe and transfer into a relational practice as procedure.
Kniess, Bernd, Anne-Julchen Bernhardt, Christoph Herrmann, Christopher Dell, Dominique Peck, and Marko Mijatovic. 2016. “Early Project Brochure.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
In Studio
Kniess, Bernd, Christopher Dell, Dominique Peck, and Marko Mijatovic. 2017. “Framing.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The current urban situation poses a number of challenges for Urban Design both as discipline and practice. Growing cities, a general housing shortage and the recent influx of refugees demand substantial analyses and the projection of these analyses into various modes of futurity rather than quick fixes. Especially the current “refugee crisis” presents a dilemma for Urban Design, which is symptomatic for the context in which it operates. While think tanks and labs experiment with modern participation tools and architects design floor plans for temporary accommodation projects, the framing of the actual issue is rarely questioned. This is where Urban Design can open up perspectives that go beyond problem solving tasks. Certain aspects of the urban either favour or impede on encounters with diversity (Esposito De Vita et al. 2016), which allows shifting the question away from the “problem” of diversity towards urban potentialities that are currently locked into its framing as problem. Where the “refugee crisis” is mainly framed as one of finding places for their accommodation, Urban Design addresses practices of “framing” in diverse situations and on various scales.
How can we re-assemble urban design in relation to urban development areas and arenas? What can changing patterns of everyday life teach us about urban, urbanised and urbanising society in general and the changing role of the designing disciplines?
Kniess, Bernd, Christopher Dell, Dominique Peck, and Marko Mijatovic. 2017. “The Process of Framing.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
We will now give an overview of the process of framing, which is comprised of practices involving human and non-human actors. This process framing took place in the month before the Summer School Building a Proposition for Future Activities.
Let’s begin with constructing and making use of a strategic field between knowledge production, projection and contracting. The annual themes of the research and teaching programme Urban Design and the books produced in reference to them serve as a good example here. Under the heading Fluchtlinien – Mobilitätspraktiken einer verstädterten Realität (lines of flight – mobility practices of an urbanized reality) in 2014/2015 or “Parapolis – city of residents” in 2015/16, UD focused on migration of people seeking protection from war, violence and lacking economic prospects in their home country. In reference to journalist Mark Terkessidis, this annual theme aimed at learning to recognize and describe, to select and glean the physical arrangements and materialities, the actors, practices and various places, and the complex spaces and rhythms of what it means to live today in the form of an atlas.
The atlas is a book, and, as we like to think, a prolific mode of developing a source of knowing-how, knowing-that and knowing-why. One has to take into consideration that these questions are only intended as a structural motor for coming into play rather than final teleological concepts. The notion of coming into play – in the form of a specific project – is of importance for project management in Urban Design. This demands realigning the focus from already ongoing research according to pertinent issues of the project’s parameters.
Welcome to the machine
Jakob Kempe, Renke Gudehus Da kann ja jeder kommen mapped “the machine” people have to go through in the process of fleeing, becoming an officially recognized refugee and making a living as a refugee.
A documentation of this work is available as a video lecture in the programme of the HafenCity Lectures 2016/17 Vom Kommen & Bleiben. Wie Migration Stadt produziert. There HCU researchers Ingrid Breckner, Alexa Färber, Bernd Kniess, Dominique Peck and Kathrin Wildner were offered 10.000€ by HafenCity GmbH to create a programme and invite guests to lecture on the issue of migration and urban development. The summer term programme focused on the issues of flight, migration and urban development on the societal interactions with the renewed challenge of migrating refugees to Hamburg and Germany. This contextualisation was followed by the winter term’s programme, which gave insights into key aspects of thematic policy fields in relation to the impact on refugees’ practices of staying and thereby rendered the complexity of their desirable participation in everyday life visible.
The machine was mobilised in several Urban Design projects to make sense of a transforming field of regulations such as: BVerwG 25. März 1996 – 4B 302.95, BauR 96,676 the definition for habitation by the Federal Administrative Court: “the concept habitation is defined by long term domesticity, the self-organisation of the domestic sphere together with the voluntariness of the stay.” §34, 3 5, § 246 BauGB, §8 BauNVO Special rules for some states; special rules for refugee accommodations. This set of rules allowed states to be more liberal in the interpretation of zoning laws and buildings codes in order to live up to the urgency and flexibility in the production of accommodation capacities posed by the rapid influx of refugees over the winter of 2015/16. The key term here is “accommodation” which is distinct from “housing/dwelling”.
No tents over the winter: The free and Hanseatic city of Hamburg, as many other cities in Germany, has issued a set of rules under the title “Gesetz zum Schutz der öffentlichen Sicherheit und Ordnung” §14a SOG (law on protection of public safety and order) which allows state authorities in case of imminent danger to take measures to prevent impending dangers to the public safety and order.
One particular piece of regulation unfolding heterogeneous agencies affecting the refugee accommodation Poppenbütttel 43 is the so called Bürgervertrag.
Kniess, Bernd, Christopher Dell, Dominique Peck, and Marko Mijatovic. 2017. “Mobilising the brief.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
In December 2015 UD was first made aware of the project Community Building Poppenbüttel. A three-page project sketch attached to an email outlined the civil society initiative Poppenbüttel Hilft e.V.’s motive of enabling participation of refugees in the form of a self-build project in the refugee accommodation Poppenbüttel 43. The initiative’s chairman sent the sketch to several potential stakeholders including the president of the HafenCity University, who forwarded it to the Research and Teaching Programme Urban Design. The email from the president implied that students could do the design planning in a seminar or project at HCU and asked Professor for Urban Design, Bernd Kniess, whether he was interested in such a project. He did show interest, replied “yes” and met with the initiative’s chairman. They discussed past projects such as the initiative’s efforts around integration during the aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia and UD’s project work in the live project University of the Neighbourhoods. Mutually expressing interest in pursuing the project, they agreed on working on the project, which at this point had only been approved on verbally. Subsequently, UD staff and the initiative’s members joined several stakeholder meetings discussing technical as well as cultural and social issues of the project and superimposed their very own project work with two seminars to remobilise the research done in the Parapolis Atlas and translate it into projections of various modes of futurity in the neighbourhood of the planned refugee accommodation.
Brochure
The idea of hosting a summer school emerged in the context of the so-called refugee crisis and a growing housing shortage. The resulting situation in the winter of 2015/16 necessitated the political reorganization of the production of housing. Simultaneously, new actors and with them novel understandings of what it means to live today emerged. Among them operates the above mentioned civil society organization Poppenbüttel Hilft e.V.. With the idea to plan and build the community building with refugees and the participating neighbourhood, they first approached the UD team with the request for an image of what this building could look like. Taking the idea seriously, the team produced a number of process drawings that left the actually emerging form open. Functioning as a means to raise funds from a number of philanthropists, the drawings were tested but not considered legible, so the team produced a brochure, adding text and references to prize-winning self-build architectures. While the organization found these proposals interesting, they were more interested in a traditional (closed) form of representation: a rendering. In order to keep the form open and still meet the organization’s request, the UD team organized an international summer school. As the situation became both clearer and more complex, three takes were devised with a view to articulate the project’s motive under the heading Building a Proposition for Future Activities.
There were three takes: 1) working on design-build proposals for the community building, 2) the construction and organisation of the first International Mini Golf Grand Prix and 3) constructing a prototype for an architecture in and from within which new modes of futurity can be practiced.
Exams
What two modes of representation are here played against each other?
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Reveal answers
The history of architecture and planning is based on a teleological structure: The representation follows the formula: plan > realization. In opposition to this structure the representation of Open Form follows the formula: virtuality of potentialities > actualization of potentialities.
