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.
The seminar format Intercultural Practice was developed by Christopher Dell and Bernd Kniess as part of the project University of Neighbourhoods UoN in Hamburg Wilhelmsburg. The project's motif of “enabling architecture for the learning city” was translated into numerous formats that had the purpose of reassembling teaching, research and practice and thus enabling a multitude of actors to play an active role in urban knowledge production processes.
The term “interculture” addresses the theme of culture as an urban resource. In addition, the interplay between the various types of conception, action and interpretation is emphasized. Why Culture? If we analyse the city from the perspective of cultural practices, we will discover an interplay in which culture introduces “symbolic balances, compensation agreements and more or less permanent compromises” (de Certeau). These contracts remain sustainable not so much because of their legal legitimacy as because of the establishment of a public sphere - a crucial aspect of the justification for the implementation of performative formats in urban development processes as cultural programming. This also means the active extension of the concept of urban development by taking into account the existing urban environment and using it to develop new options for action.
Since management and symbolic processes are more than ever networked and inter-articulated, management practices and processes are increasingly culturally affected and influenced, while culture [and also the activities in teaching, research and practice at universities] is increasingly influenced economically and managerially (Bachmann-Medick 2017). With the restructuring of the teaching formats - for the optional subjects, students could only receive 2.5 CP instead of 5 CP - and content at HafenCity University, but above all due to the elimination of the building of the UoN as a real laboratory outside the university with the completion of the project in summer 2014, the IKP seminars could no longer be conducted as originally scheduled. Can we still mix aspects of teaching, research and practice with teaching formats in such a way that we can problematize something about what the patterns of everyday life reveal to us about the urban itself, as well as the specific role of project management?
In Studio
The format of the rehearsal or model occurs in architectural production via working on and in models, mock-ups or prototypes. “Model artifacts are configured in a certain way to have some things tested on and with them. This distinguishes them from ordinary instruments. By analogy, models can be used to achieve phenomena that would otherwise be raptured by intervention, because in reality they are too large or too small, too slow, too fast, expensive or dangerous. This means that they are oriented towards manageability and anthropomorphic measurement. They promote and fire interactions, invite to try them out. Thus they are also embodied ways of looking at things, which only reveal what is in them when they are confronted with them, namely a certain range in a setting that allows them to explore” (Hinterwaldner 2017, 17).
Less widespread, however, are rehearsals on the use of architecture and the city. In recent years, we have repeatedly heard the term “Reallabor” and have already read about a number of successful projects. In the “Reallabor” it is not only a matter of realizing a project, but also of rehearsing a certain way of realizing it and of understanding this rehearsing as a knowledge production process and taking it operationally seriously. As a rule, these are socially complex situations and projects which, as cross-cutting issues, should integrate individual aspects of several nominal, legal and official responsibilities, competences and interests in order to realise one or more projects. In the meantime, some foundations, companies and state institutions have published concept papers and manuals for the “Reallabor” format.
Uwe Schneidewind talks about transformative literacy and thus provides a framework for the integration of the activities of university and civil society actors in model projects. Schneidewind, Uwe. 2017. “Der Umzug der Menschheit – zur Herausforderung urbaner Transformation.” Leibniz Institut für Raumbezogene Sozialforschung
For project management in Urban Design we want to propose a preliminary exercise as a project structuring rehearsel of a practice form to be explored. Even though concepts, organisational methods, communication strategies and the like are recorded in concept papers and can be applied, the staff members of the Urban Design teaching and research programme have often found that in conflict-ridden situations in which the realisation of a project is about to fail, individual, reducing and disciplining approaches to project management often prevail, as they provide a supposed simplification of the problem situation and thus a better chance of solving it. It has also been shown that the recurring negotiation about the “actual” motive of the project rarely contributes to a constructive handling of crisis situations, since actors usually attack each other directly at the level of the motive and attest to a “false” articulation of their interests by their counterparts, thus accusing them of acting stupidly.
The preliminary exercise is a medium to test aspects of a project to be realized in the next step in a contingency-reduced framework, i.e. to leave room for manoeuvre in the rehearsel in order to explore a form of practice and structure it for the future. This aspect can be described as performance related to a moment the involved actors convey what the project is all about and how to deal with individual aspects of the project. In addition, it also becomes obvious who can take on which roles in the project team with which competencies and abilities and which not, whether the project team is properly and sufficiently staffed or overstaffed. This addresses a structural level of co-production that is difficult to anticipate in a purely discursive planning, since situations that will occur in the project can only be insufficiently problematized in advance, since there is no awareness, knowledge or regulation of the practice form for dealing with potentially occurring situations in a model project. Finally, a model project should produce knowledge in and about such situations - it should be representative as well as productive for similar undone projects.
In a preliminary practice, the activities around intermediate design artefacts can be presented as social negotiation processes. Here, too, it is worthwhile for the project manager to initiate work on a minimal structure in the form of a lead sheet or a program of the preliminary practice determined by two sets of rules: changeable ones und unchangeable ones. Using the example of the two teaching formats intercultural practice Begegnungshaus Poppenbüttel and Agency Agency, the framework conditions were largely constituted by the university and the status in the asylum procedure of the refugees. Before the beginning of the seminar, the teachers had to clarify the formal aspects of the participation of refugees in the seminar and thus to ask an as yet unknown group of refugees for their participation or to provide the possibility of participation to acquaintances already made in the run-up to the seminar. In the first session all participants discussed the conditions of participation such as travel, remuneration, interest and motivation. From this, the participants realized that some of the refugees will reach their accommodation too late for the meal after attending the seminar. The university cafeteria also stopped offering food at this time. The students organized a revolving model of responsibilities for a buffet for all subsequent sessions - identifying needs, estimating costs, collecting monetary or other resources, going shopping, preparing in the seminar room, creating a buffet situation in the seminar room, doing dishes, handing over tasks to the next group.
The refugees could be registered as guest auditors at the university and thus received a certificate of attendance at the end of the seminar. During the seminar they have access to the university's facilities. Despite the positive aspects of making it possible to take part in a seminar, a certificate of attendance is only a small “remuneration”. On the part of the university no aspects in connection with it could be arranged for prospective students. Some of the refugees were in complex situations in the asylum procedure at the time of participation in the seminars. In discussions about this, valuable insights for the project planning of the participation of refugees in the first and second summer schools could be gained and accordingly further roles and competences could be identified as necessary for the project. The participants themselves were able to clarify in exchange with students and teachers whether and how a course of study is possible and could also find contacts in other forms of education and employment options. These aspects and the organisation of their problematisation also entered the project structuring phase of the project Begegnungshaus Poppenbüttel and finally led to the title Building a Proposition for Future Activities. The two seminars also created the framework for a knowledge production process, the concrete result of which was, among other things, the minimal structure of the first Summer School in three takes.
By linking generative with analytical or reflective aspects of the preliminary exercise, the performative-organisational dimension also becomes the design object of a subsequent project-structuring phase, which in turn can now be linked to the actual use/production of (the) space. Thus, data on a future aspect are produced that were not yet available to the actors at the beginning of the preliminary exercise, since they usually do not practice or rehearse their respective work in a project team, but learn and apply in their areas of competence. The documentation of the making of should be produced in the making. Audio and video recording devices, notebooks, index cards and the like can be synchronized via an index. The index then represents the relation to the introductory lead sheet and thus the basis for the display of the documentation. The documentation can be carried out in the format of a reflective review.
In the program of the exhibition "Putting Rehearsel to the Test", a group of artists will hold an editorial meeting with the aim of publishing two texts that have not yet been published. Hawkins, Anna, . 2016. Public Recordings, New Dramatics: an editorial meeting at Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen
Bachmann-Medick, Doris. 2017. “Cultural Turns: A Matter of Management?” In ReThinking Management, edited by Wendelin Küpers, Stephan Sonnenburg, and Martin Zierold, 31–55. Management – Culture – Interpretation. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16983-1_2.
Buchmann, Sabeth, Ilse Lafer, und Constanze Ruhm. 2016. Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Hinterwaldner, Inge. 2017. “Prolog. Modellhaftigkeit und Bildlichkeit in Entwurfsartefakten.” In Bildlichkeit im Zeitalter der Modellierung: Operative Artefakte in Entwurfsprozessen der Architektur und des Ingenieurwesens, edited by Sabine Ammon and Inge Hinterwaldner, 13–30. Paderborn: Verlag Wilhelm Fink.