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.
Mijatovic, Marko. 2016. “Clip: The Agency.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
In Studio
Buchholtz, Jules, Dominique Peck, und Marko Mijatovic. 2017. “Refining the Agency Agency.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
What is Agency Agency? You can think about Agency Agency as two things. On the one hand it is a building, a shop, that you can call an agency. On the other hand you can think about it as an organisational tool. It organizes all the cans (capabilities) and needs (requirements) of participants on site – in the first place refugees who have just arrived in Hamburg, who bring in knowledge and aspects we have already mentioned.
Agency Agency is supposed to bring all these cans and needs across and use them in a fruitful way, that is, that people interact and create products out of their capabilities and requirements. Agency Agency bundles all practices that occur out of the cans and needs and during the building process and employs the in the building process. These capacities – now existing in the building process – can be used by other participants. Agency Agency works with all the capacities, opportunities and forms of knowledge, that can be made use of. Those energies are being used to build Agency Agency and to create products for future customers.
Those products are diverse: it can be work, time, assistance, help, taking care of participant's children, cooking for the workers – whatever occurs during the building-process as a need or a future-product that is needed but not yet invented; which is basically anything that is considered as a need and can be created through the cans of all participants.
On the one hand Agency Agency organises all the work (Tätigkeiten), and on the other hand it is supposed to develop from a pure organisational instrument into a functioning location that monitors the future activities of the community building. It is to develop from a pure function into an edificial structure that serves the project's current needs and those of the process building a community. Essentially, the Agency Agency is both an organisational and and anticipatory tool, that addresses participants also as agents in a system, who detect and design activities and find its form respectively modes of construction. The following preliminary list of questions arises: Which activities, works and to-dos occur on a regular basis in the building process? How can those activities be collected and dessiminated to the participants? Which activities will occur once building processes are finished? Who are the participants in and outside of the community-building that shall benefit from Agency Agency? How can these future-participants be involved in the process? What are the capacities Agency Agency will have to include in the future? What are the competencies and needs of current and future participants and customers of Agency Agency? How can competencies and needs be imposed, brought into being and be designed? How can those aspects form the edificial form of an Agency Agency? What will Agency Agency, considered as a shop to generate activity, look like? What could be an accurate but versatile form of archiving regular and future missions for Agency Agency?
Buchholtz, Jules, Dominique Peck, und Marko Mijatovic. 2017. “agere.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
agere is Latin for “to do, to act, to perform, to bargain.” The intercultural research project Agency Agency aimed to identify and enable options of being active, doing and taking action for refugees in Hamburg. It was scheduled as a format finding process, based on refugees’ necessities and everyday concerns – as much their cans and needs in the situation of just having arrived in Hamburg. The participants were asked to take part in a mutual conceptional process that aimed to create both, an A) edificial structure to contain the agency and B) as a tool to organize actions in order to realise a Community Building, which itself contains an Agency Agency and is a format of activity. The Agency Agency is an organisational tool. It will develop out of the cans and needs of all participants and lies at the heart of the building process.
Buchholtz, Jules, Dominique Peck, und Marko Mijatovic. 2017. “Organizing Agency Agency.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
We can now talk about organizing Agency Agency. Agency Agency also worked as a structual and organizational instrument for the guidance and planning of actions during the process of establishing the community building. Any action, beginning with food-supply, making coffee, purchasing and rendering material, has to have a starting point and needs to be organized. In cultural contexts participants are with some right usually referred to as actors, especially when the focus lies on projects of activation and participation. But are human actors identical with personal entities? Although the term seems adequate, it is in a certain sense not sufficient to describe the full spectrum of being active that comes into focus. Being an actor implies to fulfill a plan, act out a scenario or script and follow defined rules of the game. In a context, in which the rules of a game have to yet be discovered and to some extent created, neither the term actors nor a the familiar alternative, players, seems to be sufficient, as the setting is not known; neither are the rules of the game, nor can its progress be predicted.
In case of aiming at the enabling of acitivity itself, inscribing individual activities into events inside already existing every-day practices – as it is the case once you want to build a new community building inside an already existing community or neighbourhood - the actions taken, differ from what an actor is usually busy with.
Hence, for the project the term agent seemed to be appropriate as it stresses the somewhat detecting activities, people undertake in the process. Most important though, in its pronunctiantion of activity (lat.: agere) it referrs to Hannah Arendts very simple and thus quite handy understanding of vividness and being active.
Exams
Explain the title Agency Agency and illustrate your thinking!
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Reveal answers
Agency Agency is a duplication, an artistic and linguistic practice similar to imitation and emulation. In the context of the project Building a Proposition for Future Activities it is used, because it guides attention to the uncertainties in organisational practices or matching of cans and needs.