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.
Peck, Dominique, Marko Mijatovic, Christopher Dell, Rebecca Wall, Kristin Guttenberg and Bernd Kniess. 2018. Transposition 1. Discussion. Project vs. Project Days. Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Peck, Dominique, Marko Mijatovic, Christopher Dell, Rebecca Wall, Kristin Guttenberg and Bernd Kniess. 2018. Transposition 1. Conception. Use, Performance and Function. Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Peck, Dominique, Marko Mijatovic, Nina Riewe, Christopher Dell, Rebecca Wall and Bernd Kniess. 2018. Transposition 1. Lunch Lecture. Reenactment. Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Peck, Dominique, Marko Mijatovic, Christopher Dell, Rebecca Wall, Kristin Guttenberg and Bernd Kniess. 2018. Transposition 1. Bringing the Open Form into Play. Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related content
Performance
Coproduction
Reflective Review
Interviews
Conception
From disciplines to disciplining
The evening before
Rules of Play
Open Form
Mediators
Project Archaeology
About related content
Performance
Performance assembles three characteristics of practice:
a. Mediality
b. Modality
c. Materiality and temporality
Vortrag von Dieter Mersch im Plenum I zu Relationalem Raum//Wahrnehmung//Vergegenwärtigung im Rahmen des Sypmosiums Performative Urbanism - generating and designing urban space am Samstag, 20. Juli 2013, in der Schaustelle der Pinakothek der Moderne.
a. Mediality
Actions depend on execution. Although this is a banal notion to make, it unfolds the complex and contingent aspects of performance and reveals that actions rely on media. Furthermore, actions take place with an actor as referent and this actor’s faculties (embodied skills) and normative forces. Both, media and actors need and take the performance of action – a manifestation or intervention in the world. Dieter Mersch (2013, 40) has assembled this in the argument that ‘the action is the praxis and performance is its coming into the world’.
Artist Milo Rau and Philosopher Juliane Rebentisch discuss the term ‘enactment’ and ‘re-enactment’ as artistic practice and its political capacities.
b.
The performance speaks of the how of the enactment, the performance of actions. There is no performance without its enactment. Following this assumption, the proposition is to look for an existing vector in action(s), which is specified in performance and thus produces modes of actions, which, thus again, reveals different modes of realising – giving form or design.
Documentation of a discussion held at Thomas Dane Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition ‘New York to London and Back - The Medium of Contingency’
c.
The e-learning arrangement Basics: Project Management in Urban Design focused on the doingness aspects (P L A Y) of project management. Consequently, in its sequels we focus on materiality and temporality of project management’s modes of realising. How do we (playfully) introduce modes of realising to contingency?
What is of interest for this project is the notion that all actions are related to situative contingencies. The normative forces of actions need enactments, however, every enactment is an iteration, with the possibility to fail. This renders two aspects visible: 1. The basic provisionality of actions, and 2. The embeddedness of actions in social contexts (the social as in Latour’s 2007 Re-Assembling the Social, yet with a focus on labour (Wark 2017). This ultimately reveals the transformative forces of actions. Walking the talk entails the promise of liberating actions from the necessities and the possibilities of a shift and the creation of potential structures ahead of us.
Coproduction
Today’s foundational conceptualisation of coproduction was developed by a group of researchers at Indiana University and The University of North Carolina in the late 1970s. The group’s work aimed to better understand increasing crime rates in Chicago after police officers policing neighbourhoods were displaced from walking the sidewalks to behind the steering wheels of police cars. “Coproduction involves a mixing of the productive efforts of regular and consumer producers” (Parks et al. 1981, 1002). The pertinent aspect opening up the issue of coproduction is the research group’s notion that coproduction is often overlooked or met with turned up noses by “regular” service providers – organised bureaus and firms and public administrators – yet attributed an increasing importance “due to fiscal pressures and partly due to evidence regarding the inefficacy of their own unaided efforts (ibid., 1001).” Policing is not without reason the main topic in the 1970s study. A rising number of neighbourhood watch groups, corruption and myopic policing strategies sparked a general debate on cities and crime in the United States and the transformation of urban governance in what later would be described as the early days and sites of neoliberalisation. In today’s words: The research group argued for a situational analysis of urban governance focusing on relations across hypothetical dichotomies in order to build problem solving approaches from there rather than based on simplistic models.
Among them was later Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, who continued to reflect on the issue in her scholarly activities. Her revised concept refers to coproduction as the “process through which inputs used to produce a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not ‘in’ the same organization” (Ostrom 1996, 1073). This concept met harsh criticisms from public administration purists – mainly because between the lines, Ostrom’s work seeks to uncover that purity in the understanding of economic action between public and private, market and state or government and civil society is counterproductive if not violent. She kept insisting that removing artificial walls surrounding (false) dichotomies with the aim of changing the views of social sciences towards the hypothetical “Great Divide” was in fact necessary in order to draw a more complex picture of the actual events. Ostrom empirically analyses the realisation processes of major social and technical infrastructure projects with a focus on coproduction as capacity to constructively process operational challenges. “No market can survive without extensive public goods provided by governmental agencies. No government can be efficient and equitable without considerable input from citizens. Synergetic outcomes can be fostered to a much greater extent than our academic barriers have let us contemplate” (Ostrom 1996, 1083). Ostrom’s late work on the management of commons frequently revisits the early work on coproduction with the aim to organise the interplay of a heterogenous set of actors through a variety of means. Her work is commonly part of research, teaching and practice projects in spatial and infrastructure planning, amongst others. There, problematising coproduction promises to re-gain an apparently disappearing knowledge of how the actual events (ought to) unfold in space. In urban development, increasing complexity on a number of levels and dimensions (such as planning and building as well as environmental laws, institutional actors and their inter-relations and responsibilities, construction techniques, compartmentalisation) is diagnosed as loss of control and of overview, leading to the perception of a crisis of the planning and designing disciplines (Zimmermann 2017). However, a loss of control and overview only appears from the perspectivation of the actual events through well-established nominal responsibilities. Are there cases of Ostrom’s original problematisation of coproduction in architectural education? Is there a similar “Great Divide” hypothetically and in fact drawing the line between what is possible and what is not?
Reflective Review
Focus-group-like discussions in planning processes are everywhere. Typical formats include inquiry colloquiums, public discussions, round tables, jury meetings, thematic workshops, markets of possibilities etc. All of these formats are planned discussions using a variety of modes of representation of states of projects to review the processing of a particular topic or (set) of milestones with the aim to learn about assessments and their effects for future projections. Classic conceptualisations of the focus group address the individual in public discourse and/or the opinion of a group. “Compared to other survey types, the biggest advantage of the group discussions is that they can work out collective orientations, so to speak. Only in conversation one sees oneself compelled to call one's own opinion and assert one’s arguments, by which deeper attitudes and a larger range of reactions come to light. The mutual influence of the participants and that between the moderator and the members of the group, which is regarded as a disturbing variable in standardized procedures, is a constituent part of the procedure in group discussions (Vogl 2014, 582).”
Recently, study programmes like Social Design, Urban Design and Architecture with a focus on Live Projects have transposed concepts and formats of group discussions from social and cultural sciences. The Handbook for Live Projects by the Sheffield School of Architecture defines the reflective review as a detailed, round-table exploration of the project with the project management and another reviewer where the project management has time to focus upon the processes of the project as well as its outcomes.
The reflective review is assessed on the basis of
The effectiveness the project’s organisational structure in relation to the project’s motive and the quality of design work carried out.
The appropriateness and creativity of any format used during the process
A reflection on oppositions, limitations and possibly better modes of realising the project
A reflection on wider implications of the project’s lessons learned in general and scopes of application represented by members of the project’s stakeholders in particular.
Project management in Urban Design is a set of practices unfolding in a variety of settings. Delicate issues are often discussed in private, or with a limited set of actors in a back-room setting. Reflective reviews present a ‘public’ setting for discussion and thus are able to make the explication of knowledge production processes available for discussion. The project manager must be aware of different roles enacted during the reflective review. These include: the moderator, the influencer, the opinion leader, the expert in a bubble, the generalist, the punk, the dummy, the reviewer and the projector.
Conduct
Openness is not arbitrariness. Here, similar to interviews, a briefing will be appreciated by all people and things related to the conduct of a reflective review. In relation to the briefing a guide is key to a prolific process of conducting a reflective review. Both formats function a facilitator between all actors to be included and the knowledge interest in a particular situation of a project.
Reflective reviews with a group of people are no shortcut compared to interviews with individuals. The organisation, transcription and analysis of a reflective reviews needs diligent researchers, assistants and production and post-production crew members.
Data privacy and protection
If research projects include the collection, processing or use of personal data, the rights of data subjects and in particular their right to informational self-determination must also be taken into account in a proportionate manner. An insight into the data protection principles in Germany can be found in the privacy policy of the Council for Social and Economic Data (RatSWD).
Interviews
Every interview is an opportunity to collect information and an impro-drama with an unfolding plot (Hermanns 2000). This impro-drama is actively and relationally produced by all participants; however, the interviewer is confronted with a special design task in relation to the project’s general interplay, the project’s motive and its past and future.
Pitfalls are most likely to appear because, …
• the conduct of doing interviews is vague; in particular so in urban design projects, which can be described as liminary organisations operating in, across and beyond established practices. The interviewer/project manager does not own a Babel Fish.
Babel Fish - The Oddest Thing In The Universe - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - BBC
• This vagueness is problematic, because the expectations of the interview to make a substantial contribution to the research project are high
• The dilemma ubiquitous in project management in Urban Design, of course, also plays a role in the process of conducting interviews: (self-)representation. The interviewer may not be able to represent him/herself as informed as s/he considers himself about the knowing-how and knowing-why of the project in order to conduct the interview. The task to collect information and the crucial thematic interest of the interview may even be in opposition to a fair process of conducting the interview with the interviewee.
Interviews as action: research-practical aspects
In projects in Urban Design interviewees are often project partners and thus will appreciate your professional approach to gain, prolong or rebuild their trust during particular project phases.
Before the interview – Access to the field and selection of interviews
• Specify issues and research interests, and use/translate methods, tools and theories relationally
• “Acquire” interviewees
The project Begegnungshaus Poppenbüttel is a model project funded by the Hamburg Parliament. Active stakeholders of the different operative and decision-making levels may secretly seek or even openly articulate the wish for return of investment of resources such as attention, money, labor, knowledge etc. from interviews and a positive representation of the interview in the project’s documentation/evaluation. A clearly organized, communicated and approved research concept will support, but not guarantee a fair and sound process of conducting interviews. The professional project manager in Urban Design must be able to operate in a setting in which all active stakeholders are experts in their own right and field and may not refrain from transgressing fields of competence.
• Arrange times, spaces and topics for the series of interviews
• Design productive interview settings. Semi-structured questions and a well-functioning infrastructure can be very conducive once the impro-drama unfolds as well as in post-production
• Agree on the use of a recording device (audio and/or video) including all pertinent declarations and information about archiving capacities
• Ethics is key
All work done before the interview must offer the interviewee a crystal–clear understanding of his/her role to enable the production of knowledge. We recommend doing this in the form of a briefing, which typically answers the following questions:
• What is at issue? Clearly explain your interest and rationale of the interview, outline themes
• How is the production process organized and what happens with the produced material?
• What is the (spatial) setting? Where is the interview conducted?
• Who conducts the interview?
• Who is present during the interview?
Qualitative interviews are typically conducted in an everyday space of the interviewee with the intention to best represent his/her situation. However, if a particular setting or plot – a walk around a construction site, looking at media – might appear more reasonable, the interviewer should feel free to arrange for alternative settings.
• How long is the interview going to be?
Time capacities in late capitalism are notoriously scarce. Interviews can last from 30 minutes up to an afternoon. Issues around transcription, translation, varying capacities for articulation, willingness to communicate, preparation etc. may have effects on the duration of the interview, so it is helpful to mock interview a friend or colleague to gain a sense of how the questions work and how long the interview approximately takes.
During the interview
• Set the stage
• Make room for not one, but multiple roles enacted by the interviewer and the interviewee. Someone who works for an employer acts in the interests of the employer, but also "the cause", his career, according to what the media or his social environment says and so on. These are partly overlapping and not always converging roles. Of interest here is a difference between what the interviewees say they have done and what they have actually done.
• Develop and maintain a professional position in the setting. Sharing specific positions must not be complicit, disagreement must not be hostile. Put yourself in a position to hear and bear any statement.
• Empathy and naivety are a slight control you may employ to illustrate matters of course and their respective meanings in relation to the process of the interview
After the interview
Project Management in Urban Design operationalises analyses techniques from grounded theory.
Research Methods. Qualitative analysis of interview data
We are documenting interviews using a video camera operated by a camera man or woman. He or she is not only responsible for the proper operation of his/her gear and the production of the material, but, in order to do so, must manage the interviewee’s position in and relation to the setting or spatial display. If this is not managed properly it might affect the interviewee’s disposition to talk and thus could render the interviews useless in relation to the project’s motive. Here the interviewer and/or the camera man or woman can make use of capacities entailed in the videos production processes. Videos are typically produced in takes and put together in the editing room following the interview. The interviewer and/or the cameraman can indicate that the interviewee can speak with ease and use colloquial spoken language. The initially agreed briefing must entail a statement about ethics as a matter of postproduction.
Werner Herzog interviews Hank Skinner - Death Row Conversations
Werner Herzog is aware of the numerous intermediaries of an interview. The videos of his portraits of prison inmates reveal the situation of the interviewees and the related circumstances of the interviews. In this series, Herzog works along the question of whether the prison inmates should be executed. The content of this question is far removed from project management, but it is meant to represent the display and understanding of ethical aspects in projects. For example, interviews on the accommodation and housing practices of refugees may very well deal with deportation, terror or similar issues. Herzog's interview series is meant to stand for the fact that through interviews we can learn about aspects of how individual actors’ worldview is related to others.
The above outlined aspects and more render the knowing-how of conducting interviews as part of an urban design project and thus as part of the repertoire required to produce spatial displays of knowledge production that communicate the intended modes of representation as being ‘in the air’.
Conception
This text problematizes how and where conceptional practice in project management takes place and references methods, tools, theories and discourses pertinent for Project Management in Urban Design’s Play methodology.
What’s what: conceptional practice in go to Project Management literature
The internationalization of project management standards follows the promise of installing and maintaining quality in business processes. Comments on project phase 0: project genesis or conception, call for project managers to actively promote coordination and decision-making processes. “In this context, the obligations of the client or liabilities of the project manager must be clearly and unequivocally clarified and contractually established as early as possible” (AHO e.V. 2006, 23). However, Abram and Weszkalnys (2013) have shown that this is never a flawless process. Consequently, practices such as moderation, mediation and facilitation are occasionally important (and in regards to project finances considered priceless) during project conception and, sometimes, phases of re-conception. The difference between concept and actual object enables the negotiation of meaning. What it means to live, work or relax today is highly dependent on socially, culturally, economically and historically specific circumstances. The same goes for meanings of intimate vs. public, home vs. shelter, expensive vs. low-budget, modern vs. historic. Rules, regulations and professional ideas and perception equally vary depending on specific contexts. Consequently, project management must actively enable conceptual practice in projects. “The conception of the project is the basis of the decision-making process of the client and thus of further joint action with the project manager and other project participants” (AHO e.V. 2006, 24). All pertinent information for the project conception must be assembled and displayed consistently and clearly. This includes the project’s goal(s) and motif, the identifiable project elements and relations in the project’s operationalizations and operations. “It is important to describe the expected impact of all project elements relevant to the fulfilment of the project objectives for the purpose of meeting the demand” (ibid).
Criticism and horizons
Project management language and its operationalizations have become subject to criticism for being meaningless, universalizing and thus anti-worldly (Easterling 2014). At the same time scholars in urban studies more and more frequently undertake efforts of readdressing key-concepts of their own practice and, in the case of Stuart Hall or Colin McFarlane (see video below), have aimed to reposition conceptional practices beyond the “enclave” of urban theory with the promise of a worldlier conceptual practice (Zeiderman 2018).
"How we go about theorizing global urbanism matters and should be debated; but our debates are not separate from a world in which people everywhere are asking and answering both global and urban questions. … It must not be allowed to drown empirically grounded scholarship that pays close attention to the social lives of concepts like the “urban” and the “global”, and the work they do in the world. (11)"
McFarlane, Colin. 2018. “No Title Obtainable.” In [Re]Form: New Investigations in Urban Form. Harvard GSD.
Zeiderman tells the story of what happened when the field of anthropology experienced a similar crisis to the one urban studies appears to currently be in. Some anthropologists …
“accepted that the theoretical question of defining (and defending) the ‘culture’ concept was perhaps less important than the ways in which the concept was being defined (and defended) far beyond the pages of their academic journals. These anthropologists relinquished their professional claims to conceptual ownership and got on with the task of understanding how ‘culture’ was being constituted and contested out in the world. (10)”
The world’s most intellectual architecture practice (🙃) argued in a similar fashion in their book/exhibition Content (see video below).
“Languages grow and mutate as any other complex system does, with the occasional nod to Darwin and a tip of the cap to the Reaper. … Let the following antiglossary impeach a few terms that have decayed to the point they stagger zombielike and even pestilent, across the toughtscape of the profession. (88)”
In manifesto-like fashion, OMA argues for a relational conceptual practice, where positions and thus authorship claims are provisional. Such a practice contains the promise of coproduction across disciplines, statuses and stakes in a project.
Content
“If a building or building-idea or book has content, conveys content, disseminates content, then it is a container: in other words, it is close to nothing. It is certainly no organism, nothing with signs of life. It is defined by its empty capacity, like the massive nondescript atrium of the Hotel Interchangeable, the space designed to impress rather than to live give life. Artists lost something when the market made them content providers. OMA offers its Content and its content under full and cognizant erasure. We stress, again, that this list [of terms and definitions] is an act of impeachment, not conviction: authority in language belongs to the open forum, not the self-appointed arbiters. And, having sounded an awakening bugle-blast, we’re more than content to let reveille turn into jazz, step aside for someone else’s solo, and the let the cleansing jam session begin. (91)”
Koolhaas, Rem. 2004. “Content.” AA School of Architecture, Februar 17.
Can what seems to be a horizon for scholars in urban studies and (intellectual) architectural practices provide remedy for Project Management?
The transposition of go to project management literature into Urban Design’s Play methodology renders differences in the worldliness of conceptual practices visible. While go to project management literature positions the above described necessities of conceptual practices in phase 0 and thus at the very beginning of a project, Urban Design’s Play methodology includes a conceptual practice in the phase How to Play which follows Coming into Play and precedes Play and Understanding the Play. This takes into account that projects never occur ex nihilo but are grounded into an unfolding existing situation. In relation to Actor-Network Theory this can be grasped as
“a decidedly empirical understanding of ethnography, which bases conceptual practices on empirical observations and descriptions and wants to make empirical phenomena [and actors] speak for themselves, without reducing them to certain [a priori] concepts, while at the same time being aware of their own situation, including their description (Wieser 2012, 115).”
Project management is not ethnography, yet in Urban Design’s Play methodology, these network-assembling or field-configuring practices termed “tracing” – remember ANT’s great heuristic maxim Follow the actors! – offers a prolific operationalisation for conceptual practices transpositioning aspects from Coming into Play into How to Play where project managers are called to generate and find integrative motifs in projects.
“Politics” as assembled by Actor-Network Theory in relation to the problematisation of the urban.Kien, Grant. 2017. “Actor network Theory: machines and authority.” Serious Science, August 10.
Conceptual practices in a project public setting go hand in hand with the allocation of work packages and responsibilities across current and future project partners. In some cases, this may result in project partners experiencing personal or even departmental futility or overloads and a priori positioning practices by powerful or claiming to be powerful actors and concomitant Conceptual practices – think the never-ending debate of public vs. private in the allocation of provision of services such as housing, health care or education or “race” in Stuart Hall’s or “density” in Colin McFarlane’s work cited at the beginning of this text.
Can ANT’s “tracing” approach be transposed into a conceptual practice, which circumvents a priori and thus often dead end and myopic concepts? Schüttelpeltz (2008, 239) argues that “the ANT’s weaker theory disposition of a mere heuristic is better equipped than all the stronger theories and histories in its operationalization [of conceptual practice], for it deprives the ontological soil of the asymmetrical association of causes and consequences. For Project Management in Urban Design and the transposition of Coming into Play into How to Play this means that every disciplining strategy goes hand in hand with an opportunity of enabling.
“Conceptual practices in project management are concluded with a proposal for a decision, which clearly describes and justifies whether and which options for action can be considered under the projected framework for meeting the requirements. In the case of complex projects, it can be expected that individual project goals or their weighting will change considerably in the course of the search for the most favorable solution for meeting the requirements [– How to Play]. The proposed decision ends with the recommendation for the further procedure, if necessary after previous iterations [– Understanding the Play]” (AHO e.V. 2006, 24f). Here again and again – after completed iterations of all phases of the Play methodology: Coming into Play, How to Play, Play and Understanding the Play – the question is whether the previous work results allow a follow-up of the project in its current and projected framework conditions.
How do you actually practice conceptual practice?
We have already stated that due to the vagueness of “concepts” in project management, complex projects often call for moderation, mediation and/or facilitation when conceptual practice comes into play. The basis of these practices and professionals performing them is that project-based work and its management always require media. Media here signifies everything that has necessary mediation agency: artefacts (Gantt Charts, architecture models), gestures, clothes, demeanor, things (door closers), complex systems Aramis. Media only become media in operational use. ANT's anti-reductionist heuristic makes it possible to empirically trace organizational processes with media by exploring how actors mediate, communicate, i.e. get together, negotiate and translate.
Résumé
The first paragraph of this text contains references to scholarly work that has shown that the current problematization of the situatedness and the horizon of conceputal practice in urban studies signifies an interest to go to the knowledge of actors. The second paragraph outlines a decidedly intellectual architectural practice and a reference to jazz in order move forward in an open forum style conceptual practice. Both are more about care and affection than about profits and self-worth maximization. Go to project management literature encourages project managers to actively move forward with conceptual practices during different stages of project management. The following aspects are often relevant:
• Translate between colloquiual and highly specific languages, keep relations traceable for all actors in the project. Babbling about standards and the ways we have always done it is too often accepted unquestioned. How things unfold in space over time entails contingency.
• Make use of the volatile attention span in open forum discussions, be prepared and on point, let the forum do the work, no project is a solo show, trust the intelligence of the forum while understanding that powerful actors will try to manipulate discussions according to their motif.
• Take great care about the documentation and communication of conceptual practice. At best, locate the documenation and communication in a forum like situation. Documentations produced in retrospect to the actual conceptual practice often entail a breath of bias.
• Be transparent about the framework, consequences and project relations of a particular conceptual practice. Outline future possibilities and necessities to revisit the results or interim results of a particular conceptual practice.
• Trust your own methodology! It’s design and realisation will have significant impact on the project’s success. Keller Easterling (2018) has forwarded a similar line of argumentation in her synoptical publication Medium Design. Medium Design is a process of creating a set of interdependent actions, whether it is a protocol, a switch, or an interplay. “It’s a creation of chemistries, chain reactions, and ratchets,” writes Easterling. “It is less like making a thing and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of organization.” She often compares medium design to playing pool, “where knowing about one fixed sequence of shots is of little use. But being able to see branching networks of possibilities allows you to add more information to the table and make the game more robust" (Zolotoev and Gromova 2018).
Easterling, Keller. 2017. “Medium Design.” The New Normal Showcase, Mosow, October 9.
From disciplines to disciplining
We propose to further develop operational challenges in knowledge production through the concept of disciplining mo(ve)ments. The concept was developed by Tom Holert (2012) in his writings on forms of cooperation in the project-based Polis. Transposed into the problematization of coproduction, disciplining mo(ve)ments occur through de-regulation and networking in the form of projects and appear when positionality is performed as countering viable modes of realizing projects, i.e we can speak of disciplining mo(ve)ments when different understandings of specific project phases or tasks lead to conflict and lead to necessary reiterations of everyone’s understanding of the project.
Working in interdisciplinary teams, or across any other theoretical divide, requires mutual understanding of disciplinary languages and the disposition to communicate. The operationalization of such mutual understandings more often than not relies on trust and an acknowledgement of reciprocity in the process. We have already written about 4P-like projects and programs such as Learning from Las Vegas, co-production or Everyday Urbanism elsewhere in this e-learning arrangement ‘project management in urban design’. We therefore know that both the emerging and existing urban mo(ve)ments are ambivalent: While disciplines enable structurally coherent arguments and perspectives, these must not be confused with structure. What needs to be addressed may not always fall within the scope of existing disciplines, competence and/or budgets of existing organizations and/or actors. The processing of complex dispositions of actors and organizations is a pedagogical and managerial challenge for present and future urban professionals.
Operationalising a concern with the urban
Urban Design at HCU Hamburg as practiced and taught is a relationally interdisciplinary undertaking that – while taking seriously architecture’s promises and problems – aims less at a projected future design (without excluding this option) and instead is more concerned with understanding the coming into being of specific situations, sites and settings and the more or less arbitrary powers that contribute to their existence. It is also transdisciplinary as the team and students work with actors and institutions across and outside of academia. Research, teaching and practice are understood as triad; research and teaching are practiced as much as informed by praxis while practice in turn draws from knowledge produced through research activity and conversely feeds back into teaching. The program speaks to Latour’s notion of ‘matters of concern’ (2004). The concern with the urban – its matters of concern – is motivated by the recognition that we need to understand the conditions under which the architecture of the urban – as opposed to architecture as product alone – is (co-)produced. The urban as relational whole concerns us, it is our motif and engagement with it is a matter of concern and form. Christopher Dell picks up Jacques Rancière’s notion of “scopic regimes” that deserves unpicking: What regulates our modes of seeing, reading and producing the urban and how do we communicate these often implicit agencies?
A major motif for urban design overall is to consider how planning interacts with and intervenes into the world under the premise that the production of (urban) space takes place on all scales and cannot be reduced to one disciplinary or scalar perspective given that disciplines and scales themselves are socially constructed and represent transmission belts of organizing the everyday. In this vein, the existing city can be seen as an assemblage of previous and ongoing interventions and future vectors, including plans and contingencies each informed by specific truths or norms. In fact, the research and teaching program Urban Design attempts to open up various scales and perspectives so as to re-assemble different, sometimes conflicting, versions of one reality in their having-becomeness so as to unlock hidden potentials. Led by emerging, yet specific and iteratively developed motifs and relating these individual motifs to urban questions at large as well as issues arising from personal and broader interests, research activities are concerned with both retrospection and projection. The study departs from a deep analysis of a given situation in the now and here (or there) with a view to produce knowledge about common, alternative and new understandings of possible ways to influence particular vectors and possibilities. This approach is a disciplined undertaking in that it is clearly rooted in and drawing on the established disciplines (from which students and staff are recruited) and (at least minimally) structured in its process, while simultaneously disturbing a mono-disciplinary and object-centered approach by working with open form(at)s.
Contemporary planning regulations and regimes disturb or even block the proposed engagement of working with an open form in a minimal structure. Real Politik, legal requirements as well as institutional and managerial resources and responsibilities, often interfere with alternative ways of handling contingency and complexity. Returning to the initial arena in the project Building a Proposition for Future Activities that started with the request for a rendering and turned into a full-fledged model project supported by the city’s integration fund, the various actors involved in the building site proceed according to their schedules and routines, which makes it difficult for an academic team to keep up and take part in organizing and designing the process. Adding to this, the disturbance of schedules and routines is definitely not something that large city agencies and building companies are embracing enthusiastically. Notwithstanding the welcoming of cheap student labor and skilled people who officially figure as “refugees” rather than concrete workers, architects or civil engineers, the participatory planning and construction process proposed by the Urban Design Team as a result of their engagement with forced migration, housing, self-construction, transformation processes and low-budget urbanity has disrupted the situation, even if from another perspective it appears to be disciplined.
Although such draw backs were not new to the Urban Design team, excessive demands in terms of time spent with the project and on site, the organization and preparation of further steps as well as the clearly emerging contradictory interests of involved partners considerably stretched academic members of staff and students alike. Some turns and twists of the ongoing efforts to realize coproduction across hypothetical small and great divides (rather than “just” designing and constructing the building) point to the fundamental contradictions of the urban as practiced. It remains to be seen how the project proceeds, yet these contradictions and conflicts manifest the kind of learning from current urbanism that we need to push further so as to productively re-assemble spatial practices in ways that enhance the coproduction of knowledge.
Note: Individual aspects and ideas of this contribution were first presented at the Architecture Connects conference at Oxford Brookes University and are currently in the process of being reviewed by academics at the time of publication.
The evening before
The three members of On/Off arrive at my home the Sunday before the Summer School Kickoff on the following Tuesday. One sleeps on my couch, one on one of my co-worker's, the third comes directly to the construction site.
A few weeks ago we met in my apartment to discuss the concept of the workshop leader's performance profile. On/Off are former employees of the Berlin office Raumlabor. In the planning of the Summer School, we, at the Urban Design teaching and research programme acting as process control, spoke about a selection of offices, which could play on the extensive range of services rendered by the workshop management. When we were looking for suitable offices, the team already knew that around 60 people would participate in the Summer School. 40% refugess, 40% international students, 10% neighbours and 10% trade students of the Gewerbeschule Bautechnik G19. The task for the workshop leader was to develop, design, partially test and produce the minimal structure of the project days, which took place on 8 and 9 September 2017.
In the first meeting in my living room one of the three On/Off employees came with his girlfriend. Both were on vacation in Hamburg one day and agreed to take an hour for the meeting. I presented the lead sheet of the project days, explained the motif, the conception, the actors and their role and individual core concepts such as minimal structure, storage of things and the rules of the project days. The On/Off employee could easily follow everything and noted down initial questions and sketches for later consultation with his colleagues about whether they could and would like to work in this way. Finally, I submitted the budget proposal. We were negotiating the payment of the travel costs, as all three employees would come from different projects in different countries and had to travel directly to the Summer School and then return to the projects afterwards. A few days after the first meeting, we were able to formalize On/Off's positive response to our offer in the form of a procurement contract at the university. In addition, On/Off provided a list of materials and tools, which we coordinated with the client and ordered from the building materials trade store.
Back to Sunday: We all go to an Asian restaurant opposite the Hamburger Messehallen for dinner. Afterwards we discuss the course of the coming days and the previous project genesis with some beers. Back at my place, I fold down the couch, fetch the sheets from the cupboard, provide a bottle of water, and say good night to one of the three employees.
The next day we take the subway to HafenCity University. I just bring everyone to the office and introduce Rebecca Wall and Marius Töpfer, our tutors. Rebecca and me make our way to a nearby car rental station, where we pick up a Mercedes transporter and a slightly larger Iveco transporter. We drive back to the university and park in front of the underground car park. From here on our paths separate. Rebecca and Marius drive to the Hamburg material administration and fetch there the props for the storage of things or the project days. I drive with the On/Off Team in the direction of Poppenbütteler Berg. After 40 minutes we arrive on site and are amazed at the size of the 400 m2 party tent in which the project days will take place. We take over the party tent and the office, accommodation, toilets and shower containers. The interior of the kitchen container is late. The tools will be delivered tomorrow. The fuse box will cause problems. When the showers are running, the fuse blows. Probably we will have to take a cold shower. The project manager of f & w fördern und wohnen offers us to go to a hotel, the costs would be covered. We think briefly, but reject due to tomorrow's kickoff of the workshop. We plan to welcome 60 people with breakfast from 9.00 a.m. and have to buy groceries and set up before. So we stay in the container village and search for a restaurant in the neighbourhood. This is not so easy in Poppenbüttel. Since we don't want to go to Schweinske or to a pizzeria, we walk to the only Syrian restaurant in the district. The shop looks like an upscale restaurant on the outskirts of the city. Everything is furnished with high-quality materials from the DIY store. People wear suits, polo shirts, dresses with leather jackets on top. Not the best choice, but the employee greets us very friendly. She has a piercing on her left eyebrow and is not from Syria, but somewhere in Eastern Europe. She notices that we are not from here and asks us the obligatory question “Where are you from?” handing over the menus. Canada, Czech Republic, Austria, three times Germany, we work here on the construction site of the planned refugee accommodation. “Ok, nice to have you”. We all order the cheapest dish with 14€ on the menu Ratatouille with couscous and a bottle of sparkling water. The four full forks taste great. We pay only a little later because we want to get some beer and something to eat from Penny. Equipped with rolls, drinks and Toffifee we sit in the atrium of the container village on the benches of the first Summer School and finish the last things for tomorrow. The On/Off's write starchitect names on the doors of the containers. The containers are each equipped with three beds. They have two windows, a door, a small entrance zone, metal beds with mattresses, cushions and bed covers. Everything here. The light doesn't work. The heating does not work. We don't have electricity for the mobile router. The fuse is out and it always jumps out as soon as we put it back in. Ok, no matter. Tomorrow it starts. Quickly into the Rem Koolhaas container into bed and then up at 6:30.
The first participants arrive on time with the technician for the fusebox. Photo: Dominique Peck, 5.9.2017, CC BY-SA 4.0
Rules of Play
Hannah Arendt names spatial framing as the substantial prerequisite for the realisation of all actions. “Before the action itself could even begin, a limited space had to be completed and secured within which the actors could then appear: the space of the public sphere of the polis” (Arendt 2016). A large tent measuring twenty by twenty metres served as the spatial framing for the project days. The size of the tent corresponded to the dimensions of the permissible building window of the future meeting house. The tent was situated on the south-western part of the building site. This position had already proved to be a convenient contact point for the neighbourhood during the Summer School 2016. The tent stood opposite the Support Structure built during the previous summer and was visible from all sides due to transparent sheeting. During the preparatory days called Setting the Stage, the participants had already built a ramp so that the slightly higher wooden platform could be comfortably reached.
On the right side of the entrance there was a wooden display on which the playing rules could be read in large letters, printed on DIN A4 sheets:
1) The performance facilitator names the rules, watches over them and advises on their compliance.
2) Each session contains one action in a group, in one place, according to one rule.
3) The pitch is limited to the area of the tent.
4) The playing field is the place for action.
5) Everyone acts as an individual and in a collective.
6) Everyone has three roles: sender, receiver, observer.
7) Choose a group. A group constitutes a place.
8) Stay in the group you have chosen for the duration of one play session. Contribute to the group as long as it makes sense to you. As soon as this changes, ask yourself: a) What does it need in the team? b) Am I required somewhere else in the field?
9) Each group respects the duration of the session, which is determined by the performance facilitator.
Onlooker-rule: Whoever enters the field is part of the play.
The rules formulated here make the first attempt to structurally frame the actions on the formally empty playing field. These rules thus set the first organizational frameworks for the improvisational actions. Speaking of rules and framings, introduces the distinction between the open and the closed form into the design of the planning process.
Open Form
Dell, Christopher, Dominique Peck, Bernd Kniess, and Marko Mijatovic. 2017. “Open Form.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0
As a person interested in managing urban design projects, you will most likely be aware of the distinction between the city as a passive and controllable matter - the closed form - and the city as a contemporary and future urban society in the practice forms of co-production and permanent reproduction - an approach to the city as an open form.
Since this differentiation has far-reaching consequences but is easily overlooked and misinterpreted, I would like to illustrate this key aspect of project management in urban design as a regime of practices of living with and in projects.
We begin with the relationship between epistemology and ontology. The epistemology of space at the general level deals with the nature and extent of knowledge about space. This concern is closely intertwined with the ontology of space, since the “what” - the vision of the occurrence and definition of something - can be difficult to separate from the “how” - the way we get to know the “what” (Hollis 1994). This relationship between the “what” and the “how” of space is not fixed, but is constantly evolving (Massey 2005).
The epistemological possibilities of open form are encountered in dealing with form. The source of knowledge - how and why - does not lie in the pure aesthetics of form, but in the relationships between form and material. It is the aesthetic of open form that undermines the reduction of form to its naked product when it mobilizes and supports a process that deals with its potential values. These are composed of material constellations of a situation and thus give the appearance of a form. We can only call the form an open form if we can ensure the mobilization and continuous support of a process. Project management in the field of urban development aims to reunite knowledge - how and why - in the relationships of actors and situations in the process.
Project work must address the problem of the disappearance of the process behind the product. Therefore, as an integral part of project management in urban design, research not only aims to educate the designer about the city, but is a reflective exploration of our own perspectives, lenses and membranes that construct the city as an object of research and design. This means not discrediting urban processes such as DIY building efforts, urban social movements or organizational improvisations as informal, but looking at their ontological principle from a different perspective. The earlier we open forms, the easier it is to deal with the potential values of the city. This ultimately opens up political aspects of project management in urban planning: the question of values in urban development projects is structurally significant, since the epistemology and ontology of form represent a hegemonic order of things. The process of form opening through project management in urban design enables the de-naturalization and renegotiation of this mandate.
Mediators
We look at the actor network theory and its concept of mediators. Mediators are active intermediaries. They influence the communication space between parties and act as “third parties”. It is they who make communication between two opposing communication partners and parties possible (Wieser 2002, 111). What the mediators do is all too often overlooked. Their power is obscure. The decisive question is how to make the mediators visible and how to use them. The mediation of the motive of a project can be extremely difficult on a purely discursive level in project level 0: project genesis. Too often all stakeholders fall into a purely affective argumentation about what it means to realise a project and what one should do with the knowledge about this meaning in the project. The exploration of the actual critical issues in the project thus remains without structure and therefore involves numerous pitfalls and even project existence risks. The mediation of the motif via a performative setting such as a summer school and in particular its closing event enables the members of the project management team to demonstrate a performative definition of society instead of an ostentatious one. With the concept of mediators it will be possible to demonstrate the discipline of “classical” procedures as never absolute, in which again there is room for cahnge or dimensions of possibility. “The challenge is to make inconspicuous and perhaps boring things visible and to show how much they actually change, transform, shift and modify what one thinks they transport, transmit and pass on” (Wieser 2002, 112). Project management in urban design is so consistently concerned with the processes of urban and knowledge production because it makes alternatives to functionalism and essentialism accessible. The ANT highlights the performativity and materiality of social action as well as the mediality of technology. By this the ANT also means supposedly non-media face-to-face communication. Here, too, media such as the body, voice and language intervene in the interaction between two people. Certainly the medium has no sole determinant power, yet the medium leaves a trace (Krämer 1998), shapes communication or action, is disciplined and even forces one to certain things (Latour 1996). A road sill insists quite obtrusively that you drive your car slower for a short time. A building construction competition forces architects to design a building.
ARTE Karambolage. Der Berliner Schlüssel. https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/RC-014034/karambolage/
We can, for example, describe planning competitions as a complex technology that prescribe the organization of human and non-human actors in the design via the tender, the procedure, the participants, the work situation, the jury and much more. The tracing method – ANT “is an attempt to refocus an analytical logic away from metaphysical assumptions (for example about human nature) and onto the event of analysis itself” (van Loon 2008, 16) – can also be used in the project exploring phase to play through possibilities of realization with stakeholders and thus confront uncertainties in the future with ideas or models. In the work of a project archaeology, the concept of mediators succeeds in conducting ethnographic media research. Project management is a form of practice that is often carried out using a computer with special software and dashboards, in the cloud, via plans, diagrams and similar notations, but also in word battles at locations such as back rooms or public participation formats. The concept of mediators is so productive because it does not separate production from use and the power positions included therein, but first follows the operational chains of the actors studied (Wieser 2002, 115). Thus, instead of producing new theories on changes in society as a whole or epochal transformations, it may be possible to describe “the setup, establishment, use, reuse, historicization, and deactivation of media technology infrastructures themselves as complex social processes of enabling and restricting each currently possible form of practice” (Passoth 2010, 211). ANT as a process theory enables project management to do justice to the reflection of situations of mobility or multisitedness of media communication that are described as evidence by following the actants.
Project Archaeology
Römer, Alexander and Marko Mijatovic. 2016. “Notations on site.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Dell, Christopher and Marko Mijatovic. 2016. “Notations on site.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The term “project archaeology” for us describes a technique for reading structural traces of projective processes and thereby multiplying the directions of a project’s time (and content) vectors. It is clear that a documented process is a temporal entity that happened in the past. It thus seems to be a closed entity although in its becoming it was an open one. The dilemma now is that when the process is read as closed entity, the potentialities of the process itself get lost. Consequently, in order to open up the process again and to regain its immanent potentialities, we work with a diagrammatic approach of a serial fragmentation, de- and re-assembling, cataloguing and indexing of the process structures. Rather than looking for representational effects, we look in the document archive for traces that incorporate new beginnings and for structural entities that can be re-assembled.
Dell, Christopher and Marko Mijatovic. 2016. “Project Archaeology.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
