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.
Transposition 2: Project Days vs. Planning Competition
Column A
Wall, Rebecca, Marius Töpfer, Dominique Peck, Marko Mijatovic, Christopher Dell, Jan Holtmann, Kristin Guttenberg, Bernd Kniess, Kirsten Plöhn and Anna Seum. 2018. Transposition 2. Presentation and Discussion on the Wall. Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related content
Project Days
Rules of Play
Performance
Unbuilding
Project Archaeology
Mediators
Conception
Facilitate Uncertainty
Learning from Las Vegas
Reflective Review
Open Form
About related content
Project Days
Christopher Dell, Bernd Kniess, Dominique Peck, und Marko Mijatovic. 2016. “Documentation of the Cooperative Review Process Building a Proposition for Future Activities.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The film first shows the course of the Project Days. About 60 participants - refugees, students, trade students, clients from the Inclusion sector at f & w fördern und wohnen and neighbours of the Ohlendieckshöhe construction project in the Accommodation with Perspective Living programme - come together one year after the first Summer School on the publicly accessible parking lot in front of the InfoPoint – three stacked containers. The area of the large tent erected for this purpose corresponds to the area of the building window of the future community building: twenty by twenty metres, 400 m2. The project days begin with a simple breakfast and are organized as a series of Doing Rooms, Resonance Rooms and Reflection Rooms. The project day leader makes an introduction round in the first resonance room, introduces the existing materials and introduces the first Doing Room: Lunch. The participants meet in mixed groups along the activities of the organization of the common lunch, discuss their activities, coordinate with other groups and go to work. Two stool cookers are assembled, Doka boards and roof battens are screwed together to form shelves and kitchen furniture, the water supply is secured, ingredients are stored, chairs and tables are arranged, the arrangement of the stool cookers is improved during operation, after about 100 minutes the participants of the project days meet for the first time at lunch.
Several cameramen and people can also be seen, whose gaze keeps switching back and forth between what is happening in the room and the notebooks in their hands: they are all “accompanying researchers” who are responsible for documenting the process. Once the Project Days are over, the architectural programme developed and displayed there in practice will be part of the call for entries for the planning competition starting next Monday.
The terms “NACHBARSCHAFT”, “SPORT RADWEG”, “WALD” and “WIESE” have been written with tape above the transparent windows of the large tent. They refer to the adjacent functions of the planned location of the Community Building, which is located about 300 meters away from the parking area. In the corner between the “SPORT RADWEG” and the “Wald”, some participants of the “cinema group” erect a projection screen made of construction foil and roof battens. The beamer borrowed from the university will later show a selection of short films on the subject of architecture and use. Before the cinema evening, the project day leader gives a take: To re-enter into the play on the second day of the project days, she asks all participants to bring along things from their everyday lives. These things are epistemic in character, they contain insights into what the actors want to find again in the programme of the future community building, they define the themes of the forthcoming Doing Rooms and thus make it possible to negotiate the programme at the round table. At the table, representatives of the individual rooms (room for intercultural education, stage, workshop, kitchen, table tennis and darts room, lounge, etc.) will negotiate the arrangement of the rooms to each other and in relation to the qualities of the outdoor space marked with adhesive letters. At the end of the negotiations, the result will be transferred from the table on a scale of 1:100 to the floor of the large tent on a scale of 1:1 and checked again in a tour concluding the project days.
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.
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.
Unbuilding
Keller Easterling in conversation with Nikolaus Hirsch and Brian Kuan Wood | 05.02.2014. e-flux Videos
The Intercultural Practice seminars explored, designed, tested and produced the form and content of the Summer School Building a Proposition for Future Activities. In the following semester, the students would once again deal with the project Begegnungshaus Poppenbüttel in the seminar Project Management in Urban Design. For this purpose, the lecturers developed the concept of project archaeology. They encouraged the students to start working with the project archaeology through an interconnected discursive and performative form of practice. The project archaeology can make use of a number of methods and forms of representation, including description, film, images, but equally discussions, forums, guided tours etc. In this way, the evidentiary aspects of the summer school were to be translated into a mode documenting and reflecting upon their coming into being, their emergence and development, in other words, translated into an archaeology of the project.
The aim was to document the dismantling process so as to enable the exploration of the various processes before, during and accompanying the building activities in a way that allowed reading them as ways of encountering one another and concluding by problematizing the now – retrospectively – logical phase of the project’s conception. By the time Hamburg’s parliament promoted the project, the structuring phase 0 was nearly completed, while the reflective review as well as the reorganization of the stakeholders into a project group and a steering group was scheduled to take place during the project’s conception phase. The seminar Project Management in Urban Design served to newly make available the project’s material in all its aspects. Project archaeology thus figures both as method and means of representation.
As the seminar started, the students only had vague ideas of the structural aspects of the unbuilding and the objects they would be dismantling. What emerged from the discussion of some video clips and accompanying readings in the first session was the notion that spatial arrangements are usually conceived as products with particular costs and simultaneously as means to specific ends. The exercise rested on the assumption that students would be able to determine on site, for instance, that the squared lumber sheets used for the construction of the structure had largely remained in their original condition as found in the heavy-duty shelves at the DIY store before their delivery to the construction site, both in their materiality and their cut-to-size parts. While reflecting the video in light of the notations on the dimensions and connectivity of the individual pieces of timber, the students were able to reconstruct that the structure could be built by laypersons under the supervision and/or cooperation of trained specialists as long as fundamental principles were observed, e.g. not cutting up the pieces of timber when taking apart the timber structure. Deconstructing the structure thus made it possible for two people to retrieve all the original materials and carry them. Without using tools to cut, the process also proved to be faster and safer.
Schneider Tatjana. 2018. Problematizing Social Engagement, as part of the weeklong workshop and seminar series Toolkit for Today: Activisms. Canadian Center for Architecture CCA.
The seminar’s location on site enables an affirmative process of exploration and recording of what has happened. This way, a priori critical perspectives are grounded with facts, on the basis of which dense descriptions can be produced for critical analysis. The objects, which at first appear as complete, clean and self-contained, can be grasped as performatively changeable through the process of self-responsible dismantling. This, in turn, allows the students to problematize the framework conditions in which the practice took place and to relate it in their representation to further conceptual practices or historical references. Deliberately set up as an interdisciplinary seminar, students articulate different kinds of knowledge and engage in relating these to their respective means (of representation, of production). The articulation of the processes of embodied knowledge production goes hand in hand with a contextualization of the respective backgrounds and reflection of particular ways of problematizing, which contributes to understanding the importance of proximity as central to the project. As motifs, positions and limitations are anchored squarely in the project, they become negotiable. The exercise of dismantling the extended minimal structure thus prepares for a retrospective projection of the conversations to be had and an understanding of who is to sit around the table.
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.
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.
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.
Facilitate Uncertainty
The aim of the project days was to develop the spatial program of the future Begegnungshaus through joint actions in a prototypical framework. Following the title of the project, participants, with their expertise as producers of the everyday space of cities, quarters and houses, should be involved as thoroughly and as much as possible in the planning process Building A Proposition For Future Activities. This is based on the understanding of space as relational and generated by actions, while at the same time actions are generated. While conventional participation methods often only allow for a discussion of the already set goal, the research and teaching program Urban Development tries to counter this closed form with a participation methodology based on common actions - and thus to open up the form.
Structurally, the definition of the project days as an open form is an attempt to allow and enable the transposition of uncertainty into the “planning bureau”. Questions are invited and supposed truths are put up for negotiation. In addition to the rules of the game and the archive of things, the role of the performance facilitator was therefore to structure the common processing of uncertainty during the project days. This role was assumed by Kristin Guttenberg. Her task was to absorb the resulting uncertainties and transform them into a productive sense of impact. With Christopher Dell's definition of improvisation technology as a constructive handling of disorder in socio-material constellations (2016), it was therefore the task of the performance moderator to deal with uncertainty and, by actively doing this, to enable improvisation.
During the project days, improvisation was the way in which the existing orders and their supposed truths were transformed into a common design. This was the basic prerequisite for a collaborative design process becoming possible instead of offering apparent solutions to unclear problems. The questions: “What is encounter?” and “How does encounter take place?” were therefore posed before it was materially determined what a meeting house should look like.
Social truths and orders, which Bourdieu (1987) understood, for example, as four different types of capital (social, cultural, economic and symbolic), were also broken down and opened during the project days. A political space in which negotiations can take place should therefore take the place of a space already pre-structured by power or violence (e.g. by an assumed “knowledge gap” or decision-making hierarchies). Arguing with Hannah Arendt, one prerequisite for political space is to renounce conventions of power and violence and instead to return to argumentative negotiations in (unintentional) communication. The facilitation of performance during the project days had the task of breaking through existing groupings and hierarchies as a structuring force - in contrast to a prescriptive force - through joint actions.
Learning from Las Vegas
The perspectivation of the urban “as is” has a prominent history in architectural education. About half a century ago, following Louis Wirth’s notion of “urbanism as a way of life” (Wirth 1938), two architects worked against architecture’s purity as a discipline. In a recent interview with Denise Scott-Brown (2016), she recalled that “Bob Venturi was the only member of the architecture faculty [at Penn] who sympathized with my attempts to straddle architecture and planning responsibly and also imaginatively.” Scott-Brown joined Penn in 1960 and together with Venturi was hired to relate theory to design. “From that time, we worked together—first as teachers, communicating ideas and subject matter, tying coursework to studio, architecture to planning, and the subject matter that interested [us], to the students' work and ours as designers. In 1964 I ran the work topics, seminars and term papers for both courses. Bob's lectures introduced new ways for architects to approach history as designers and formed the basis for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” There they argued to stop Mies van der Rohe-like modernism from becoming the building industry’s wet dream – pure construction. Both built their arguments on Kevin Lynch 1960s work The Image of the City, which tried to operationalise the coproduction of meaning of places realised on the basis of doing field research and mapping its results.
Scott-Brown and Venturi used these methods in combination with others in their seminal project Learning from Las Vegas. The project started as a manifesto-like piece in Architectural Forum in March 1968 conceived and written by Denise Scott-Brown and Robert Venturi entitled “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas”. They wanted to do away with projects indebted to heroic and monumental modernism, transpose an existing urban situation into the academic realm of architectural production and re-negotiate education from there. In the piece "Mourning the Suburbs: Learning from Levittown", Beatrice Colomina tells the reader about the ‘density of urban unrest and challenges to normative architectural education’ during Scott-Brown and Venturi’s tenure at the School of Architecture at Yale University (Colomina 2011). "Yale provided a focal point for demonstrators who were angry about the ongoing Vietnam War and about societal institutions that were slow to act on matters of racial and gender inequality (Shelton 2015)." Scott-Brown and Venturi transposed their thinking into writing and then into a prototype teaching project. The team taught and co-developed with their students from architecture and graphic design new approaches in an integrative, hands-on and explorative way. The final spreads in the first published edition represent Venturi and Scott-Brown’s efforts to be inclusive to alternative perspectives with the aim not only to process the relations between observers and their aesthetics, but also to convey an understanding of the city as a “set of acitivities” (Venturi and Scott Brown 1977, 76). Later the project was made public in the form of an exhibition and Scott-Brown and Izenour together with the student Virginia Carroll scripted a plan for another studio titled “Learning from Levittown”. However, the criticism within the School of Architecture about the approach and resources used in its operationalisation eventually drove Venturi to give up teaching at all.
In the end, what seems relevant to today's efforts to co-produce urban forms of knowledge when visiting Learning from Las Vegas again is the request to the architect to sharpen the view of the existing world in its actual and not in its imaginary complexity.
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).
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.