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 7: Completion of service phase 2 vs. Project Execution
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Dominique Peck, Marko Mijatovic, Christopher Dell and Bernd Kniess. 2018. Transposition 7. Completion of Service Phase 2 vs. Project Completion. Reenactment. Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related content
Administered World
From disciplines to disciplining
Cooperative Review Process
Mediators
Project Archaeology
About related content
Administered World
Peck, Dominique, Bernd Kniess, Christopher Dell, und Marko Mijatovic. 2016. “Administered World.” Basics: Project Management in Urban Design. Hamburg. CC BY-SA 4.0
Project Management in Urban Design actively tests the scales and scopes of the highly regulated field of project management currently employed in architecture, urban design, planning and development. A relevant example are the Regulations of Architects' and Engineers' Fees (in German known as HOAI, Honorare für Architekten und Ingenieurleistungen). Within this regulation, a wide range of Urban Design practices occupies what the Baukultur Report 2014 calls “Phase 0” – the conceptual or research phase and “Phase 10” – the use management phase. From these currently not yet officially recognized phases actors involved in construction broadly expect to avoid conflicts of interests, save expenses and achieve better results in the overall acceptance of a project. This holds true in particular at times and in places where the public sector on all levels operates under the regime of austerity. The problem is that different people understand different things under “Phase 0” and “Phase 10”.
A number of issues arise for Project Management in Urban Design in this respect. If we see Urban Design (as practice and theory) as a relational form of practice in concrete situations, it is questionable whether there is actual demand for such an approach that does not aim to reduce complexity in order to arrive at solutions. Our understanding of Urban Design draws on Latour’s (2004) notion of “matters of concern” and rejects working with pure “matters of fact” because it strongly builds on the importance of the motif, which is a condition of the acting subject.
How can phase 0 and 10 become recognized as highly relevant for the renegotiation of today’s organization of urban design projects and as specialized practices that not only have to be developed as a form of project management but also must be compensated?
The form of project management itself becomes an experiment. This means that you have to mediate between the existing and largely standardized processes of sectorally and organizationally structured services.
The diagram shows only four of these processes in comparison. The work phases of the Regulations of Architects' and Engineers' Fees in grey, the project phases of the Committee of Associations and Chambers of Engineers and Architects for the fee structure in green (Ausschusses der Verbände und Kammern der Ingenieure und Architekten für die Honorarordnung e.V.), the project phases of the client in red and the project stages of the Committee of Associations and Chambers of Engineers and Architects for the fee structure for public private partnership projects in building construction in yellow (AHO 2006).
The attempt to standardize procedures and to document the actual process originates less in an interest to understand the epistemological knowledge production and more in the real-world setting of liabilities and risk management. Documentation, in particular, serves to sue or hold responsible individual contractors and actors for delays, faults, miscalculations, etc.
By definition, the “client” takes the role of project manager. Initially, s/he alone is entitled to planning, management and control on all hierarchical levels of contractual relationships and competencies within the project and vis-à-vis the public.
The delegation of competences between client and contractor is theoretically clearly regulated by the performance and fee regulations of the AHO commission “Project Management”.
Project management consists of project control and project management.
(1) project control is an advisory service without decision-making authority, which is part of the organizational structure as a staff unit, and
(2) Project management, on the other hand, includes those parts of the client functions with decision-making and enforcement authority.
Problems often arise with the implementation, when theoretically clearly established regulations practically prove less clear.
“If one follows the isolated solution of individual problems without holistic consideration of all interrelationships and connections as well as the constantly changing environment, there is the danger of developing strategies that only partially solve the tasks at hand” (Kochendörfer 2018, 13f).
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.
Cooperative Review Process
Members of the civil society initiative help guide through the neighbourhood and show their self-built community building, before all participants of the planning competition receive helmets to take part in a guided tour through the Ohlendieckshöhe construction project in the Accommodation with Perspective Dwelling programme. Back in the big tent, the prepared lunch is served before the members of the process management of the planning competition present the task. At the end of the first day, the approximately 60 participants are divided into five mixed groups along their pre-qualifications and the project leaders are drawn by lots. The project leaders are all member of architecture offices that have been selected and invited by the project and steering group of the project Begegnungshaus Poppenbüttel and who have all been involved in self-construction and participation procedures. On the second of a total of seven days, work begins in the project offices. The project offices are a form coproduction that provides different people and working groups with an infrastructure, starting with such basic things as electricity, model building materials and breakfast, lunches and dinners for the participants and partly also their relatives, friends and families. Similarly, the organisation of the financial and legal framework is also at stake, as was demonstrated by the example of the participation confirmations, the additional expense allowances for voluntary work and internship certificates.
Each project office works on the task in the planning competition according to its own design approaches. The participants get to know each other through narratives, draw a network of existing capacities, go directly into the elaboration of possible design approaches on different scales in model making (1:200 to 1:1), draw on sketch paper or the PC. Every evening a project office is responsible for dinner and a presentation of the work. Within a week there are kitchens from Switzerland, Japan, the Middle East, Belgium and Germany; the ingredients are bought in the vicinity of the project area and prepared and served in the large tent in the kitchen from the project days.
On the final day of the summer school (project days and cooperative review process), all project offices set up their displays for the intermediate colloquium, while photographers from the daily press get an idea of the situation. The process management explains the experimental arrangement of the intermediate colloquium. In contrast to the usual forms of planning competitions, the cooperative review process allows all participants to exchange ideas and insights into each other's contributions. Different competencies and procedures become visible in this way, which invites the leaders of the project offices to signal their willingness to contribute to the possible realisation of a project. Instead of five competing entries, the project office discuss how they could work on one joint competition entry. The participants of the project offices let the visitors of the summer festival of Poppenbüttel hilft e.V. see their designs for the Poppenbüttel meeting house.
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.