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.
Following the promotion of the project Building a Proposition for Future Activities by the Hamburg Parliament, the staff of the Department of Social Space Management introduced the project management model for building construction projects certified by the City of Hamburg to the project group. This model can be traced back, among other things, to the report published in 2010 by the Court of Audit of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg on cost-stable construction.
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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.
Comparison of project phases. Dominique Peck. 2018. CC BY-SA 4.0
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).
AHO e.V., Hrsg. 2006. “Interdisziplinäres Projektmanagement für PPP-Hochbauprojekte.” AHO Schriftenreihe 22. Berlin: Bundesanzeiger Verlag.
Kochendörfer, Bernd, Jens H. Liebchen, and Markus G. Viering. 2018. “Werkzeuge des Projektmanagements.” In Bau-Projekt-Management. Grundlagen und Vorgehensweisen, 247–271. Leitfaden des Baubetriebs und der Bauwirtschaft. Wiesbaden: Springer Vieweg. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-8348-2245-1#about.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248. doi:10.1086/421123.
