Collaborative urban spaces
«It's a miracle», Hartmut Rosa begins without
ambiguity:
«(…) all the evidence of a climate crisis, often
physically felt in many parts of the Earth in recent years, all our
political intentions, have done nothing to stop or at least slow down
these inner workings. Not even two hundred years of powerful criticism
directed against capitalism and its engines of accumulating wealth. But
now, they are at a standstill. And we are still alive! We can do it! We
have done it!»1.
Yes, during this pandemic a miracle has occurred. Beyond its tragic and
painful aspects, this enormous, terrible, planetary plague has had an
extraordinary transformative power.
In the daily life of cities, the onslaught of the health crisis has
brought about unexpected changes, profoundly altering urban scenarios
that were believed long established.
In this general slowdown, urban practices have been called into
question and many of the observed mutations do not fall within a sphere
of loss, quite the opposite: the rediscovery of neighbourhood life, the
strengthening of closeness networks and different forms of solidarity,
the reactivation of pedestrian and bicycle circuits, the renewed
perception of environmental systems and ecotones, etc. All elements
that have emerged from the experience of confinement and that represent
precious resources for a post-crisis urban regeneration, in terms of
the constitution of social innovation practices and regarding the
stimulation of urban cultures and policies, aimed at a greater care of
the multitude of subjectivity of which the civitas is made up.
(Hardt, Negri, 2009)
The shapes, meanings and roles of the urban space had already changed
over time; in recent decades the opening of a post-capitalist future,
the constitution of common assets as forms of resistance to the
intensified privatisation of capitalism and social structuring
following a heterarchical form (Citton, 2018) – thus endowed
with a plurality of value systems – had already begun to
configure new scenarios.
With the lockdown over, a different consciousness of urban space is
gradually taking root; public spaces and common spaces are conceived by
the most mindful as places of exploring different ways of
co-constructing and living together, as fields of experience of civic
action and platforms of diffusion for the new maieutics of active
citizenship.
The experience of confinement has taught us the city is a place full of
“especes d’espaces”2,
namely a variety of spaces of relating: from the apartment block
terrace to the entrance hall, from the collective parterre to the
semi-private garden, from the common courtyard to the shared patio. The
heterotopia3
discovered as a result of physical distancing are spaces of resistance
that could remain, perhaps in new ways, in the design of a post-crisis
city.
What has been understood, clearly and unequivocally, is that organising
the urban space must be opportunely correlated to the framework of
social relations and to the system of common assets –
inappropriable, material or immaterial. This node cannot and should no
longer be dissociated, nor should it be considered a marginal parameter
in conceiving the urban project, «(...) to use does not
simply mean to utilise something, but to stay in relation to an
inappropriable» (Agamben, 2017).
Place/Work/Folk4,
towards a topology of care
«What people can do is begin this process of change
themselves. It is a process which should both examine the cause of our
present condition and pose new ways for building more humane places to
live.» (Robert Goodman 1973)
In the careful analysis of the ongoing mutations, among the most
important issues coming to the fore emerges the theme of care, a
Geddesian (Tyrwhitt 1947) metaphor that is well suited to the
experiential picture of urban phenomena in times of a health crisis.
It was 1946 when Lewis Mumford, in the introduction to the collection
of Patrick Geddes' reports from India5, as though a kind of premonition,
described the eminently pioneering nature of the approach presented in
those writings, underlining the scholar’s ability to
anticipate areas of investigation that would in the future become
pivotal subjects of collective reflection on urban issues: solidarity,
collaborative action, cooperation, man-nature reconciliation,
community, common space. These are the same instances manifested
– often in the form of urgency – during the months
of crisis, as an unexpected humus, a precious substratum favouring the
blossoming of that universe of possibilities (Rancière,
2009) of which the city, with its frame of unresolved common and public
spaces, has a pressing need today.
During the lockdown, the media and social networks never ceased talking
about alternative uses, urban spaces regained from vehicular traffic,
reconversions of use as common meeting spaces, arising from new ways of
living, especially between neighbours (respecting the rules of physical
distancing). In other words, it has emerged that the capacity for
transformation of collective action (Harvey, 2012), the power of the
community (Sennett, 2020) and the constituent praxis of common assets
(Dardot, Laval, 2014), considered as synergic forces, make it possible
to rethink the weave of the city, starting from the common spaces of
relationship, in the ‘micro’ dimension of the
neighbourhood and the scale of the neighbourhood's contact spaces
(Choay, 2003).
Within this framework, the theme of care represents an important
challenge for a new epistemology of the crisis, on which to implant
experimental policies of shared administration, new visionary
capacities and renewed common practices.
What forms of planning intervention should be encouraged to favour the
creation of care communities in urban spaces? Co-design round-tables,
think tanks for orientation and reflection, assemblies, communities of
inquiry, etc. seem in many places to be configured as collaborative
scenarios within which to conceive the necessary transformations of
neighbourhood spaces. It is precisely in these spaces that the metaphor
of Geddes is embodied and becomes current: observing, caring for,
healing the city's nodes of vulnerability are the phases of a
collective process that serve to regenerate neglected or abandoned
urban spaces (Tyrwhitt 1947). At this point it is worth dialectically
comparing the two perspectives: on one hand, that dictated by a need
for Gemeinschaft
(Tönnies, 1887), a sense of community, made up of warm social
relations, of contact, and is linked to the scenarios of reception
(Sennet, 2000). On the other, the one oriented by the need to review
the terms of social interaction, according to the rules of the
pandemic, whose regulations impose a redefinition of the notions of
accessibility and distance. In concrete terms, it would be difficult to
try to resolve the antinomies at the crux of the health crisis without
rethinking the way in which space is designed and governed and the
types and times of interrelation that this will determine. Following in
the footsteps of Geddes’ legacy, we can analyse the question
of what the treatment and care is at the moment, setting these in terms
of a right/duty to configure effective design lines:
Care means equipping oneself with the theoretical and practical tools
necessary to build an adequate, eco-responsible and sustainable
environment, beyond the oppressive logic of the society of abundance:
the concrete “eutopia” of Geddes, in other words.
Care is pursuing an «intelligent and responsible
frugality» (Magnago Lampugnani, 2020) in planning
interventions, a sobriety that resembles conservative surgery6,
in a house-to-house mode, case by case. In some way this same course
includes all the design actions aimed at unhinging the logic of
standardisation, such as tactical urban planning or urban acupuncture.
Care is to activate and innervate “attention
regimes” (Boullier, 2014), through preliminary investigation,
physical exploration and walking as a cognitive practice –
the survey before planning7. in Geddesian terms. Only through
in-depth observation of the places and communities that inhabit them
can new ways of accessibility and distance be defined.
Care means building inventories, through community mapping (of which
Geddes mentions the prodromes8),to read and interpret the city
through a mapping of social infrastructures, of places that configure a
system of relationships, that coordinate networks of collaboration and
solidarity9.
Through these principles, centred on the concept of care, there is no
attempt to impose the features of a new localism, which would be
burdened by the risks of incongruous consequences – such as
the intensification of exclusion mechanisms and the proliferation of
uncoordinated micro-interventions. Policies of social cohesion and
social innovation should underlie the logic of intervention to be set
up. To this end, new forms of governance remain to be fine-tuned,
articulating experimentation at different scales, in order to
increasingly move towards a horizontal and participatory management of
places of urban communal living.
Note 1 Hartmut Rosa, “Le
miracle et le monstre – un
regard sociologique sur le Coronavirus”, in AOC media -
Analyse Opinion Critique, aprile 2020. «C’est un
miracle (…) toutes les preuves d’une crise
climatique, souvent ressenties physiquement dans de nombreux endroits
de la terre ces dernières années, toutes nos
intentions politiques n’ont rien pu faire pour
arrêter ou même ralentir ces roues. Pas plus que
deux cents ans de puissantes critiques du capitalisme face aux moteurs
d’accumulation du capital. Mais là, ils sont
à l’arrêt. Et nous sommes encore en vie
! Nous pouvons le faire! Nous l’avons fait ». 2 Georges Perec, Especes d’espaces,
Galilée, Paris
1974. «Le problème n’est pas
d’inventer l’espace, encore moins de le
réinventer (trop de gens bien intentionnés sont
là aujourd’hui pour penser notre
environnement…), mais de l’interroger, ou, plus
simplement encore, de le lire.» 3 See. Michel Foucault,
“Des espaces autres”,
Conference held at Cercle d’études
architecturales, 14
marzo 1967, in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no 5,
ottobre 1984 4 Sulla triade geddesiana
“Place, Work and Folk”
Cfr. Patrick Geddes, “Civics: as Applied
Sociology”, Conference held at School of Economics
and
Political Science, University of London, 18 juin 1904, available on
https://www.gutenberg.org 5 See. J. Tyrwhitt, op.cit.
«he life and work of Patrick
Geddes prefigure the age in which we now live. The tasks that he
undertook as a solitary thinker and planner have become the collective
task of our generation», p.7 6 See. J. Tyrwhitt,
op.cit. «The best way in which
congestion can actually be reduced is by the creation of open spaces.
Whereas the new street will only too readily destroy any remains social
character within an area, the new open space will do much towards
renewing the values of village social life.», p. 85 7 See. J. Tyrwhitt, op.cit.
«The conservative method,
however, has its difficulties, it requires long and patient study. The
work cannot be done in the office with ruler and parallels, for the
plan must be sketched out on the spot, after wearying hours of
perambulation (…)», p. 44 8 See. J. Tyrwhitt, op.cit.
«One of the parts of a
city survey that can easily be
undertaken by any interested and intelligent person of active habits is
to mark on a map those vacant plots of land that are used for
cultivation.», p. 89 9 See. J. Tyrwhitt, op.cit.
«How very different from the
present state of affairs would be a city in which such active
co-operation could arise spontaneously between the citizen and their
town council!», p. 65
Bibliografia
AGAMBEN G. (2017) – Creazione
e anarchia. L’opera
nell’età della religione capitalistica.
Neri Pozza
Editore. Vicenza
AGAMBEN G. (2001) – La
comunità che viene. Bollati
Boringhieri. Turin
ANTONIOLI M. (2017) – “Le stade
esthétique de la production/consummation et la
révolution du temps choisi”. Multitude 69
BIANCHETTI C. (2015) – Territoires
partagés.
MetisPresses. Geneve
BONSIEPE G. (2017) – “Design et
démocratie” in J. Fezer et M. Gorlich (edited by)
Civic city. Notes pour
le design d’une ville sociale,
Éditions B42, Paris
BOULLIER D. (2014) – “Médiologie des
régimes d’attention”, in Y. Citton
(edited by), L’économie
de l’attention.
Nouvel horizon du capitalisme ?, La Découverte,
Paris
CAILLE A. (2011) – “Du convivialisme vu comme un
socialisme radicalisé et universalisé (et
réciproquement)”, in Caillé A. et al.
(edited by), De la
convivialité. Dialogues sur la
société conviviale à venir,
La
Découverte, Paris
CITTON Y. (2018) – “CRé-ouvrir un
horizon
post-capitaliste ?”. AOC Media- Analyse Opinion Critique
(april)
DARDOT P., LAVAL C. (2014) – Commun. Essai sur la
révolution au XXI siècle, La
Découverte, Paris
HARDT M., NEGRI A. (2009) – Commonwealth,
Harvard University
Press, Cambridge.
HARVEY D. (2015) – La
crisi della modernità,
(Original title: The
Condition of Postmodernity, 1990, translation by Viezzi),
Il Saggiatore, Milan
HARVEY D. (2011) – Le
capitalisme contre le droit
à la ville. Néoliberalisme, urbanisation,
résistances, (translation by Le Roy,
Vieillescazes, Garrot, Gross), Éditions Amsterdam, Paris
RANCIÈRE J. (2000) – Le partage du sensible.
Esthétique et politique. La Fabrique
Éditions.
Paris
ROSA H. (2020) – “Le miracle et le monstre
– un regard sociologique sur le Coronavirus”. AOC
media - Analyse Opinion Critique (april)
SENNETT R. (2000) – La
Conscience de
l’œil: urbanisme et société,
(Titolo originale: The
Conscience of the Eye: The design and social
life of cities, Faber and Faber, 1991, traduzione
dall’inglese di Dill) Verdier, Paris
TYRWHITT J. (edited by) (1947) – Patrick Geddes in India,
Lund Humphries, London
