Design and Politics: the next phase #8
Making Design and Politics; The Concluding Debate
ANCB Metropolitan Laboratory in collaboration with Henk Ovink, The Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, and in cooperation with the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR)
© ANCB
Date: Wednesday, 25th April 2012
Programme
Part I
Welcome
Ole Bouman Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam
Kristin Feireiss Director ANCB The Metropolitan Laboratory and Aedes Architecture Forum
Aine Ryan Programme Manager ANCB The Metropolitan Laboratory
Roelof Bleker Chairman of the Board of The Netherlands Architecture Fund
Introduction (and debate moderation)
Henk Ovink The Netherlands Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment, co-curator 5th IABR: Making City
Part II
Statements by
Wouter Vanstiphout Professor of Design as Politics, Technical University Delft
Thomas Sieverts Founding partner S.K.A.T. Architects and Urban Planners, Bonn
Speakers:
Wouter Vanstiphout, Professor of Design as Politics, Technical University Delft
Thomas Sieverts, Founding partner S.K.A.T. Architects and Urban Planners, Bonn
Floris Alkemade, Director Floris Alkemade Architects, Sint-Oedenrode, Brussels, Paris
Petra Wesseler, Head of Urban Development Projects, City of Chemnitz
Henk Ovink The Netherlands Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment, co-curator 5th IABR: Making City
Part II
Statements by
Wouter Vanstiphout Professor of Design as Politics, Technical University Delft
Thomas Sieverts Founding partner S.K.A.T. Architects and Urban Planners, Bonn
Speakers:
Wouter Vanstiphout, Professor of Design as Politics, Technical University Delft
Thomas Sieverts, Founding partner S.K.A.T. Architects and Urban Planners, Bonn
Floris Alkemade, Director Floris Alkemade Architects, Sint-Oedenrode, Brussels, Paris
Petra Wesseler, Head of Urban Development Projects, City of Chemnitz
In the front row:
Robert Kaltenbrunner, German Federal Office on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development
Arnold Reijndorp, Professor for Social-economic and Spatial Development of New Urban Areas
Joachim Declerck, Architecture Workroom, Brussels
Pauline Terreehorst, Author and Advisor on urban culture, former director of Utrecht City Museum
Robert Kaltenbrunner, German Federal Office on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development
Arnold Reijndorp, Professor for Social-economic and Spatial Development of New Urban Areas
Joachim Declerck, Architecture Workroom, Brussels
Pauline Terreehorst, Author and Advisor on urban culture, former director of Utrecht City Museum
Video © Reframe
Background
Henk Ovink introduces the debate with reference to the disconnect between politics and coordinated responses to complex challenges. He advocates visionary urbanism grounded in learning from the past and collaborative processes and asserts that we must better educate city planning professionals tasked with the integration of design and politics.
Wouter Vanstiphout pinpoints the tendency to equate the city with our collective destiny and the lack of a dominant ideology guiding contemporary city making. He offers the goal of the Just Society and proposes democracy and equality and the re-establishment of the public sphere and the values of solidarity and trust as goals for making city.
Thomas Sieverts consequently advocates for the replacement of our unsustainable wealth-based planning model with strategies to survive a potentially catastrophic future – the ‘Resilient City’. He defines ‘resilience’ as the ability to maintain identity under conditions of extreme stress and argues for this transformation as a practical necessity but also hopes that it may prove beneficial for making city.
Our distance from existential crises, the dominance of wealth-based planning, and the difficulty of predicting future crises were then argued to represent impediments to resilience. It is speculated, that strategies for resilience might be generated through ‘stress testing,’ learning from history and other places, and extrapolations from present conditions. It is suggested that these strategies could include green amenity spaces that can be converted to food production and spatial redundancies accommodating the unplanned. Resilience is also detected at the intersection between the Resilient City and the Just Society, in public space and the decentralisation of responsibility.
The participants stress the critical role of design education in the necessary transformation of how we make city. There is a broad agreement, that education must encourage attitudes with the capacity to engage existential, moral and political questions and generate innovative solutions to urban challenges. Arguments in favour of real-world experimentation and research with the freedom to constructively fail were discussed. The discussion concludes with a call to challenge our assumptions around making city and to improve the interface between design and politics through debate among the design disciplines informed by an engaged public.
Summary by Matthew Beattie for ANCB The Metropolitan Laboratory
In collaboration with: The Netherlands Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment, The Netherlands Architecture Fund, Goethe Institute Rotterdam, International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Netherlands Architecture Institute
