Architect Collectives and the Coproduction of Places in the “Grey Zones” of Urban Development Planning: The Educational Institution as a Mediation Framework

Abstract

Recent research work carried out in France tends to show that calling on collectives of artists or architects to develop participatory approaches with inhabitants has become a common practice for public or private project owners. However, these interventions are still often limited to communication operations or come up against the inertia of political and professional cultures, which limits their scope. After briefly stating the circumstances that lead urban project owners in France to pay increasing attention to the skills of architectural “collectives”, this article focuses on the presentation of two experiments conducted by two of them. Articulating pedagogical and urban citizenship issues, these experiments were confronted with procedural and normative frameworks, some of which came from the world of urban production, others from the school institution. The aim of this article is to show that the coproduction of spaces that have a strong meaning for their users, but which are unthought of within strategic urban projects, can have a greater impact on the way in which the operational actors envisage their project. After summarizing the main highlights of these two experiments, this contribution discusses the lessons that can be drawn from them in terms of their implementation conditions and the extensions they may have had. From a methodological point of view, the interest of these two experiments lies in the fact that the two associations that were involved in them understood them as experiments from the outset. They thus implemented reflexive mechanisms involving researchers, of which this article is one of the concrete results.

Participation: A Disciplinary Border for Architectural Research and Practice

“…When applied as soon as the project definition, the Lean approach expands into Lead-led design and enables transcending beyond the mere optimization of processes: although its historical roots in "reaching a waste-free process" might have reassured the skeptics, its patient-focused goals created commitment and common vision, both essential while pursuing participation throughout the long-term scale of building a hospital. Similarly, the teams presented in Royer's [6] paper and Zetlaoui-Léger, Macaire, and Tcherkassky's [11] paper show the interdisciplinary nature of the projects, and how stakeholders from different backgrounds can complement each other from the very beginning of the process onwards. Except for these papers, the knowledge transfers between disciplines are less visible or clearly named in other contributions.…”

“…This paper [11] focuses on the coproduction of urban spaces with inhabitants and presents two French experiments conducted by two architect collectives in partnership with researchers. The three authors are (1) a researcher, (2) an architect practitioner and member of the first collective, and (3) a researcher and member of the second collective.…”

“…Whether explicitly or not, the contributions revealed that participation may take place outside the traditional boundaries and categories of architecture (as a discipline, as a participatory environment), thus creating unusual uses of space and time. Zetlaoui-Léger, Macaire, and Tcherkassky, for instance, focus on participatory approaches that are developed by collectives of architects [11]. Citizen participation takes place in two "grey areas", i.e., neglected spaces emerging at the interstices of different urban development projects driven by authorities.…”

“…Participatory architecture, as discussed in four articles [6,10,11], reveals the close and strong link between participatory science and education. From the projects studied by the authors, we emphasize three main observations:…”

“…In two articles [6,11], we highlight this social architecture through pedagogy in regard to the methodological outcome of the participatory approach by itself. This methodology creates permanency in the fieldwork, in addition to the community.…”