Revisiting Civic Architecture and Advocacy Planning in the US & Italy: Urban Planning as Commoning and New Theoretical Frameworks

Abstract

Under the headers of ‘advocacy planning’, ‘collaboration’, ‘participatory design’, ‘co-production’, ‘commoning’ and ‘negotiated planning’, participation is, nowadays, at the centre of the debate on urban design. Architects and urban designers are developing new concepts, tools and roles to comply with these new participatory modii operandi. The participatory concern in the urban design process has not only a long history in practice but also in urban design education. Various experimental initiatives with participation emerged in the domain of architectural pedagogy in the late sixties, often starting from student initiatives. Representative cases are The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) - a group formed in 1968 by architecture students from Columbia GSAPP, MIT Department of Architecture, and Yale School of Architecture, - the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS), the Black Workshop, the City Planning Forum, and Associazione Studenti e Architetti (ASEA). Many of these groups emerged within the context of the struggles for civil rights and thus made a plea to have non-hegemonic or ‘other’ voices heard in the urban design process. These initiatives explored how new concepts, roles and tools for participation could become part of the education of the architect and urban designer. The paper investigates an ensemble of counter-events, counter- publications in the US and Italy during the sixties, shedding light on their impact on the institutional status of academia and on how activism can reinvent the relationship between architecture and democracy. Its objective is to reveal the tensions between enhancing equality in planning process and local bureaucracy in the case of advocacy planning strategies, on the one hand, and to reflect upon the necessity to reshape the urban planning models in order to respond to the call for a more democratic society, on the other.