Abstract
Design and Planning professionals have long been influenced by the belief in physically and spatially deterministic power over people and the environment, a belief that their representations of space become space. As a result the goal of design often becomes “fixing” or directing behavior and culture instead of letting culture happen. This outlook often prevents designers from engaging critically with culture, through representational space and spatial practice, as a crucial, possibly the most crucial, aspect in the design process. Just as human cultures interact to constantly reproduce and co-produce hybrid cultures, the professional designer and those users and experiencers of design (at whatever scale) must interact to co-produce spaces and places of activity. Through a critique of the practice of placemaking, we highlight the need to differentiate between participation and co-production. Understanding participation as one element of the design process and the role of design at larger scales of co-productive processes can help designers have a better understanding of how spaces are produced, and the role of designers in the creation of spaces of potentiality. Agamben’s writing on<em> potentialities </em>and Lefebvre’s spatial triad offer a theoretical framework to investigate the ethical role of professional designers in society while taking a critical stance against the singular solutions of modernist urban transformation. Spaces of Potentiality are seen here as a designer’s simultaneous withdrawal from rational problem solving and deterministic solutions, and an engagement with open source strategies for the co-production of urban space.
Highlights
Design and Planning professionals have long been influenced by the belief in physically and spatially deterministic power over people and the environment, a belief that their representations of space become space
Understanding participation as one element of the design process and the role of design at larger scales of co-productive processes can help designers have a better understanding of how spaces are produced, and the role of designers in the creation of spaces of potentiality
By engaging in the deeply contextual nature of perceived and lived space, designers can better understand the triadic dialectical relationships of the spatial triad, and use this to alter and disrupt conceived space. This understanding can help shift the production of space, to a co-production of differential lived space with the people and communities they are responsible for engaging with, helping communities achieve architectural autogestion
Summary
Design and Planning professionals have long been influenced by the belief in physically and spatially deterministic power over people and the environment, a belief that their representations of space become space. Placemaking is a contradictory process that despite claiming to “make” place and have transformative properties serves to dominate and homogenize spaces through generalized rules independent of context These generalized rules and the common perspective amongst designs and planners that behavior and activity can be controlled through the physical environment can be linked to behaviorist ideas of space and a deeper environmental determinism. To promote another label or term (such as coproduction) as the new best practice or a new set of rules, but rather just the opposite, to offer a critical stance, and develop a clearer shared understanding of the intended impact of co-production, and to emphasize the need to reposition the role of design to facilitate community control over the production of space. By simultaneously withdrawing from the “potential to actualize” and engaging with the creation of “spaces of potentiality,” the act of design becomes 1) a withdrawal from and resistance to forces of development that create inequality and exclude sections of society and 2) an engagement with dynamic, hybrid processes that enable a multiplicity of actors, other forms of knowledge, other forms of production, and other potentialities to manifest
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