Abstract
This article explores ‘dialectical design dialogues’ as an approach to engage with ethics in everyday urban planning contexts. It starts from Paulo Freire’s pedagogical view (1970/2017), in which dialogues imply the establishment of a horizontal relation between professionals and amateurs, in order to understand, question and imagine things in everyday reality, in this case, urban transformations, applied to participatory planning and enriched through David Harvey’s (2000, 2009) dialectical approach. A dialectical approach to design dialogues acknowledges and renegotiates contrasts and convergences of ethical concerns specific to the reality of concrete daily life, rather than artificially presenting daily life as made of consensus or homogeneity. The article analyses an atlas as a tool to facilitate dialectical design dialogues in a case study of a low-density residential neighbourhood in the city of Genk, Belgium. It sees the production of the atlas as a collective endeavour during which planners, authorities and citizens reflect on possible futures starting from a confrontation of competing uses and perspectives of neighbourhood spaces. The article contributes to the state-of-the-art in participatory urban planning in two ways: (1) by reframing the theoretical discussion on ethics by arguing that not only the verbal discourses around designerly atlas techniques but also the techniques themselves can support urban planners in dealing more consciously with ethics (accountability, morality and authorship) throughout urban planning processes, (2) by offering a concrete practice-based example of producing an atlas that supports the participatory articulation and negotiation of dialectical inquiry of ethics through dialogues in a ‘real-time’ urban planning process.
Highlights
Issue This article is part of the issue “Built Environment, Ethics and Everyday Life” edited by Mattias Kärrholm (Lund University, Sweden) and Sandra Kopljar (Lund University, Sweden)
How can we use the concepts of dialogue and dialectics to enable debates and practices around ethical questions that emerge during participatory planning processes? How can urban designers, researchers or planners create space for complexity, conflicts and dissenting opinions? In this article, we study dialectical design dialogues through urban planning practice via the atlas, a tool proper to the research and design language of planners
We explored how ethical questioning can take shape during the design research process, through discussing the content of the research and through the conscious use and production of design—in this case, atlas—tools and techniques
Summary
Issue This article is part of the issue “Built Environment, Ethics and Everyday Life” edited by Mattias Kärrholm (Lund University, Sweden) and Sandra Kopljar (Lund University, Sweden). This article discusses an approach capable of dealing with these questions around morality, authorship and accountability in real-time throughout urban planning processes. It explores a concrete case study in which researchers-planners engaged in a low-profile planning context in the city of Genk, Belgium and co-produced an atlas as a participatory planning and design tool to address ethical questions throughout the process. The growing focus on spatial planning for everyday life experience and how it is shaped by various dimensions of society brought about a necessary shift towards more collaborative planning practices (Healey, 1997) In this process, the dialogue became an important ingredient of planning practice to deal with the complexity and diversity of interests of actors in spatial transformation processes. When translated to the planning context, dialogues can be seen as conversations that can be steered by everyone in the process, within horizontal relations among all stakeholders based upon mutual respect and trust in which each member acknowledges and engages with the other (Freire, 1970/2017; Rule, 2011)
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