Plan and project as resistance strategies. Didactics, planning and designing in a continuous changing era

Abstract

The transformation of physical spaces by means of plans and projects requires knowledge and understanding of what needs to be transformed. In this sense, project work is influenced by the way we get to know things and learn. This way is in turn strongly influenced by the wider socio-cultural context in which we are educated. Cultural debate about learning modalities in the era of “liquid modernity” evidences an epistemological change and a worrying aspect that involves the project-oriented ability of individuals: no person can have experience of stability and it is impossible to design the change. What, then, is the future for all those activities that plan change and transformation? Maybe the answer can be found in imagining the traditional instruments of space transformation, namely plans and projects, as “resistance strategies”. A idea like this implies “resistance” at various levels by an approach to the plan and project that retrieves some of the connotations lost over time and takes on new ones more suitable to these times of crisis: the plan and the project as an instrument of knowledge, as a means of structuring elements of permanency, as an instrument of opposition to standardisation and to steered market forms, and as an activator of forms of collective management.