Sensitive Urban Planning or Critical Spatial Practice?

Abstract

Both ‘small architecture’ and design, but also the process of planning the entire housing estate could be labelled as experimental independent critique of space (Markus Miessen), thanks to which the architects and social activists created social, cooperative, neighbourhood and tenant programmes that fostered cooperation and the formation of communities on the housing estate and socially responsible sharing of space and caring for it. Educating the tenants and animating various activities in the extensive public spaces (communal house) and common areas (courtyards, green spaces and pathways) proved to be extremely important. This education proved also emancipatory in its nature since it consisted in the production of urban entities—active citizens. In this chapter, I depict the interdisciplinary ambitions of the Żoliborz project, in which architects work together with sociologists, educators, hygienists and urban planners. As a result of these activities, the so-called living culture has been developed. I analyse in detail the concept of ‘socialised individualism’ developed by Barbara Brukalska, as well as the most important guidelines for the design of social housing estates included in her brochure Social rules of housing estates design. I confronted Brukalska’s concept (which I modernised and labelled, after Miessen, as an independent practice) with Helena Syrkus’ vision. Both of them are looking for the estate’s central point: Brukalska calls it ‘estate core’, while Syrkus—‘estate axis’. With Krzysztof Nawratek, I also put forward the thesis that the city must/should provide a kind of ‘empty oppression’. Taking Nawratek’s idea further, I analyse the housing estate’s space in the context of two categories: ‘spaces of interaction’ and ‘spaces of intimacy’. Thanks to this, I avoid using the terms of ‘private’ and ‘public’ and analyse the city itself as a political idea. The space, organised by planners and architects, is a tool that can embody this idea.