At the ground level of the city Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, founders of atelier d’architecture autogéré www.urbantactics.org • Reclaiming the “contemporary city”
In the 1990s, critical debates in architecture and urban development began to take into account the dynamics, mutations and conflicts of life in the “contemporary city”. The term contemporary city itself was coined to differentiate these urban experiences from the troubled “modern city” which had fragmented by its own autonomous processes (Bell, 2004, p.14). Similarities emerged between these debates in architecture and the discussions taking place in contemporary art about the social and spatial dismantling of the “global” city. Common themes emerged; the transformation of urban spaces by “illegal” occupants; the privatisation of public space and the rise of gated communities; the increasingly artificial nature of urban settings and concomitant environmental problems; social and economic fractures affecting the mobility of populations; protest movements, urban actions and so on. These discussions also questioned the part played by artists’ in creating an alternative, a “substitute” city that invents new ways of winning back the contemporary city for its inhabitants (ErsatzStadt, Berlin). These discussions raised the need to restore a sense of the “commons” to the
contemporary city, re-conceptualising public property within what Lars Lerup calls a “sociopolitical ecology” (Lerup, 2004, p.19).
Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu are architects and activists. They have founded atelier d’architecture autogérée
One of the functions of architecture is to provide the tools for the sociopolitical ecology of the contemporary city. Atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) feels that achieving this task is impossible without the initiative and direct participation of the city’s inhabitants. Despite the great progress being made in theoretical debates on this subject, practical experiments in participatory urbanism are still in their infancy. Subsequently, rather than working within the mainstream of the architectural profession, aaa chose to align itself within a critical continuation of spontaneous actions carried out in the 1980s by different groups and inhabitants who reclaimed different ways of living and different social and urban policies. aaa draws inspiration from the squat movement in Germany, Holland and throughout Europe, the interventionist demands and urban movements in the USA and England (Reclaim the Street, Green Guerrilla and The Land Is Ours (TLIO)) the centri sociali in Italy, and also communal experiments such as KraftWerk1 in Zurich and citizen initiatives such as the citizens’ urban development workshops (ateliers
(aaa) in Paris, a collective platform conducting actions and research on urban mutations and emerging practices in the contemporary city, (www.urbantactics.org). aaa 's projects focus on issues of self-organisation and selfmanagement of collective spaces, emerging networks and catalyst urban processes, resistance to profit driven development, recycling and ecologically friendly architectures, collective production of knowledge and alternative culture. Recent projects include ECObox and Passage 56 as well as the trans-local networks PEPRAV (European Platform for Alternative Practice and Research on the City) and Rhyzom (a network of trans-local cultural practices). Currently aaa develops R-Urban, a participative strategy of urban resilience in the metropolitan Paris, through a pilot project supported by the EC innovation programme Life+.
Wood pallets
Plastic bottles
Earth
Gravel
Plastic bottle tops
Plastic buckets
Cardboard boxes
Vegetable waste
An adapted version of this article will be published in De Architect magazine.
Figure 1. Functions in La Chapelle © aaa
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