RC12
Architectures of Participation Adam Greenfield, Usman Haque
Students Wen Cui, Yiying Hao, Baonan Jiao, Yuan-Tse Kao, Moritz Karl, Tianyue Li, Huan Liu, Qingrui Meng, Masayuki Sado, Jiaying Yang, Meiying Yu, Xin Yu, Yu Zhang, Jianing Zheng
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Project teams Group 1 Wen Cui, Yuan-Tse Kao, Tianyue Li, Qingrui Meng Group 2 Huan Liu, Meiying Yu, Xin Yu Group 3 Yiying Hao, Baonan Jiao, Jianing Zheng Group 4 Moritz Maria Karl, Masayuki Sado, Jiaying Yang Group 5 Yu Zhang Thanks to our critics and consultants Saul Albert, Rob Annable, Christopher Burman, Andrew Chetty, Mo-Ling Chui, Stephen Gage, Gyorgyi Galik, Debbi Lander, Elliot Payne, Alison Powell, Ling Tan
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The work of the students in this cluster, as presented in these drawings and diagrams, barely portrays the work that they’ve actually been doing: getting out into the streets, meeting strangers, forming friendships, and working with communities in London neighbourhoods in ways that are unlike anything you might normally expect from an academic Urban Design course. We prioritised engagement over making drawings, so consider these images mere evidence of something that actually occurred somewhere in the city this year. The brief we set for the cluster concerns one of the deepest challenges of living together in cities: How are we supposed to get along with one another? How do we negotiate, how do we deliberate, how do we express ourselves and claim a place amid the scrum? What does it mean to have a voice? And what is the role of a designer in this context? In 1969, at the tail end of a turbulent era, an American social worker named Sherry Arnstein offered her reflections on public power, in the form of something called ‘the ladder of citizen participation.’ This started with frank manipulation, continued through therapy, informing and consultation, and burst through placation into a stratum where ordinary people actually had some ability to shape the conditions of their own existence. She called these situations partnership, delegated power and, at the very apex, citizen control. You don’t have to be a cynic to note that for all the talk of a Big Society, contemporary life in the United Kingdom appears to be stalled at the consultation stage, or maybe even just short of it – between consultation fatigue, incomplete or misleading information, and simple exhaustion, a great many people have clearly checked out. In some way, the entire purpose of this cluster has been to find methods of checking them back in. We asked our students, all of whom came to the UK from other cultures, to work in and with some of the city’s most deprived communities. We charged them to listen, observe, learn, and propose ways in which those communities might take back control over their everyday environment. If those ways involved the latest technology, that was especially interesting – but not necessary. What we were most interested in was whether they could help people unlock their own latent power. And at the same time, whether they could discover within themselves the engaged urban subject that had been there all along.