Welfare Space. On the Role of Welfare State Policies in the Construction of the Contemporary City

WELFARE SPACE On the Role of Welfare State Policies in the Construction of the Contemporary City

Stefano Munarin Maria Chiara Tosi

Foreword

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Introduction

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Welfare State/Welfare Space

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Concepts and questions The Fatigue of Living Welfare and Right to the City Urbanism Interrogated by Welfare Welfare and Relational Practices

Welfare Space/Urban Space

49 Towards New Life Cycles for the Veneto Region?

Equipping the Territory: a School, a Kindergarten, a Sport

Field for Each Bell-towers

Seasons, Players and Forms of Social Welfare

Emerging Phenomena Scenarios Veneto Equipped and Accessible Planning Explorations

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Why Spaces?

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References

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FOREWORD

Coordinated by Stefano Munarin and Maria Chiara Tosi, the research has seen the participation of Ruben Baiocco, Cristina Renzoni (research fellows), Michela Pace (collaborator), Brando Posocco, Elena Gomiero, Laura Bogon, Paola Silvestrini, Alessandro Danese, Maddalena Orsato, Cecilia Luca, Giorgia Ferlin, Sara Peruzzo, Silvia Orso, Serena Marchetto, Federica Nalesso, Giulia Paccagnella, Elisabetta Zamperin (university students who participated in a degree laboratory).

The book is the outcome of a study on the relationship between welfare and city, carried out over the past few years.

Little by little, the reflections that have arisen as a result of the research have been published in various texts: - S. Munarin, M. C. Tosi, “Lo spazio del Welfare in Europa”, Urbanistica, 139, 2009; - S. Munarin, M. C. Tosi, “The Space of Welfare in Europe”, in J. Rosenmann et al. (ed.), The New Urban Question, Papiroz, Rijswijk 2010; - S. Munarin, M.C. Tosi with M. Pace and C. Renzoni, Spazi del welfare.

Esperienze, luoghi pratiche, Quodlibet, Macerata 2011. Some parts of this last book in particular have been taken up and reworded here.

- S. Munarin, V. Martelliano (Eds.), Spazi, storie e soggetti del welfare, Gangemi, Roma, 2012.

The collaborators, final year undergraduates and students of our courses, with whom we have done the work.

Our colleagues and friends from the Department of Culture of the Project of the IUAV University of Venice with whom we had fertile interactions and from whom we received useful suggestions: Carlo Magnani, Paola Viganò, Aldo Aymonino.

Finally, a special thanks goes to Bernardo Secchi, who ten years ago urged us to begin researching these topics.

This book is dedicated to our son, Milo Tobia, who awakened our senses, bringing us to explore and observe the city anew.

Although the responsibility is ours, we would like to thank those who have contributed in various ways to our research and to this book, who have discussed with us the intermediate results and whose observations led us to clarify certain descriptions and hypotheses.

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INTRODUCTION

We had won the war together, together we could win the peace.

We had fought to defeat Hitler and fascism, we now had to fight to defeat poverty (...) never before had the sense of community been felt so strongly, the power of solidarity and of working together to build a more just society (...) If the state had needed everyone’s labour to fight against the Nazis, could we not now all plan to build houses, schools, create a health service to improve our lives?

populations will help to build the city, depositing there facilities and spaces and, conversely, how the city and its various spatial articulations contribute (or fail to contribute) to the well-being of its inhabitants. The reflections offered here are the result of research carried out in recent years, mainly through continuous experimentation with the city: through the analysis of its spaces, the development of projects and the deconstruction of its policies.

Research that took the Italian city and the Veneto region in particular as a case study, and which developed also through the exploration of a number of European cities (Berlin, Stockholm, Bordeaux, Hamburg, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam, Porto), and a literature that necessarily passes through several fields of knowledge.

The book consists of two parts. In the first we attempt to define the concept of “welfare space”, discussing the current value of the concept and its use within a new urban planning strategy. In the second instead, considering the central area of Veneto (comprising Venice, Padua, Treviso and the areas between) as a laboratory and assuming the exploratory nature of the

Ken Loach, The Spirit of ’45, 2013 1. Commenting on the European Union’s reception of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, Jurgen Habermas pointed out how, along with the merit of having achieved peace after repeated fratricidal wars and of having developed the constitutive strength of democracy, the Swedish Committee wanted to reward the third great feat of Europe: its social model based on the welfare state.

This book deals with the relationship between (more or less national) welfare policies and cities, the ways in which the complex set of actions designed to ensure greater well-being to different

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project (De Carlo 1989, Viganò 2010), we analyze the spatial results of the welfare policies that have been enacted here and at the same time, we develop some projects that, starting from the welfare spaces, try to re-imagine the contemporary city in greater totality.

2001), and then experiencing the city again with our child, we often noticed (especially in Italy) not so much a lack of services but rather their incorrect localisation, a lack of any relation of the welfare facilities to the other public spaces, an ‘introverted’ organisation that reduces their potential as gathering points, making these facilities more awkward and difficult to use in daily practice. This kind of attention has highlighted the “difficulty of living” the contemporary Italian city, the sometimes exaggerated effort its inhabitants must make to carry out simple routine practices, and a contemporary spatial poverty (Bourdieu 1993) characterising the living places - a poverty which is both symbolic and material. The confluence of these two conditions has provoked over the last few decades the progressive impoverishment of the city and of the occasions and opportunities of being in public, amplifying the distance between the comforts of the interior spaces of our homes and the inhospitality of the external environment: “the windows of luxuriously decorated homes gaze upon the windows of homes just a few metres away. Outside the door, a stairway and hall lead to an anonymous, nondescript road, with two concrete sidewalks and a ribbon of asphalt packed with cars, some parked, others in transit” (Benevolo 2011, 70).

4. The misery of the urban spaces as well as of the landscape, their resistance to the normal unfolding of our daily lives, has gradually weakened the right to the city (Lefebvre 1968), the right to live in a comfortable, healthy

2. Recognizing the erosion which the term welfare state has undergone in recent decades, a process of misrepresentation and emptying of meaning that made it almost unpresentable today, research is based on the assumption that, trying to establish new “connections of meaning” (Zagrebelsky 2010), this term could be still a useful operative concept: useful because capable of illumining the settling phenomena by reflecting mainly on “collective well-being” rather than on individual well-being - already a muchstudied entity in our “individualistic society” - by paying attention to public spaces more than private buildings.

3. So, accompanied by a parallel work of reflection on the term welfare state, the research placed at its centre the direct observation, on the one hand, of the practice of daily usage of services and equipment by those who inhabit our cities, on the other, of the physical/ material support on which these practices rest, i.e. the sum total of spaces and facilities that allow such practices to be carried out: an observation thus of the practices and spaces of welfare.

First working on some cit y plans (Brescia, Pesaro, Macerata, Belluno, Ferrara and Venice) and analysing the Italian territory (Munarin and Tosi

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and safe city, establishing an important link between spatial misery and injustice (Soja 2010, Secchi 2013). Since it is not a question of “great misery”, of a radical material poverty, but of “the misery of position”, that is, that set of difficulties and frustrations one clashes with daily while using the city, the injustice of the spaces we live in grows ever greater, those spaces that reveal themselves more and more averse to accommodating its various groups of inhabitants. The definition of “spatial injustice” comprises diverse aspects, some of which seem particularly significant: “injustice in mobility” with the prevalence, not to say monopoly, of the car, capable of establishing generational gaps (penalising children, elderly and disabled persons) as well as economic ones (indirectly, of ethnic and social class); “the pulverisation of criticalities”, with the territorial and social system of family networks that seems to absorb difficulties (inequalities, poverty and crisis) but actually distributes and hides them inside the home. All this has led us to reflect on “urban infrastructure”, on what does not create individual wealth directly but contributes to the collective wellbeing (gauged in terms of comfort, health and safety), recognizing that if we look at the city as infrastructure we discover strong ties with welfare policies and are driven to recognise that the modern and contemporary city is characterized also by a physical repository for these same policies. From here one can perhaps start to reconsider the city as an “instrument of coexistence”, a tool that leads us to share experiences by

allowing us to learn to live with others: it does not guarantee the result but obliges us to play the game.

5. The attention given to the relationship between welfare policies and the city has requested in the past, and is demanding even more urgently today a reformulation of the received wisdom and practices of urban planning, with a view to improving their capacity to grasp, through the project, the link between the progressive impoverishment of urban spaces and the compression of citizens’ rights.

A reformulation in line with the hope expressed recently by Susan Fainstein: “It is my hope to shift the conversation within discussion of planning and public policy toward the character of urban areas, lessen the focus on process that has become dominant within planning theory, and redirect practitioners from their obsession with economic development to a concern with social equity” (Fainstein 2010, 19). Thus, a reformulation with the aim of participating in creating a ‘scenography’ that lessens the fatigue of living together. Without seeking to draw up a new complete theory of the just city: rather, making proposals to help make the city less unjust (Sen 2009).

6. Significant and recurring aspects in the relationship between the inadequacy of the spaces and the innovation of practices have led us to identify some themes which the project must necessarily address. What has emerged is a kind of dual movement: on the one hand, social practices claiming greater welfare in the use of urban

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space, and on the other, the project which, trying to handle these claims with greater competence and accuracy, focuses more on the quality of the space that “holds together the facilities” and that “relates the services and practices” more than on the quality of the individual buildings. A project that brings attention to the “sequence of spaces” rather than to the facilities they contain, to the “relational systems” that make the city safe, healthy and comfortable “for all stages of life” (Mumford 1949). A project interested in developing the right to live and move in a public space that is free, collective and serendipitous, interested in developing the “logistical essentiality” and the “sustainable spatiality of the city” (Bollea 2005), of an urban space that becomes, by implication, “educational” of the rights and duties of coexistence and citizenship. A project for which the urban planner is called once again to go through the arena of “public space”, trying to enkindle a virtuous synergy between the planning of the space, the forms of active participation and the social policies and policies of service to the citizen. An integration often evoked or spoken-of but that, in fact, seems to be practiced little, favouring instead forms of a sectorialisation and fragmentation not just of the fields of responsibility but above all of the results and the “material deposits” left in the territory.

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7. A research which is both analytical and design-related, which tried to reflect on the relationship between welfare policies and the city as a socially-relevant matter, interested in restoring legitimacy to welfare policies, even to their “utopian core” (Habermas 1998) and at the same time to urban planning, which in terms of “social legitimacy” is not much better off.

A collective research “on welfare” that has sought to focus on a limited, specific issue: that of reading and interpreting “welfare spaces” as instruments of social cohesion between the individual and collective spheres. An issue we do not consider more relevant than others (such as, for instance, the role of the third sector, the new forms of inequality and poverty, etc.), studied and practised by other research groups (Saraceno 2006, De Leonardis 2002, Karrer, Ricci 2003) but that today seems left on the sidelines and which we have felt it rather useful to take up again, hoping that it will not be confused with the current flood of projects concerned with “beautifying” and “decorating” the public space (Bianchetti 2011).

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Pictures

Edited by Stefano Munarin and Maria Chiara Tosi

Pag. 8 Chinese wedding, Bissuola park - Mestre Pag. 12 Neighborhood park - Stockolm Pag. 16 Kindergarten - Bordeaux Pag. 22 New forest - Mestre Pag. 28 Park along the Sile river - Treviso Pag. 34 Civic center - New Castle Upon Tyne Pag. 41 National Museum of Scotland - Edinburgh Pag. 42 Playground - Copenhagen Pag. 47 Urban Park - Paris Pag. 50 Playground - Edinburgh Pag. 53 Rugby fields – Casale sul Sile - Treviso Pag. 57 Playground - Amsterdam Pag. 58-59 Roman grid - S. Maria di Sala - Venice Pag. 66-67 Settlement along the road Pag. 76-77 Caltana - Venice Pag. 78 Ca’ Pesaro Museum - Venice Pag. 92-93 Vigonza - Padua Pag. 94 Neighborhood street - Amsterdam Pag. 97 Football fields - Copenhagen Pag. 114-115 Oriago - Venice Pag. 118 Welfare Spaces, collage

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Translations Just!Venice

Aereal View Paolo de Stefano Pictures Stefano Munarin

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