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Description

The round table explores the reasons and motivations underlying the current interest in participatory practices that occurred in the second half of the 20th century, to acknowledge this period as a field of investigation on its own and to point out some of the particular historiographic problems that it raises.

In recent decades, especially after the global financial crisis of 2008, collaborative architecture, as a global phenomenon, has regained strength and is being researched, recorded, and cataloged to shed light on alternative ways to intervene in the built environment. However, recent participation practices have also tended to be instrumentalized by urban policies and, at times, even perverted. But, as historians are committed to the task of excavating the past to question the present and nourish the future, participatory practices may be revisited and investigated from multiple perspectives and temporal frames since the genealogy of participation in architecture spans across transnational networks, geographies, and various historicist narrations shaping the discourse on the role of architecture as social practice in the future of socio-spatial justice, global urbanization, and environmental decay. Historical investigations of such projects open the field of consideration of architecture in a way that might provide lessons for more conventional histories of architecture.

In particular, the period between 1968 and 1989, is often referred to as a threshold after which participation is more commonly recognized in practices of dweller-control, community-led or aided self-help architecture. This architecture has been long enough inhabited, transformed, glorified, and mystified to be nowadays re-approached with a critical and comprehensive lens. Therefore, rather than viewing histories of participation in architecture as a collection of isolated and innovative experiments, this roundtable discusses this topic as a method with roots in various social, biographical and historical contexts.  How this is made visible in the historiography focused on participation is one of the main interests of the debate we pursue, since this might provide lessons and new challenges to the architectural field. 

In the opening the debate, we will present four studies of past experiences where inhabitants, citizens and other laymen took part in the construction and/or planning of the built environment. The following discussion will reflect on both historical importance and contemporary research issues related to architecture and urban planning realized with community engagement, co-design and self-construction, polemicizing, for example, the sense of belonging and the redistribution of power relations that these practices can propel, questions of memory, protection and evaluation of living environments that resulted from these practices, or the impact of transnational connections in the evolution of the participation in architecture.

SAH Connects is a suitable tool for raising attention to the following questions:
Why are we dealing with participation from a historical perspective? Why and how are we writing the histories of participation? What meanings can be given to the term ‘participation’? And if these histories are polyvocal, reflecting the diverse approaches to participation that emerge as a challenge for contemporary research, how to include different voices, perspectives and criticism in historiography we generate. This will be an opportunity to rethink who gets to tell the story of participation, why and how researchers engage with reconsidering the social purpose of architectural practice, and what are the limits of our practices of research. 

The selected panelists will present their particular approaches to the key actors and episodes of participative processes, outcomes, lived-in experiences, and current perspectives. Overall, the moderated event would create a critical platform for the community of architectural historians to debate on the possibility of a genealogy of participation, as an exercise to questioning notions such as tradition, innovation, continuity, disruption and addressing the ideas of assemblage, complexity and its implications. It will help to understand the difficulties of researching the field and open a debate on the inclusivity of architectural history.

In sum, each of the four-panel members will present complementary and particular participatory practices as unfinished histories with non-western, feminist and grounded approaches. Moreover, the panelist, who engage in their research with primary sources such as archival records, professional journals and magazines, video and sound recordings, and oral histories, will further extend on their methods of investigation and interpretation of these micro-histories providing the base for a dialogue on the different ways participation can be understood, investigated and implemented.

Participants

MODERATOR

Alberto Franchini, PhD
Technical University of Munich (TUM)

MODERATOR

Marta Serra Permanyer
Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura del Vallès (ETSAV)

 

PANELIST

Elodie Degavre
UCLouvain, Belgium

PANELIST

Kathrin Golda-Pongratz
UPC-ETSAV, Barcelona, Spain

PANELIST

José António Bandeirinha
Coimbra University, Portugal

PANELIST

Jere Kuzmanić
Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura del Vallès (ETSAV)

 

Biographies

Alberto Franchini

Alberto Franchini has been a research assistant at the Chair of Modern Heritage Conservation since February 2024. His research is focused on understanding the role of the user in the design and modification of the built heritage. From 2021 to 2023 he was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Architecture Museum of TUM (Technischen Universität München). From 2019 to 2021 he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Archive of the Modern (USI), and from 2020 to 2022 he held teaching positions at Milan Polytechnic. He received his PhD in History of Architecture and Urban Planning from the IUAV University of Venice in 2019 with a thesis on Giancarlo De Carlo (awarded the L'ERMA-C Prize and published in 2020).

Marta Serra Permanyer

Marta Serra (Barcelona) is associate professor and Serra-Húnter fellow in the Department of Theory and History of Architecture and Communication Techniques (THATC) at the Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV), Polytechnic University of Catalonia – BarcelonaTech (UPC). She belongs to the research group Architecture, City and Culture: Reality and Transformation of Contemporary Urban Space (ACC). Her dissertation (2014) includes public space politics, artistic spatial practices and critical historiography on contemporary urban history. In education, she works from methodologies such as Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Service-Learning. Her field of study has been focusing on theory, history and practice of community engagement in architecture and urbanism, covering the complex range of nuances between the autonomy of the user and the social responsibility of the architectural profession. Most recently, her research also tackles socio-spatial phenomena of urban vulnerability, exclusion of minorities and marginalization, popular plans, women in urban social movements and oral history.

Elodie Degavre

Elodie Degavre is an architect, teacher, and cinema director. She graduated from ISACF La Cambre (2006), where she taught until 2018. She then joined the “Uses&Spaces” team at UCLouvain, Belgium. In 2006 she joined the architectural firm Vers Plus de Bien-être, before joining A Practice in 2016. She regularly collaborates with the magazine A+ Architecture in Belgium. Between 2016 and 2022, Elodie Degavre made the documentary film “La vie en kit”, on the work of several figures of the community architecture movement in Benelux, including Atelier Kroll. Winner of the 2019 Duyver Prize for this transdisciplinary work-in-progress, she received the Audience Award from the Brussels International Art Film Festival in 2022 and the Wernaers Prize (FNRS) for Scientific Popularization in 2023.

Kathrin Golda Pongratz

Kathrin Golda Pongratz is an architect (Technical University of Munich TUM), doctor in architecture and urban planning (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT), urban researcher, photographer, and curator. She is a lecturer at the Departament d’Urbanisme, Territori i Paisatge (DUTP) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech and a member of the Laboratori d’Urbanisme (LUB). Her research is focused on urban history and memory, with specific attention to the Hispano-American context, self-built architecture and the work of John F. Turner. Director of the documentary “Ciudad Infinita – Voces de El Ermitaño” (2018), about the memory of a self-built neighbourhood in Lima (Peru).

José António Bandeirinha

José António Bandeirinha is full professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Coimbra, where he completed his PhD in 2002 entitled "The SAAL process and the architecture in April 25th 1974". He was the scientific consultant of the exhibition "The SAAL Process Architecture and Participation 1974-1976", curated by Delfim Sardo and organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Oporto, Portugal, in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, Canada (2014-2015). He is a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. José António Bandeirinha had been continuously working on the urban and architectural consequences of political procedures, mainly focusing on the Portuguese 20th century's reality.

Jere Kuzmanić

Jere Kuzmanić (Split / Barcelona) is a researcher and doctoral candidate since 2021 at the UPC Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech, researching the history of proto-ecological urbanism with prof. José Luis Oyón as a tutor with the support of an FPU scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Education. Teaching and assisting various courses at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura del Vallés - UPC. As an author and collaborator, participated in a series of scientific, professional and activist investigations in the field of urban planning and critical urban studies with a particular interest in social and environmental justice, direct action and cooperation in urbanism and urban degrowth. Board member of Universitat Popular Autogestionada. Overall, an experienced urbanist and researcher with a demonstrated history of working in academic and cultural institutions.