Design Documents - Dennis Kaspori & Jeanne van Heeswijk

Dennis Kaspori & Jeanne van Heeswijk

Dennis Kaspori: Hi, Thanks for the invitation to the Design Documents Seminar.

In talking about collaboration today, I'd like to start with a bit of theoretical background, but keep it short, then I would like to present a project that I did together with Jeanne van Heeswijk and this project has at its center collaboration in one of the most complex fields there is for collaboration and that is urban renewal. For me the idea of collaboration started a few years ago by writing an article called Open Source Architecture, which is not about media but is about physical architecture. The article addressed for me the necessity of collaboration for architecture. It is not only the idea of collaboration as something interesting but as well it is necessary, especially for architects to maintain a collaboration and develop a knowledge base that allows them to develop their creative edge, while in a field I think is dominated by economy.

From working on ideas like that I stumbled upon Jeanne and she invited me to join the Face Your World project, which is actually a hands on project dealing with collaboration in areas of urban renewal. So from two years of theory I entered the field of practice. Together we have been working on the Face Your World project for nine months. We started in January in Amsterdam in Slotervaart, which makes up part of the western cities. It is one of the post war urban schemes that were built and it is currently up for urban renewal. The urban renewal in this area is a vast operation dealing with more than 50,000 houses.

To give you an idea of the project we are showing these pictures about the project on the screen. We began in January starting with two groups of participants. One group is a group of youngsters, kids from school, and the other group is the main inhabitants of the area. And we were given the task to design a new park for this area, the park that would be the center, the heart of the new neighborhood. This is a follow up on a project that Jeanne did in Columbus Ohio and she will discuss a bit about that project.

Jeanne van Heeswijk: Yes, Face Your World [1.0] was first developed in collaboration with the Wexner Center in Columbus Ohio. The idea for Face Your World is actually really simple: find a way to connect, or meaningfully connect people with their environments within which they are living in, their daily environment. Today, you could say in contemporary society, more and more people lack the ability to face; literally to give a face to the conditions they are living in, and because of that impossibility to feel that they are part of the creation of their public space they then decided to drop out. More and more you see people becoming alienated from processes of not only urban renewal, but also simple processes associated to the public domain. Face Your World was created to help people, to assist people, in getting a grip and once again becoming a player in their surroundings. Face Your World literally means; stand still, where you are, look where you are, give an image to the place where you are, give it a face, and face it.

To enable this process we developed software, which we called the interactor, it is not a game like some people believe, it is a tool, a set of tools that allows people to very quickly get access to processes of design, processes of inhabitation, processes of formation of public space. Basically it is a multi-user environment projected in a 3D photo-realistic program of the neighborhood they live in and while in the setting of their neighborhood they are allowed to make different decisions about changing their neighborhood. They can add things, throw things away, and also they have digital cameras so they can go outside take pictures of what they think they need, as well as take images from the internet, and start placing that material into their environment, and begin a process of shaping that environment.

The project in Columbus, Ohio incorporated city busses as its main mode of interacting with the public, from that work a commission was granted to actually develop the interactor to a more full-blown useable model, for young people to learn about public space and about citizenships. To take part in public space and in the construction of space also means you are going to be involved in processes of being a citizen. That was the mandate.

First we began, on the one hand to develop the software for Face Your World 2.0, 1.0 was built in conjunction with V2, Anna [Nigten] probably still remembers, and the second version we worked with Marco Christus, the programmer and with Ijsfontein as a team to develop the software. Those were the programmers and we never had the problems Victoria [Donkersloot] mentioned about the creative and the programming side, we worked very closely together because in developing the project we worked with a team of over 55 people. I think you should keep that in mind. This also includes very simple programmers, educational people, people that write curriculums, people that specialize in philosophy, architects, city planners, local experts, and so and so and so on. All of these people were used to create this new version. The new version is the software and at the same time a location based program. The location we incorporated was called the Urban Lab or Stedelijk Lab.

Kaspori: So version 1 was about the interactor the software and that has been developed further, but the second part we introduced for the Slotervaart version of Face Your World was a second model that we called the Urban Lab and that is a physical space. So we have the two, a virtual space coupled to a physical space where we could actually meet with the community in order to talk with them and discuss the issues and topics through different events like this presentation day you see now on the screen.

In the Urban Lab you could also work with the interactor, but I think the physical space or perhaps the presence was a very important element that we added to the version 1. The lab gave us a presence and a starting point to begin work, and the space is actually on the spot where the park would be realized in the next few years. There is a direct relationship with the community and also with the physical site that we were working on.

Heeswijk: I think that is also an aspect of the way a project develops. When we did the Face Your World version 1.0, we thought it was very interesting that young people worked on the computer re-imagining their neighborhood their city or their city park. But it lacked a mandate, a mandate to actually help assist people in re-connecting to the spaces they inhabit, there needed to be a mandate to make change. So for us it was very important to combine the interactor with the Urban Lab, which actually worked quite well, because it was on the location where the park was going to be built, so there was a very interesting connection between the virtual and real world. For instance if you made a change in your computer you could literally compare that with the outside, or for example further in the process, the area around the lab which was a vacant territory, we started to use that as a test field to try things out; how does a certain structure look if it were built like it was in the interactor. This combination between the virtual and the real world and the interplay; back and forth, I think that is very important. It also allowed for the community to take notice of the process of re-imagining.

What was also happening in parallel to the young people working, in groups for four hours each week, was that their working process was made completely visible, public. So their fathers, their brothers, their mothers, the people that would use the park in the future could actually come and assist them with their opinions, with their ideas, with the do's and don'ts. In this situation the entire process of imagination became a public platform. This combination is very important, having the virtual world image played against the real world to check, while at the same time having a location to make all of that public and distribute the ideas for immediate feedback.

Kaspori: Not only to give feedback, but also to illustrate that change is actually possible, because with these urban renewal schemes they are very complex processes taking 20 to 30 years. The people we were working with really didn't even know what was going to happen at this location. They'd already seen several different plans, each plan being dismissed after a couple months or a couple of years. So the people really had no clue what was going to happen and when we started they were totally numb; on the one hand not believing anything would change but on the other hand living with a constant feeling that they would have to move the very next week. In that sense, being there and also creating the testing field outside gave them the idea that there was still a possibility to make change. In this time of waiting the area around the Stedelijk Lab was already beginning to deteriorate, but actually digging up this area and making it something that looks nice and can be used already gave the people a better idea of what could happen and that they could be involved in the process.

Heeswijk: Of course in the beginning we faced quite a lot of skepticism, we should be quite honest about that. From the first day we moved the computers into the lab we had a break in, but that is how things happen. However these are also processes of territory which are very much happening in the "real" world, for instance if you would look at the whole process as a sort of game then it was a TOTAL fight of not only dealing with the skepticism from the commissioners of the project but also dealing with the skepticism from the neighborhood, who were totally loaded with aggression against anything that had to do with changing their neighborhood, and this came out of frustration.

Our challenge was to figure out how to slowly re-load these people become part of their process of change. And like we said, the location was very important and what was also very important was that we really got the commission to design the park. We were not making fake designs that would be hung around the city or in city councils halls as images with captions stating how beautiful the images were. No. WE ARE DESIGNING THE PARK. You are influencing the park; you are a co-curator of the park. As well the whole process of co-curating you could see how some of the kids, like Samir, here up on the screen, is explaining to the management group that there are other notions of safety than their own that might be prevalent. Or how Samir as a designer has to deal with the management group's notions of safety, and how he cannot or can work with those notions.

At present we are very happy that the city council is going to realize the final proposal. We know that they are going to build it, which was the biggest worry. Would the city council drop the mandate we have. But not only that while we were working with the interactor and the urban lab we proposed another project that we call Urban Workshops.

Kaspori: Yes, in that sense you begin to see that this can take on this open source model that begins with something small and begins to get bigger and bigger creating a life of its own. Jeanne as the initiator of the project and in version 2 I stepped in and in version 3 probably many other people will step in. During the process of designing the park we saw that it would be a real shame to stop the process we began. Stop the process, hand in the design, move to another location and do the same trick again, for instance. But instead we thought it would be interesting to take that existing commitment with the community and further develop the process into the building stage and the maintenance stage of the park. So that is when we...

[Audio drop out 5:31:00 – 5:40:18]

Heeswijk: I mean this is of course what Dennis started off with, if you look at the whole process of urban renewal in the Netherlands, many of these plans are partly decided in '87 with the decision to deal with the post-war neighborhoods in the Netherlands on the one hand and building new high density neighborhoods on the other hand, know as Phoenix locations, but this process was decided in 1987. 1987 is almost 20 years ago. With this decision came ideas of how our future neighborhoods and cities should look, what were the qualities we would need. After '87 this process began in Slotervaart...

[Audio drop out 5:41:24 – 5:43:17]

...To leave that person outside of the re-development process is really bad. So we engage the neighborhood now, for lets say one year, but with the coming Urban Workshops we can engage the community for at least another two years. Together we take three years out of this ten-year process. Ideally I think we should work the entire ten years with these people, but I think three years is quite a good start.

Question [Todd Matsumoto]: The question was meant to say how one project is small and one project is large. But instead to put into perspective what the time frames are for all of these things. In fact I think that it is also interesting that you can get a project, you can get an urban development project done in a year or two years; why do they take 20 years? It's that kind of thing, and I'm just wondering about that process.

Kaspori: But we're not finished in two years. The park will take five or six years. I mean we can try to break open the process, but we cannot change the slowness of the whole process.

Question [Mckenzie Wark]: I'd be curious to know if there were surprises considering what people wanted.

Heeswijk/Kaspori: Yeah.

Question [Mckenzie Wark]: And can you give an example, because the thing about architects is your supposed to know stuff about what people want, I wonder what the surprises are that can change the practice.

Kaspori: First of all the assignment we got, was an assignment for a park. So that is mainly grass and trees and when we started to talk with people they only talked about amenities, like shopping centers. But there is a real lack of amenities in the neighborhood, there is nothing. I mean there is open space and that is it. So participants used this project as a chance to talk about that lack. What we tried to do was to use some of these ideas for amenities as well as the park maintenance and that is why we came up with this idea of an urban landscape layer. We tried to infuse the urban objects and the urban amenities into the park. That was a big change and at a certain point it was a real struggle to keep some of the park.

Heeswijk: I think one of the other things that is a part of this major discussion, for instance we have this word in Dutch "kijk groen", viewing green, this is green especially in the westerlijk tuin steden [the western garden cities], it is full of green that is meant to look at, and the group said at a certain point, we don't need that kind of kijk groen, we need "doe groen" [do green], and doe groen is green with an added amenity. So then we started to look into green with an added amenity, what are doe boomen [do trees], how does that look? How could you use green in a way to deal with the lack of amenities, in order to bring to the area some necessary facilities into the park.

Another thing that is very important, sure they come up with a lot of things you and I would come up with, yes we need benches, we need garbage cans, we need swings, we need a fountain, we need a place to picnic, we need a chill place; these places everybody would mention, but I think it is much more the way they described, or drew, or mentioned the use and the functionality that made a big difference. You can see the cultural diversification of the neighborhood through the way that they describe the necessary objects and functions in the park.

Kaspori: And the inventiveness of trying to deal with these problems; on the one hand a lot of amenities, on the other keeping the image of a park, which inspired the term doe groen. Also the idea that they wanted to have somebody in the park, a person who overlooked the park a person who could lend things out like equipment. But we were not allowed to build on the site and that is when they came up with an idea for making the park hollow; which is not a building but at the same time it is hollow.

Question [Femke Snelting]: In relation to the title of this conference Design Documents, when you step into the great tradition of urban planning in the Netherlands you also begin to deal with the idea of consensus, and how negotiation processes work in a particular way. I mean if you talk about the traditions from '87, this is very specific for how Dutch urban environment decisions are made. I'm curious about how decision processes are different from that or change because of your approach. And how this process of negotiation and decision-making is made transparent and understandable for people that are involved in it.

Heeswijk: There are two sides of the question. I will take the neighborhood side. If you talk about these kinds of processes I think it is possible, and this is something I believe, to have more inclusive methods of collaboration and designing which are not only based on consensus. I think that you constantly have to strive to create models to make that work. And like we on location, we made a sort of double shift; a, we worked closely with a group of students ages 11 to 14, from the neighborhood weekly as part of their school curriculum. These students they had to come four hours so they had to participate, so this wasn't voluntary, but a military order. But of course because they have their friends and their brothers and their mom's and if you design you have to know for whom you are designing. Who is the user group of your design? So you have to start talking to people and that of course is the group of people around us from the neighborhood. These people became involved by means of the young designers, and they eventually came to the Urban Lab to talk. We showed them what the kids were doing and we facilitated these processes of action and reaction. So for us in the design process, we tried to be as public as possible. You might say that the more people speak, the more consensuses you get, but I believe it is the other way around. The more you put people into a room and say, okay here we have three designs, make a decision, then you get a consensus model. And that is the problem of most urban renewal processes is the "insprak" [speaking into, participation], is always organized in a specific way; a group gets presented a few ideas and can make a decision between some ideas. They are not asked what their idea is; they are presented with ideas and to make a choice. So in the situation of making a collective choice lies much more the consensus rather than working collectively on a design. Because in that situation you must argue and form alliances and that is a different process than what they could learn from the design process. And I think Slotervaart learned a lot from this process and if you want people to come it is very stupid to have an "insprak avond" [speaking in night] on Thursday evening at 8:00, because for the simple fact that a Moroccan mother with seven kids must be at home to cook food. So if you want to talk to her that is not the right time, you have to ask her at another time. To have a more open process that allows people to just step in and facilitate the fact that they can have an opinion, I think that is the most important.

Kaspori: Yeah, I think talking about consensus is really difficult in discussing urban planning right now, I mean you also see it on a national level where we have a tradition of changing national policies every ten years, like the national planning on Phoenix is probably the most famous example, there is a kind of in pass on this top down planning because they've tried a fifth policy but somehow we weren't able to finish it and for the sixth one they completely cancelled. There is a real problem now with this kind of top down consensus model, and I think what we are showing is that it is not about consensus because consensus seems to be a time when you are finished with your work and then trying to arrange agreement. So it isn't about creating consensus, it is about creating understanding.

Heeswijk: And it is about mutual learning.

Question [Anne Nigten]: In the realm of today's seminar I think your project is one of the good practice examples and I am really impressed about the entire enterprise, but maybe you could say something about your general approach. Because so far we've seen how you've dealt with a very extensive participatory design approach, but I'm curious to hear, especially from you Jeanne, what kind of model master plan is behind this 50-person enterprise.

Heeswijk: I think a few things are important in these kinds of artistic processes, and one thing is to find people who you can connect with. So that is very important, I mean we [Dennis Kaspori] as a working team are a match made in heaven; I'm happily married. But it doesn't always work. Sometimes you find people who feel the same urge to work with you on a certain project and that is very important, but what is also very important is to allow to not have a master plan, by that I mean to allow others to become full participants. That means to allow other people to take over parts of what is happening, otherwise you do the same as what the others are doing with this top down planning approach. So if you don't allow for the project to be inclusive then you have a problem. In our case one of things that turned out to be a good collaboration, but was very difficult was the first group of boys in the neighborhood, from about 17 to 21, young men, who were very territorial and had a very big territorial influence. At the beginning of our project they rejected any new element in the neighborhood. But because they were very curious and also very upset about current processes going on with "their people" as they would call them, they slowly came around and finally said okay we only want to collaborate if we are fully involved. And then at that moment we have to open up the team.

Kaspori: I think that is what makes this a unique project and if done somewhere else the results would be totally different. In the end you want participation, you want to be dependent on the input from people and you can't know before what that input will be. The importance of the project is not to come up with a management structure for dealing with people and therefore dealing with process but instead giving tools. So it is the tools that are important and developing the tools further.

Question [Anne Nigten]: I would argue that empowering you collaborator is a very strategic management decision.

Kaspori: It is. But it is not a format.

Question [Anne Nigten]: No I didn't mean as a blueprint, I think it is interesting not only to hear about failing or hampering experiences but also about the ones that seem to work very well.

Heeswijk: Yeah I think that is very important theme in your master plan, if you have one, and that is to leave the right to fail but also the right to have success and that success you must also be ready for. For instance when I approached Dennis to come and work at the lab for three hours a week, it quickly turned out to be three days a week for six months, and in the last weeks it was working for five or six days constantly on location, because the process became much more intensive then we at first imagined. And I think then you have to be ready to do that, and you have to be ready to clear the agenda if necessary, getting ready for failing but also getting ready for success; and take that opportunity.

Question: Dennis I have a question for you, you started off by saying that you thought there was a necessity for architects to collaborate and I was wondering if you could tell us something more about the interaction between the children and the architect, how was that interaction.

Kaspori: Well in that sense the interaction wasn't so much between me as an architect, but more between them and the community. We had a lot of intensive talks with the community about what they wanted in the park and we fed that information into the classes with the school kids, so the kids knew what the community wanted and then they tried to come up with designs for that. We were facilitating that process, so the design was mostly in the hands of the youngsters.

Heeswijk: You should see that really as it was. It isn't as if when everything was finished that Dennis would do his trick and make an architectural plan. They made the plan, and I still remember you saying [Dennis Kaspori] "I have to teach fourteen year olds in six months what I needed six years in Delft for, how can I teach them enough tools and knowledge to be able to make that design".

Question [follow up]: Sometimes you have to say that can't happen. I can understand that there can't be two mills in the park, so there has to be a final plan, which the architect wants to make.

Kaspori: In the traditional sense there is no final plan. We divided the preliminary design into two levels, one the landscape and infrastructural level and the second level, urban objects. But these two levels are still flexible in relation to each other. So most of the design work on the objects still has to be done by the youngsters.

Heeswijk: Also all of these modes of negotiation, which they had to do, and our software tool, the interactor there was a specific module about negotiation. So if there were a conflict of interest, they had to negotiate. Lets say they had a conflict about 7 mills and three fountains they not only had a conflict with each other but as well with the project requirements that were given with the project. And at the beginning we mentioned one very poignant project requirement, which was: it is a park. It is not a new shopping mall. But even with that they managed to quite happily tweak this requirement to find very interesting ways to escape the no building policy of the park. There were very good reasons to divert from the project requirements as given by the city government, this became clear with the location of the playground, where the kids and their mothers made very good reasons to break the project requirements in order to move the playground. With that we went back to the city to counter argue the project requirements, and in two places the city agreed to adapt the requirements. So they went pretty far, because normally the project requirements are holy.

Kaspori: For that we mainly acted as facilitators for the process not as a traditional designer. You also saw this happening while being on the side and working in the gymnasium, the urban lab, we discovered that the floor of the gymnasium was on a scale 1 to 5 to the actual park. Discovering that and showing that to the kids really gave them some insight in what they could do with the park, because at that point a normal ruler suddenly became a kid, so they could actually face themselves within the park. And that was kind of the idea, that we built upon and that we used to empower them as possible designers.