Doina Petrescu

Architecture and participation

Edited with Peter Blundell Jones and Doina Petrescu. A collection of essays setting out the whys and hows of new approaches to participation. Chapters include work by Jon Broome, Giancarlo de Carlo, CHORA, and my two fellow editors.

Co-producing commons-based resilience: lessons from R-Urban

The co-production of resilience in European urban neighbourhoods is explored based on the experiences from a case study. Within the current ‘resilience imperative’, co-production processes involving multiple stakeholders can be a key factor for increasing cities’ resilience. Co-produced resilience processes are more successful when embedded in collaborative forms of governance such as those associated with urban commons and when fulfilling needed roles with a community. Through the application of the R-Urban approach in a neighbourhood of Colombes (near Paris), the co-production of a commons-based resilience strategy is described. This involved a group of designers as initiators and a number of citizen as stakeholders of a network of civic hubs. The specific strategies involving a participatory setting, collective governance aspects and circular economies are analysed in the light of co-production theories and practices. Internal and external challenges are identified within the implementation process. The nature of conflicts and negotiations in this co-production approach are discussed, and the role of the architects/designers as agents within the process is investigated. Reflections from this example are provided on the limits and promises of this approach and the lessons learned from R-Urban for collaborative civic resilience.

Co-producing neighbourhood resilience

The global climate events of 2015 saw the highest level of ocean warming on record, the most extensive melting of winter sea ice in the Arctic and, consequentially, a billion people in South Asia suffering from an unprecedented heat wave (World Metrological Organisation (WMO), 2016). This increasing visibility of climate change impacts has brought the question of how to evolve more sustainable and resilient urban communities into sharp focus. Sustainability and resilience are two very different and competing concepts. Whereas sustainability can be broadly defined as the capability of human communities to improve the local quality of life while remaining within the environmental carrying capacity (Gibberd, 2015), the authors of this special issue see resilience as being more focused on the capabilities and capacities of human communities to thrive in response to uncertainty, threats, disturbances and shocks (e.g., rapid climate change and its impacts) (Brown, Kraftl, & Pickerill, 2012). This extends beyond more traditional mechanistic definitions of social resilience within the framework of socio-ecological systems theory (Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004) towards a definition of social resilience within a theory of empowerment (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2013), including the ability of individuals, and the communities they live in, to develop the capacities needed to promote social justice in relation to any resilient strategies (Maguire & Cartwright, 2008). The rate at which the Anthropocene is transforming our planet demands a new paradigm for how we understand our role as humans in the world in order fundamentally to readdress currently dysfunctional social and organizational values, relationships and actions (du Plessis, 2012). This in turn demands new approaches to developing our governance of urban production processes and is essential if we are to contain the global warming within a range 1.5– 2.08C in order to prevent irreversible and truly catastrophic changes (COP21).

Co-design and urban resilience: visioning tools for commoning resilience practices

Abstract In response to the environmental and social challenges of an uncertain future, practitioners and communities across Europe and beyond have started to engage with the concept of ‘resilience’ and experiment with forms of local resilience. However, many of these initiatives tend to remain localised, isolated projects, with little capacity to instigate broader change and at risk to disappear by not having the means to become sustainable in the longer term. We suggest that one way of sustaining and scaling local resilience practices is by developing digital tools that could enable connections and knowledge sharing across locations, through commoning in the digital realm. In this paper, we introduce the specific co-design process we devised with the aim to develop an initial ‘brief’ for potential tools. By creating a co-design process that is situated, mediated, networked and open-source, we argue that the commoning process initiated in this project has the potential to evolve and expand, beyond the project time and initial user base—an essential quality in the context of collectively enhancing urban resilience through knowledge sharing and mutual support.

Jardinières du commun

L’article aborde la question de la reinvention du commun comme un travail relationnel et differencie dans lequel la subjectivite feminine a un role actif a jouer. Elle montre que ce travail de reconquete, de reappropriation et de reconstruction a besoin de situations specifiques ou il puisse s’agencer, d’espaces actifs, mais aussi de personnes actives, d’agents, de sujets porteurs de cette reinvention. Fonde sur des observations puisees de l’experience de l’auteur comme membre de l’atelier d’architecture autogeree, l’article parle de ce processus de reinvention du commun qui est aussi un processus de resubjectivation collective dont les agents sont pour la plupart des femmes.

Agency: alternative practices and alternative worlds

This edition of arq assembles a selection of papers presented at the Conference ‘Agency’ organised by the research group called ‘The Agency’ initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. We offered to host the 5th AHRA International Conference, giving it the theme of ‘Agency’ and hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society.

Form-Trans-Inform: the ‘poetic’ resistance in architecture

In Nicolae Ceausescus ‘Systematisation’ programme, implemented across Romania throughout the 1980s, power was played out in acts of building. The city of Bucharest provided a visible symbol of the centralisation of authority, manifest in the construction of the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism and the House of the People. Beginning from this historical context, this paper revisits the work of one group of student architects in Romania, Form-Trans-Inform, who used spatial practices to question orthodoxies in architecture around them as protests against repressions under the monolithic Ceausescu regime.