Louise Fabian

Claiming participation – a comparative analysis of DIY urbanism in Denmark

The article discuss the conflicts, potentials and possible alliances of do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism when it takes the form of spontaneous place appropriations, when it is performed as participatory urban design and when it is integrated strategically in planning. DIY urbanism and experimentation with participation are currently strong influential factors in Danish planning. The article explores the use of participatory DIY urban design in two cases: the relocation of beer drinkers in Enghave Square and the Carlsberg City development in Copenhagen, Denmark. Carlsberg City is the most thorough Danish example of how DIY urban design is employed as an investment and planning tool. It discusses the implications of DIY urbanism in terms of how it can be understood in the context of the struggles over ‘the right to the city’, how it applies different activist tactics for the appropriation of space, and how it is integrated in planning and the development logic.

Retweet This: Participation, Collective Production, and New Paradigms of Cultural Production

Fabian and Rowan explore how notions of creativity, participation, and work have been deployed and reformulated in discourses, policy frameworks, and economic models designed in order to transform cultural practices into economic activities. The figure of the cultural entrepreneur and the widespread promotion of intellectual property is analysed as part of the neoliberalisation of the wider economy. As an alternative figure to the cultural entrepreneur that reproduces the premise of “individual creativity,” the chapter identifies contemporary examples of creative and cultural practices where social cooperation are central to cultural production, despite the normative framework of policies, schemes, and institutions aimed at promoting the creative industries and its implicit notion of individual creativity.