the tranformative potentials of everyday

7/24/2019 The Tranformative Potentials of Everyday

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BUDlab

The Bartlett - Development Planning Unit

Volume 7

June 2015

BUDDcamp 2015THINKINGDOINGBRESCIA


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The Bartlett

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The students and tutors of the MSc Building and Urban Design

in Development (BUDD) would like to thank the membersof the Associazione per lAmbasciata della Democrazia

Locale (ADL) a Zavidovici - Local Democracy Agency

(LDA) Zavidovici for their generous hosting during this new

BUDDcamp in Brescia. In particular, we would like to thank

Agostino Zanotti, head of LDA Zavidovici, for his continuous

collaboration with BUDD and his precious assistance in the

planning of this workshop with Maddalena Alberti, Lucia

Melato and Valeria Marengoni. We also wish to thank all

the people who showed us around, talked to us and made

our weekend in Brescia so successful. In particular, we would

like to thank the Municipality of Flero and Brescia, SPRARBrescia, Anthony, Mamadou, Aziz, Unione Italiana Sport per

Tutti (UISP), and Laura Pucci of Solidariet e Cooperazione

(SOLCO) Brescia.

CREDITS

BUDDlab is published by the Development Planning Unit,

UCL. The Development Planning Unit is an international

centre specialising in academic teaching, practical training,

research and consultancy in sustainable urban and regional

development policy, planning and management. The MSc

Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) is a cut-

ting edge international Masters programme offering a unique

synthesis of critical methodology and design-based research,

linking the practice of design with the complementary

developmental processes of planning.

All texts were reviewed by Giulia Carabelli. The assembly and

design of this publication was led by Giovanna Astolfo. All

photographic images and works are attributed to participants

and tutors.

Development Planning Unit, University College London

34 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9EZ, United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 1111

Email: [email protected]

2015 The Bartlett Development Planning Unit

HOW TO READ THIS BOOKLET

The publication presents and discusses the results of a short

design research workshop developed in close collaborationwith Local Democracy Agency (LDA) Zavidovici (6-9 February

2015): the BUDDcamp. BUDD students spent four days in

Brescia to explore and critically engage with everyday

contested urban realities in four sites selected with LDA

Zavidovici staff. Working closely to local residents and

partners, BUDD students investigated existing urban dynamics

and designed strategies for the inclusive city guided by the

memos of Calvinos American Lectures: Multiplicity, Lightness,

Quickness and Visibility. This publication offers an overview

of the students works, which are organised in four chapters

to illustrate their contents in relation to Calvinos memos.Each chapter includes a description of the issues posed by

the context and the strategy developed to tackle them. As a

way of conclusion, each chapter presents extracts of students

reexive accounts of their experience in Brescia.


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5BUDDlab

The main objective of the BUDDcamp is to offer all its

participants a provocative, timely and instant immersion

into an urban reality, creating a momentum of reection

on design-research methodologies. Experimenting with

walking, observing, and talking, the goal of this years

BUDDcamp was to produce transformative design

strategies - rooted in a socio-spatial understanding - for four

different sites in Brescia that were chosen in collaboration

with Local Democracy Agency (LDA) Zavidovici, our local

partner. Despite its short nature, the BUDDcamp representsan opportunity to get closer to the imperfect and mutable

reality of the urban everyday with its small invisible, light

stories and their big, heavy narratives. Guided by the

LDA Zavidovici staff energy and passion for an inclusive

city and accompanied by the stimulating reading of Italo

Calvinos American Lecturesand its thrilling concepts of

Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity

and Consistency, the participants were asked to imagine

possible catalytic and strategic interventions that could

highlight, mobilise, and/or transform existing social

activity to explore the potentials for an inclusive city to

come. In doing so, the BUDDcamp offered the opportunity

to rethink the limits of urban design and its political

dimensions and contribute, possibly, to question how

designers and civil society can contribute to alternative

urban futures that could contrast and resist to the apparent

dark matter and extremely resilient neoliberal forms of

urban production. In this introduction I want to offer two

points of reections.

First and foremost, and aligned to Henri Lefebvres

thoughts, a reection must be made on the extent to whichthose who control the production of space also control the

social relations reproduced through it. For the argument

here, it is important to note that the habitants and users

can challenge the social relations embedded in everyday

life by appropriating urban space and participating in

decision-making determining the urban transformation of

the city. In other words, the ways in which the habitants

and users produce, reproduce, transform, and maintain

urban space allow them to control or alter social

relationships embedded in their lived space, which calls

for a new reections on the relationship between the

notions of dwelling and inhabiting and on the bodysrelationship with space which is an essential prerequisite

of the production of space; [] before producing effects

in the material realm [] each living body is space and

has its space: it does produce itself in space and it is also

producing that space (Lefebvre, 1991: 170). As Lefebvre

argues the bodily lived inhabitancy, which incorporate

practice, representations and symbolic codes can provide

the basis for an alternative sets of aesthetics categories that

counter the unquestioned fetishism of technology within

the domestic space and move beyond the nostalgic elegy

of the past (Butler, 2012: 126). Such reorientation is at

the heart of a politics of inhabitancy which attempts to re-

appropriate space through self-management thus restoring

the importance of the full bodyand its range of gestures.

Or differently - any revolutionary project today whether

utopian or realistic, must, if it must avoid hopeless banality,

make the re-appropriation of the body, in association with

the re-appropriation of space, into a non-negotiable part

of its agenda. It is in fact the bodies in spaces that help

to resist the solely abstract vision of the city that can be

nurtured with the restoration of the connection with thebody and its lived rhythms. As Borden noted the subject-

body is a preservation and production of time through the

The transformativepotential of everydaypracticeCamillo Boano


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various rhythms of breathing, eating, sleeping, walking,

looking and sensing (Borden, 2012: 183). The centrality

of embodied practices, bodies and appropriation of space,is very evident in the last translation of a Lefebvres book

(2014) Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (Jouissance),

where there is the call for an of architecture as space, not

the one of the modernist understanding of it as privileged

medium [] and specic mode of aesthetic perception

(Lefebvre, 2014: lix) but a call for a more embedded and

less heroic action; more humble and situated. Situated in

the everyday,Jouissancerefers more to an appropriation

of space, an excess of use as it is related to right to use

(Lefebvre, 2014: lx), the right to benet from, to use, andto enjoy something which belongs to somebody else or is

held in common ownership, as long as it is not damaged

or destroyed (Stanek, 2014). As Lefebvre writes, at

the centre of the theory and the possible new practice

lie the total body, simultaneously reality and value in its

prodigious and unrevealed complexity (Lefebvre, 2014:

149). This is part of a possible project that explicitly

challenges architecture as essential to subvert the

ambiguity of twofold composition as body occupying

the space and a body producing the space (Lefebvre,

2014: 149) and its manifold constituent oppositions. Thebrief account of the BUDDcamps experience suggests an

embodied and performative reection on the urban, a

method and an attitude, but also an open-ended project

that has the body at the centre of urban and architectural

thoughts. The second point I want to stress is that, back in

2004, Massimo Cacciari, Italian philosopher and once

Mayor of Venice, argued that the City does not exist,

what exists are different and distinct forms of urban lives

(Cacciari, 2004). He was suggesting the impossibility

of a common, universal denition of what a city is while

calling for an anti-essentialist formulation of the multiple

origins and futures of urban territories.

Tracing down the etymological origins of the now-often-

used terms of polis and civitas, Cacciari suggests that

the linguistic difference between them, the Greek and

the Latin, is essential to understanding the origin and the

nature of the city itself. The polisfor him is the place where

determined people, genos, specic for traditions and

uses, has it own ethos. Whereas the word civitasgrounds

its origin in the cives, a group of people that got togetherto form the city under the same regulations and norms.

Cacciari is re-framing this renewed tension between two

ideas of cities, betweenpolisand civitasand the tensions

between the willing of growth and expansion, the will of

hosting diversities and welcoming people and populationsand the strenuous defense of its origins, borders and

identities. What emerges is that the city is polemos, conict.

It is again the stage of great tensions between rootedness

(polis) and pact, treaty (civitas), xity and movement,

dwelling, property and exchange, commerce, memory

and future. The essence of the urban does appear to be

the capacity to hold such competing different qualities in

a dynamic perennial conict in an irreducible tension. As

Cacciari states, there is no single denition of what a city

is. One single city is impossible. The city is in a continuousmutation, reassemble, change and transformation, and

it does exist only because it is inhabited, perceived and

lived. The complexity of the urban however creates the

impossibility of a unitary vision, form, denition, design

and image of a city.

The design strategies and the projects presented here

are a rediscovery of the potentials of architecture and

design, they offer a different reading of the contemporary

city and allow the activation of new sites of critical

intervention rather than a unitary vision. They are a callto arms for researching and engaging with contested

urban conditions, arguing for an architect who, as Jeremy

Till suggests, is bound to the earth but with the vision,

environmental sense, and ethical imagination to project

new (social) spatial futures on behalf of others (Till, 2014:

195).

References:

Borden, I. (2012) Beyond Space: The Ideas of Henri Lefebvre

in Relation to Architecture and Cities. Journal of Chinese Urban

Science, 3(1): 156-193.

Butler, C. (2012) Henry Lefebvre. Spatial Politics, Everyday life

and the Right to the City. Rutledge: London.

Cacciari, M. (2004) La citta. Pazzini Editore: Villa Verrucchio.

Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life, New York: Verso.

Lefebvre, H. (2014) Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. Edited

by ukasz Stanek Minneapolis: Minnesota Univ.Press.

Stanek, L. (2014) interviewed by S. Elden on Society and Space

www.societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-

with-lukasz-stanek-about-henri-lefebvre-toward-an-architecture-of-

enjoyment-and-use-value-of-theory/ last accessed 14 May 2015.Till, J. (2014) Architecture Depends. Minneapolis: Minnesota

Univ.Press.

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