Jesko Fezer, Mathias Heyden
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Strategies of Participative Architecture and Spatial Appropriation

Introduction

Clarence Schmidt built his house himself in the hill country near Woodstock: at first a simple wood cabin, in 1948 the learned mason began extending it piece by piece. Schmidt used only found materials – old windows, doors, wooden slats, planks, tarpaper - over the years it grew into a labyrinthine, seven-story pyramid of thirty-five rooms. His intensely painted and decoratively equipped "House of Mirrors" was covered almost entirely throughout with reflective materials like aluminium foil, mirrors and Christmas tree decorations. In 1968 it was completely destroyed by a fire. Through exhibitions and publications, Schmidt’s building and other forms of spatial appropriation - whether born of necessity or diversion - gained the notice of professional planners.

1946 in Britain, 40,000 families occupied thousands of evacuated military camps, soon after the responsible health authorities legalised the settlements. In 1966 the sociologist Phillipe Boudon published an investigation of the Pessac housing project - entirely altered by its inhabitants in color, form and organization - that Le Corbusier had planned in 1926 for a French manufacturer. Since the 1960s, the architect John F.C. Turner has surveyed illegally established settlements in Peru and describes the superiority of individual and local resources to a bureaucratic centralized housing system.

Considerations of unplanned production of space played an important role in international discourses of the post-war period surrounding the renewal or dissolution of modernism. An increasing uncertainty about the function of design and a dissatisfaction with the paradigms of an industry-oriented, post-war modernism, spurred architects to search for new concepts. They set out on different paths toward the users of their products. They encouraged, motivated, organised, sanctioned and outlined the participation of those affected by building: the inhabitants.

In this regard an architectural history of participation can be understood as a reaction to the real pressure of spatial acquisition. Participation is tested as an approach to forging new connections to a vital world and its everyday occurrences. Thereby, techniques of participation always follow on the heels of social power relations. So models for incorporating inhabitants in architectural processes emerge just as the fordist regulation of labor and lifestyle reaches its limits, and a new flexible regime of work and consumption emerges, integrating the employee into a new and more dynamic hierarchy.

Architecture, from this perspective, is primarily a technique of mediation between herrschaftswissen and everyday practices. It is a reference point for marginal and suppressed appropriation forms, as well as for hegemonic arrangements of society. This contrast of affirmation and resistance establishes the transformational capacity of architecture. The production of space modifies given interests, in that it makes them visible and effective. In the realization of a built form, the meaning and effects of interests change because architecture reacts to them or integrates them, as it responds to the pressures of appropriation and resistance. The practice of participation actively takes up these negotiating functions of architecture.

Participation, Pacification and Emancipation
Participation means taking part in something already given and can refer to any area of social life, work, politics, school, cultural production or consumption. Participation can mean arranging breaks autonomously at your workplace or receiving a share of the company’s profits, taking part in a referendum or going to a parents’ evening at school, manipulating an interactive artwork, painting your sneakers, or fixing your bicycle or cabinet yourself. One takes part in something that would happen anyway, but with one’s involvement might be more simple, more satisfactory, more beautiful, cheaper, faster, more just, or even more humane and more democratic. Through this involvement, one develops a defined relationship to a specific power constellation, which compels one to participate or at least puts forth the possibility of participation. Such arrangements reveal their borders and structure hierarchies within which one can participate.

Today’s more frequent calls for participation can be understood as a new governing principle under which privatization and urgings toward more self-government legitimize a renouncement of social responsibility. While in the 1960s, demands for democratization and liberalization still carried an emancipatory character, at present the question is raised as to what extent the techniques of mandatory flexibility correspond to neoliberal ideologies or at least to the logic of administration, management and production.

The discursive, process-oriented method of participation is credited as economically superior to more hierarchic and static models of organization. Theories of selforganization in biology, mathematics, computer science, economics or urban planning recognized early the tolerances gained through self-correction and the innovative capacities of self-organized contexts. Thus understood, hope for less hierarchical social structures through participation is often couched with promises of efficiency and better control. Subjects are addressed as their own entrepreneurs, and asked as ‘active citizens’ to take their fate into their own hands. The resulting internalization of constraints and self-discipline shifts forms of control, repression, exploitation and exclusion onto the subjects themselves: one voluntarily goes on patrol or tries one’s luck as a so-called me-inc. (Ich-AG =German Expression for a small One-Man-Company that was developed by the government.). In these models of limited participation-- the extents of which are deemed ‘realistic’ by principles of economic efficiency—control legitimizes itself through the accountability of those acting within the framework.

Productive debates about participation name these control mechanisms and reveal the limits of their tolerance. They suggest social models and cultural techniques to mediate power. Participation, even if it is regarded as pacification or subtle involvement, entails an articulation of political conditions of power. With luck, this sets something into motion. The resulting conflicts, differences and pluralities refer to an imagined promise of a radical-democratic, equalitarian, pluralistic society and present the possibility of an unfurling of desire.

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