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

Introduction

Participation in space
Considering concepts of participation in relationship to planning or building as well as uses of space, the outlined power relation reconfigures itself in the spatial sphere. The relationships of power and space are distinctly drawn. Space is socially produced and is itself the place of production and reproduction of society. Therefore space, especially built space, is an issue of power as well as its expression and its place of negotiation. Though space is essentially produced by all who take part in its construction and its use - economic, political and social power relations settle there, thus excluding a multiplicity of possible uses. Housing conditions—whether a single family home with garage, a renovated historic building or former social housing - refer to hegemonic concepts of society which reproduce themselves in those spaces as built reality.

Critically understood participation is an involvement in the social sphere, one that reflects upon society’s grounding conditions and possibly steps beyond them. Questions of private property and the conditions of utilization according to economic, political and social criteria, and of the representation of national, civic or economic concepts are put at one’s disposal. In this sense, worker housing projects, Soviet commune houses, people’s parks or the social housing complexes of the post-war period were architectural responses to the demands of new social forms. Social movements, as well as the reformers and planners they pressured, called for new spaces. Through such means, resistances were pacified but new social realities were established as well. As a result, demands for democratization and self-determination, which were common in western democracies toward the end of the 1960’s, affected debates in architecture.

The authority of planners and their role as caring experts stood at the center of this debate. The architect, legitimized by his profession as a mediator of interests, was confronted with the failure of allegedly objective and technical decision-making procedures, and he was criticized in his self-understanding as a representative expert of design. The contradictions between authoritarian aesthetics, economic-technical requirements and social reality as well as the perception of the users took rise within the profile of his profession. They questioned the logic of factual constraints and of personal genius as well as technocratic culture. The imposed self-reflection enabled a fundamental questioning of the function of architecture within a social context and opened ways for inventing new approaches to design.

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