Debate 2 - Implementation Processes: How to develop them?

 

Moderators: 

Carlos Arroyo, member of Europan’s Scientific Committee
architect, urban planner, teacher (Madrid, ES)
Bernd Vlay, member of the Europan Technical Committee
architect, urban planner (Vienna, AT), Europan Österreich Secretary

 

Carlos Arroyo: How can we introduce innovation in our cities’ mutations and what type of processes and protocols can we create to do this? In the debate about the Europan topics, it was clear that it is important to take the ideas of the site representatives into account as there are new needs in our cities; populations and lifestyles have changed; there is also a different economic framework at the moment, which is also a requirement for innovation in spaces. But new ideas tend to clash with networks of practices, with the way things are normally done. So new ideas also have to be implemented, introducing an element of innovation in the way they are carried out as a process. 

A lot of the strategies that competitors in Europan propose are not so formal anymore, but are proposing timelines, ways to work or ways for a project to self-generate after the competition. So they are introducing processes, already from the point of view of the architects. You can see that sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, winning proposals do not look like a traditional architectural entry: it may look like a booklet, ready to be cut and framed, where there is information on how to get together, how to discuss things and which ones to discuss, and how evolution can take place over time; or it may look like charts explaining what economy or what activities and how those economical activities can be brought into the picture in order to develop something over time. The idea of process is very much into the evolution and change over the seasons, very much into the spirit of young architects at the moment. 

To give a first example, in Kleines Dreieck (DE/CZ/PL), in a place between Germany, Czech Republic and Poland, the winning team proposed a kind of software as an answer, a way to manage information in order to relate the three little inhabited nucleates in the three different countries and cultures in a joint kind of effort. How to manage the unforeseeable, how to think of a framework, that can grow in different ways, depending on needs at a given time.

 

This example was a competition result, but we are going to look closely at some examples of implementations because there are some clues about how those ideas on processes can be implemented over time. We have divided these processes of implementations in three categories. We called the first one Reframers — projects where it is proposed to look at the existing urban development tools but with a twist, a different way to look at existing things and procedures; the second is called the Catalysts — it is about developments where there is somebody or something that is very important or crucial in the whole development of the process; and we called the third the New Collectives — this qualifies the processes of implementation with new kinds of organisations that people created in order to develop the ideas and the proposals in a more collective and impersonal way. Reframers tend to appear in the older editions of Europan and the New Collectives tend to be of newer editions. The Catalysts are somewhere in the middle. So there is a certain chronology, a certain evolution in the way things are implemented in the different sessions of Europan. 

 

-1- Reframers

Carlos Arroyo: To illustrate the first category, I propose the site of Toledo in Spain, with a large area comparable in size with the historic city of Toledo, and the proposal was a set of rules on how to use the available space in different ways so that it could be developed in time responding to different needs. The model was not a formal model but a simulation on how the different kinds of volumes and structure could be implemented in the place. There was also a way to manage the unforeseeable in the structure of housing itself, with these bands of usage that could be cut or adapted to different kinds of uses, depending on the size of the family unit or the people living there and then we could see how the flats or units —that could be like mid-20th century traditional 3-bedroom flat— could evolve with real inhabitants, directly from the needs of the people who would be applying to live in this place. This is all subsidised housing in this region. Things could evolve once you get the structure out of the way, or in time as well, things could change in the future. The idea here was to deal with the existing regulations: for instance there is a standard procedure to allocate social housing units by which people fill in a certain application form with a number of data, like if there are family units or a single parent and you fill that in and then you go into a ballot and it may happen that the people who applied and the existing situation that is built do not fit. And it may happen that a single parent for instance may not have an available house or it may not fit in size. But we ask for this very form that people fill in before the partitions are made and the sizes of the flats are decided, so that, with that information, we could respond person by person, keeping in mind of course that the structure is flexible enough to be adaptable in time with the natural changes of the units. So the exact kinds of legal procedures that were used are then used in this project but in a new way. That’s the reframing kind of idea.

 

Bernd Vlay: The second example concerns the French city of Saintes for Europan 3. The site is by the city centre, in the densified fabric of the town. There are of course a lot of constraints for the cities to regenerate or revitalize areas in the inner cities. And for the competition the site was one big block that should be renewed. The winning project proposed to reinforce the limit of the block with new buildings plugged in the external limit and to implement individual housing inside the block. But this mutation had to respect constraints concerning for example the preservation of structures like walls and pathways to be contained. The question was also how to make this block porous and the main issue here is how to create this change of the existing to the new without going the habitual way. The whole change took five years because the mayor decided not to buy the people out by force, but to negotiate with the neighbours to make this change happen in a soft way. So this of course completely changes the adaptability of the site and the site’s integration into the city, so the significance of the project changes completely compared to the classical tools of expropriating the people and having new ones move in.

 

The other project is for the same city of Saintes, but in Europan 10. The site is a former hospital that has been for hundreds of years a sort of enclave in the city, but very close to the centre, and the question was how to open up this area and integrate it into the fabric of the city. The topic was not the interior organisation of the building but how the urban spaces organize concerning the non-built spaces, the public spaces and the collective fabric of the city: how the lines of visibility connect the different areas with each other and this was the main concern of the project, not so much about the types themselves but much more about how public space and the network of the city can be reached. Even if the competition winning project evolved into a masterplan of the implementation project, we can talk in nice words about public space and that we love to have nature in the city and green spaces but the question would be: “how can we make it happen?” Because everyone knows there is a lot of money for built space and construction, but there is very often no money for landscaping. And I think that one mission of Europan is to activate the resources for our ambitions to create public spaces that are of quality and to integrate them in the very concept of the implementation. So creativity is not the privilege of the architect anymore but also one decisive part of course of the municipalities that become the partners. In order to create a sort of political vision for the project to be integrated as a new future in the city of Saintes it was important that a sort of public strategy accompanies the Europan competition so what the city did is they opened up a place inside where they accompanied, where they created a documentary in parallel to the Europan competition so that they informed the people and the neighbours all the time about what would potentially happen there in the face of the competition but also then, when the competition was decided, they introduced the winners to the people and they also introduced their concept and the masterplan. They have a strong political commitment that was created with the architecture and urban plan in parallel to this development.

 

Carlos Arroyo: There is another example in Trondheim in Norway for Europan 9: there was a request to do student housing, student accommodation including some shared space and common space in this university place. The collage of the competition proposal was then built little by little. The approach of the ground floor with the shared spaces of the student housing, shared space for student would be particularly relevant. The ground floor of the building has very few partitions and its use is associated with shared life in student times. The building has been nominated to the national award of architecture in Norway and the key thing here is that although it is a standard kind of programme –students residence– the approach to the way it is managed considers the building as some kind of small parliament of 116 people, the students deciding what to do, the activities that happen in the ground floor in a self-management kind of approach and in a shared space that is like a large kitchen; there are also a study area, an exchange area and including the protocols to promote or propose activities through the social networks. The students living there are already making a very good use of this building, they are very happy about it and are apparently also used to using the social networks, they find it very easy to communicate through Facebook and get organised to do their activities. So this is the set of examples to do with how an existing kind of method for developing a part of a city can be adapted to introduce new ideas.

 

Bernd Vlay: After these examples of former Europan implementation processes that can be linked to the topic of Reframers, I would like to open the discussion with the representatives of sites of Europan 12 to ask them how they imagine innovating into the processes that can result from the competition. And I start by asking to Mr Peter Hafner from Nürnberg (DE) to refer to his precedent participation in Europan 10 where he is involved in a process of implementation. There was an interesting initiative, founding some sort of open office, where you involved the planners to come together with other people from the local municipality to discuss the potential of the winning teams. What was the impetus, what was the concept for that and how did it come along?

 

Peter Hafner, Urban Planning Department, Nürnberg (DE):
For the first time with Europan 10 we asked ourselves the question of participating and we then introduced a new tool and opened an open office: office in the way we actually were into a planning process and open as we wanted open questions and answers to be heard. Europan helped us very much in this way. At the end of the competition we did not have one but three winning teams and we were wondering how to manage this situation. This is when we created this open office, inviting the architects but also the population who could discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the different projects. This experience was very fruitful and the feedbacks were very positive and enabled us to develop a learning process. The first thing we learnt was that it is important to make drawings that can be understood by everyone and around which we can easily discuss. This requires a strong preparation on the contents and a lot of work in the frame but in the end it is very fruitful. The second thing is that the urban planner has to work side by side with the politicians to represent the project and to remain in contact with the inhabitants to answer the different questions on the projects. I think that in the future we will have to include the inhabitants more and more in the planning process, because we are not building a city for urban planners but for the inhabitants themselves. Participation also helps the inhabitants to seriously consider theses issues. And finally, if we want this participation we have to be ready to change our initial goals. It is also important to determine at first hand which fields can be open to discussion as there are many legal points that cannot be changed. We adopted the same approach for other projects after that.

 

Berd Vlay: It seems it can be a successful process to integrate different people involved and bring them together in the urban transformation. And if we look at a site like Aalborg (DK), proposed for E12, we can see that it is a huge and dense residential area with a lot of public space that is abandoned. The brief asks for a revitalization of a whole district of the city. We then asked ourselves how can we now be already aware of what we are asking the competitors and how can we develop a strategy in parallel to the project of the architectural and urban result that is ready to take the winning project further on in the implementation? This is the decisive question especially in these complex sites that deal with the public space. I would like to ask Rie Malling, from the city of Aalborg, with this high ambition to renovate the whole district of the city, do you consider a process that then is ready to take the Europan project?

 

Rie Malling, Project Manager, city of Aalborg (DK):
That is a very good and important question. Right now this part of the city is a part of our municipality plan thought as a strategic plan with three levels. We work with wider connections of the district with its surroundings and with the goal to create a good life and also with the idea to make the city attractive: these are the three themes for the area. And there are a lot of different things going on in the area. Right now we are speaking with different actors or investors in the future and they cooperate in this committee so that they get the ownership of developing the area. And then you can say there is also a local level involving the citizens in the area: how do they participate in this development? I think we will see it in the next step because this high strategic level can be very difficult to let the people living in the area participate, it will be a second step after definition of the strategy and process to start the discussion with the inhabitants. Now we were aware of the question of public space and actually we just have made a lot of development in the inner city on the public spaces and there is a lot of investment coming through the public spaces so yes, this strategic way to think public spaces attracts investors.

 

Bernd Vlay: I now would ask a question Mr Jean-Marc Boéchat from the city of Marly (CH) about awareness of problems or potentials of the site because in your case, the site is quite obviously a gate to the city, it could be developed to something as architectural excellence, beautiful, high quality, significant, a sort of sign. On the other hand, you have a rather small town that is developing along a road to Freiburg. Would it be possible that the site initiates a development that affects time wise, in a gradual development, the whole identity of the city and as it is really a very strategic position at the interface to the countryside, to think more about the potential of the process and not so much only about architectural excellence and the best architectural project?

 

Jean-Marc Boéchat, City Councillor, Marly (CH): 
There are indeed 2 very different aspects for this site, as this former factory area has been a fallow land for 40 years. It is at the entrance of the city and it does not give a good impression so that our idea, through our participation to Europan, was indeed on the one hand to get ideas from outside that would not be marked with the bad image of the area and on the other hand to collect new ideas around the idea of catalysing the development of the city around this major axis in a way that is different from what has been done until now, as geography has forced us to do it in a certain way. Nowadays we realise that the concept of zoning that has prevailed for a long time is falling apart as we cannot separate things anymore, it is not very sustainable to separate work from services and housing. A very popular district boards the site and the transitions have to be dealt with. Marly is a very car-oriented city, it is part of the Freiburg conurbation which is increasing drastically as the conurbation now counts approx. 70,000 inhabitants, even if the city of Marly only counts 8,000 of them, and 32,000 inhabitants and 17,000 jobs are expected by 2030. On the scale of the development of the city, the concepts that we have are of no use to welcome this population and these jobs. We now have to create different concepts and then transpose them into reality and have people accept them. Our city has a tradition of going to the people and we will also introduce this approach of exchange and participation for this project.

 

-2- Catalysts

Carlos Arroyo: In fact, if time and phasing are very important, the fact that also one person or agent follows the development process is essential in the success of a Europan implementation. This mediator can be called a Catalyst. 

In the case of Selb (DE), a “shrinking city” that has run Europan sites in 2 sessions, the responsible of urban planning of the city himself was like the catalyst, the driving force behind the continuity of this project. What was thought in the competition phase only as an addition of housing for elderly, was modified during the implementation phase in order to add elements of youth to the existing houses to the whole city, so additions in the scale of the domestic and the urban. And a number of projects have been built or are being built thanks to this catalyst, this city urban planner who gathers people together, and new uses have been introduced through participation. So a series of meetings with the architects, the city, the users… they use forces in the urban tissue, the brainstorming session to see what could be useful and they found for instance that there was the possibility to do a youth club and youth hostel, because they saw there is a need for students accommodation in this place –because there is an institute for professional education– but the students there, they go away for the weekend, back to their hometown, and at the same time there was a certain demand for weekend accommodation for people enjoying the natural context of the city. So they saw that they could do a very efficient kind of unit that could be used during weekdays by students in the weekend to bring in some tourism. So this kind of synergy of forces can only be achieved if you sit with a certain number of people around the table. The first part that was built was the nursery, which recently received a Baum Welt award for best first building.

 

Bernd Vlay: The second example in this family of Catalysts is the architectural project of Spremberg (DE), where it is important to talk about key persons in the process that were able to navigate and dominate a process in a positive way so that things that are usually difficult can be made possible. There are sometimes key figures that trigger, initiate and develop the whole process. And like Mr Resch in the former example of Selb, here in Spremberg, there were two people helping and making this project possible: it was the mayor and the city planning director. This will be the next implementation of the project; it is the square in front of the main station and also the modifications on the station. And there was no money to develop this project. So normally we say: “Okay it was nice to do the Europan but let’s end it, let’s try it another time.” But here, the railway company did not want to develop or cooperate actively in the development process so the city just bought the station and they applied for an Intereck funds, they got money for the European funds to finance this project without the railway company. So now it is possible due to this intelligence of a sort of funding move from the city to make this project possible. And it is really important to understand that sometimes the structure can be an excuse that nothing happens but sometimes the smartness of people is really a potential that more can happen on a place.

 

Carlos Arroyo: We called this figure the Catalyst implying that it is not a leader, it is somebody who calls people in order to talk, to discuss things, to let things happen, so it is not a director figure, it is like a pole of attraction, somebody who keeps calling everybody in order to make sure everybody involved is actually thinking about it and working together, somebody who has enthusiasm and energy and has a certain continuity along the whole process. 

We also see another example where there is a process over time, adapting to the changing needs of the city as it grows, with in this case a combination of catalysts, a city architect and the mayor. It is a project by the Cypriot architect, Socrates Stratis, winner in Europan 4, in Iraklion, on the island of Crete (GR) over the former Venetian walls. Thanks to a strong mayor who succeeded to use European financing, two phases were built and the third has been finished just at the end of last year. For the competition the complexity of this case was that you needed to preserve the monumental walls, you had to adapt to the circulation of traffic in this place, and then to allow the pedestrians flow across to reach the sea, and to include a number of cultural programmes with a use like indoors, to open up a public space that is much needed by the very dense kind of urban tissue here. This was the first phase that was materialized, a clever strategy of layering and adapting the different layers, going up and down with ramps or galleries going over the buildings so that all those various lines of movement could live in the same space and using the in-between space to include the elements of program for cultural program. In the second phase in 2008, they built a construction with all the ramp systems to gain access to the sea by the city and also an elevated public space living close to the cars, but a wide open space superimposed on the monumental area. It is not a sidewalk, it is like a square along the line of traffic here. And in the third phase, the road is crossed by an element joining one of the bastions of the Venetian walls.  

Socrates Stratis, winner in Iraklion (GR) – E4, Member of the Europan Scientific Council:
The process in Iraklion is very long since the competition there is already seventeen years old. I think the important point is a sort of stability and the presence of a figure that continues along the way so you can actually get support from this person, but it is very important that you realise that design is politics and has to do something with diplomacy. With the mayor first of all, it was very important that, from the beginning, we realised that our project was used as a political tool, in order to succeed some goals but, what was even more interesting for us is that design itself was formulating politics about the urban issues of the city. So we became active actors in counselling the mayor in an indirect way. But then we found out that, in Greece, in the public space it’s a very flexible sort of institution, it is not controlled as in another Western European country, so for us that was positive and negative at the same time: positive because we could navigate and develop our own rules; negative because it was a lot of energy. I think it’s very important that it goes back to what Chris Younès was saying before: we learn how to co-inhabit with the unknown, I think the mayor used us in a way: because I am from Cyprus, which is not Greece, and Crete is in Greece; but when the mayor called for the last phase he said Crete is not Greece, because Greece was going bankrupt and he wanted to make another project so it was very paradoxical, so it was very interesting that the Europan potential winners have this advantage of being outsiders. It means they get this grace period when they can be naïve, they can propose things that the cities for decades could not even imagine because it was not even possible. So this kind of relationship was very important. And also sometimes being able to actually create coalitions between the actors and create a little bit of indirect advice to the mayor, who sometimes wanted to do things that were not in the coherent part of the project, but other times we actually made coalitions with the mayor in order to confront the technical department of the city. So I think we could navigate and the competition proposal from the very beginning actually took that as a scenario of possibilities for this space between the city and the sea, and that allowed us in fact to get in and create this platform to give the city a lot of input and they could use the beginning, the first phase of the project, as a proof to get more money from the European Union. So the mayor could then very quickly realize that he could use the implementation of the project, which is not given in Greece, to persuade first the State, and then Europe, that the money would actually be used in the right way. So in this way little by little they made a really big scale project for the scale of the city and for us, an office of 3 people, we could actually work with that during time.

 

Bernd Vlay:  I would now like to ask to Mr Niek Verdonk from Assen (NL) to react on this idea of catalyst. You know Europan a little bit as you have participated 2 times for the city of Groningen, successful implementation, and now you are in charge of Assen. So you are not afraid of Europan after 2 times, that’s very positive, you can see that you also bring experience in this forum that we would like to use now for the discussion because in Assen, in the harbour area it was interesting when we read the brief, one of the first phrases says “We don’t want to do the master plan way, the master plan way is not interesting for us. We want to start a different process in the harbour area that is now the Europan site”. And we would like to know if there is a key figure, if you are somehow a sort of mediator for this process that is now experienced enough to direct this or if there is any agency behind that, in the way we have seen, any person behind this process, behind this ambition of doing it in another way.

 

Niek Verdonk, 'Florijnas' supervisor, Municipality of Assen (NL): 
In Holland, the age of this type of master plan is really over. We have so many acres of land that are vacant now and we have so many big ideas of this, so we are very proud of all these Rem Koolhaas super ideas but which will never be realised. And the city of Assen is now going a quite different way, wanting to have more people to live in the inner city, to repair this former industrial area, and that is in this time a very brave process and we don’t know what’s going on. So the city now funded a lot of money for the first phase, a kind of a need to strengthen the first phase and then we don’t know what the outcome of the second phase will be. So therefore for our two sites we rather want to ask a strategy than a utopia which will not be realised.

 

Bernd Vlay: We also have sites this session where the master plan is the reason why the city comes to Europan, the master plan for example from the 1970 like in Haninge (SE), that is now still somehow in function because it is a huge shopping mall area with slaps of the 1970’s around it and modernist town planning, and we had the feeling when we read the brief that it was so radical saying we want to turn the existing condition of the master plan upside down by opening up the mall and turning the whole logics of Haninge, that is completely car-based, upside down and create a local place with soft mobility, slow down the movement and really turn upside down the whole spot. And I would like to ask now Mr Henrik Lundberg if you also consider it to be a radical plan to decompose this master plan?

 

Henrik Lundberg, Stadsarkitekt, Haninge (SE):
We want to create a city with higher density, a city that is traditional with houses and shops along the streets in the level where people are walking and apartments over the shops. So in a bigger question where you want to create a city with less car movements, so we can hopefully get a more sustainable city asked by a lot of our politicians who have told us to start this change. And we who make the master plan, we are the architects from the community, we want to develop our city for a city-like life. The examples of project implementations were very interesting because in our competition area we have a lot of different owners, so we do not really have any exact strategy yet. So it was very nice to hear these examples of how to do it.

 

Carlos Arroyo: I also wanted to ask to Mrs Petra Lüdtke from Wittenberge (DE) which is one of what is called a shrinking city, if you have an idea of the process and the possible tools to implement shrinking, something you would have seen in examples in other shrinking cities in Germany, maybe through Europan or the examples we have seen? Shrinking cities means cities that are decreasing in population or where a certain amount of the population is ageing as it was the case of Selb. I remember five, six years ago, in a Europan forum, there were people from shrinking cities in Germany and people from cities that were growing very fast in other places of Europe and there was this mutual surprise: in some places people said: “Oh, so cities can shrink!” And some other thought: “Oh, so cities can grow!” And so the forum became a good platform to exchange information on how things can work or not. 

 

Petra Lüdtke, Chief officer urban planning department, Wittenberge (DE): 
It is indeed for us a big opportunity to collect new ideas. It is not about developing a big general plan in a short time anymore but on the contrary to initiate processes developments in our region, determining the potentials. It is a region that has evolved since the ‘90s with former industrial buildings transformed into cultural places, with the creation of a festival, the construction of a hotel. The city of Selb took many opportunities. A pathway was developed along the riverbank and the professionals, public and private actors involved on this site, are expecting more new ideas from Europan. There are other buildings that could be turned into something else for tourism, but we also have to think about the development of the city in the long term and for its inhabitants.

 

-3- New Collectives

Carlos Arroyo: The third part concerns sites where there are new kinds of organisations or institutions or groups or even art installations to raise awareness of a new possibility or a new future for some of these sites.  

In the case of Babenhausen (DE), the competition area was a former barrack area, a rather large base with some old buildings with historical interest that was closed by a fence and separated by a railway and therefore invisible for the city. So if you were a soldier you knew what was happening there, but if you were a citizen you could not know what was happening behind the walls on the other side of the railway. The proposal of the city was to change the use of this and turn it into a possible way of bringing in some soft industry and some cultural aspects and this was the competition proposal by the winning team. The winning project proposed to do a kind green nucleus using some of the existing buildings and proposing three satellites around the green centre… Well the project in terms of landscape is very interesting, because they are moving the earth, the water, the management system to create landscape, so they are using all the natural cycles of human life to create a kind of human nature in the centre of this area. But the problem was that it was very difficult to connect both parts in the imagination of the people in the city. So what they did was, as a first kind of intervention, to actually perform a walk with the citizens from one place to the other to first realize that it was only 15 minutes walk, so even though it was a sort of out-of-bounds in the people’s imaginations, it was actually very close, and also to let that walk become a way to follow the future development in stages of the new part of the city, so that it could be like an evening stroll to see what was going on in the new part as a way to culturally link both parts. And this walk could be considered as an art action and at the same time as a highly efficient way to visualize what is going to happen, it was a very important collective intervention for this, and we will see what is happening as it is being developed at the moment.

 

There is an other example in Cáceres (ES), this is a piece of industrial heritage, mines, where there are some interesting buildings, original housing from the period when the mines were working, but there is a lot of pressure all over the place and different kinds of things happens, even more contemporary real-estate pressure. And one of the main materialisations in the development of the winning project was to meet all the people living in this area, to have them sit around the table to learn things about themselves first by identifying themselves, knowing who they were, who had very different kinds of interest in the area; it could be people who were living there, who were not known to be living there because the mines were still inhabited although they were officially abandoned. The winning team did a series of publications and communication became the main tool for development of the project to find out what to do, and that was actually their competition proposal, an open method on how to link the pieces together. And they were also proposing things that can be called “installation” to provoke exchange of information between people. Finally there is a planning tool that has been approved two months ago to continue with the development and we will see what happens.

 

The next example is in Norrköping (SE). Here we have hard urbanism from decades past, the kind of planning that could look like a lot of developments in the 60’s and 70’, with very hard things going on. The competition proposal for Europan 11 looks at these weak lines that go across the hard urbanism. So this soft urbanism that is infiltrating in between the hard urbanism. So the winning team studied what happened with the green things, what happened with certain masses, walks, people going through, they realised that even though there was a very strong geometry for the hard urbanism there was a softer geometry of people going through it from A to B, and then they devised a new way to divide the use of the land, also challenging the over-dimensioned road with very few cars, so they changed the nature of the road by redoing the allotment and the management of the land. And this proposal was subversive in two ways: first, the winning proposal was subversive in the sense they didn’t content themselves with the competition area but they thought that another area was much more important, and second, to do the plan, they used the standard tools that are normal in the city, so it is also subversive in the way the design is made. So this is a standard planning map, or planning drawing for any kind of zoning plan in cities in Sweden and there are the colours defining uses and what was subversive was the way of including a new allotment of all the in-between spaces that would be developed spontaneously by the people living there. There is already a small implementation, the city and the team developed a testing structure, a small space open air, a hut with solar panels to get the energy, to see how this soft, light urbanism in a very dense kind of pattern could work and how it had to be done working with the people who would have to develop all the various allotments. So these are examples of some kind of new ways to deal with groups, with society or large organisation that we have called New Collectives.

 

Erik Wingquist, former Europan Sverige Secretary: 
I think that both the words Catalyst and New Collectives can apply to Norrköping, thinking of both the team, how they can act, but also in relationship to the work together with the municipality. And that is why the project becomes really interesting. Norrköping is a city that sometimes relates a little bit to Malmö, it is also a former industrial city that has gone through a real structural change and they have a very attractive river running through the centre, with a lot of interesting industrial landscape buildings being converted from industrial use to for instance university buildings and so on. And we always imagined that it would be an interesting place to work. But when we met the city they said: “Here, in the industrial landscape, we know pretty much what to do, but in Vilbergen, we do not really know what to do. There are big estates, it is difficult to develop, so there we need something new, some new way or model of thinking.” And they were throughout the whole period very active and engaged both in writing the brief but also through the process. And it became a quite interesting collective, not only the architecture group, but the architecture group and the two planning architects and the city architect were really into it together in the very beginning. And also we have seen that the Head of the Building Department of the municipal body was also very optimistic. The winning project did not win because of what it was, but because of what it could be. And to connect to Socrates Stratis back who did the project in Iraklion 17 years ago, this is still just one year and it is a lot about time in all urban planning. So I am really looking forward and have a lot of hope in this process.

 

Bernd Vlay: It is important to understand that nowadays because there is very often a lack of tools in urban planning, very often there is somehow also a lack of means and instruments and also a lack of money. And then the question would be: there might be enough money for the Europan competition, which is not so expensive, but who will be there for the whole implementation procedure? And then teams who participate, they already know “ok, in this site, there is a lack of means and we want to address this lack of means in our project strategy by ourselves”, so they somehow also surprise the cities with a project that offers the towns a new way to start the process. And this is very important. Sometimes a project looks much more like a plan for action, that enables the cities a slim start with very little means or with different means that have to be developed in the further process. So in this sense this group is quite interesting because it would also allow countries or places with a planning culture that is very different or has a lot of gaps or has suffered from a lack of means to come to some project that works in a different economical and tactical way, in a different strategy. 

 

In this context we would like to question Mrs Uta Schneider from the Regionale 2016 (DE). The Regionale is also some initiative that has cultural things to happen and now it is interesting that it is part of Europan. How do you see this kind of approach? What do you expect? Because if we look at your brief we do not see any sites as we would expect them from a competition, we see a milieu, we see an ambience that suffers from a lack of intensity, from restructuration, single family homes that have generational problems with the people inside because there is ageing, so it is more a social issue in a fabric that does not really work and now you connect three remote areas to one task for Europan and we would like to know how you see the whole Europan participation? 

 

Uta Schneider, Managing Director, Regionale 2016 (DE):
We indeed are not expecting a classical architectural project at all. 35 municipalities are working together at Regionale to think about the problems we may encounter in the future. One of the major problems concerning our region is indeed the fact that we are a very big conurbation that developed in the 1960’s and 70’s and that has to face a change of generations. We are dealing with many private owners and the question here is how to initiate a renewal, some attraction or evolution that in its turn restricts the extension of the conurbation. Our participation to Europan is an opportunity to find solutions that concern Germany, even Europe in general. It is about letting ideas blossom that could help us evolve. It is certainly also architectural ideas but that could be integrated in long-term processes. Regionale is a development tool in time. We are working for the overall of these municipalities in finding and developing new processes for the future. Here, we feel responsible to find solutions with the municipalities, the inhabitants and the other potentials actors.

 

Bernd Vlay: Today, we have certain sites from Spain that are huge and have no program, but they are important for the development of the city. And we would like to ask the representatives of Urretxu-Irimo (ES) about their involvement in Europan, because what we think is interesting in your case is that there is an industrial structure that is already being appropriated by people and there is some sort of micro-process of appropriation from part of the people of a huge area that is partly dead somehow –the buildings are abandoned– so how did you approach Europan, how did you enter Europan, why did you ask to collaborate and to be partners of Europan?

 

Iñaki Mendizabal, City Architect, Urretxu-Irimo (ES): 
We began the participatory process one month ago because when we saw Europan talking about Adaptability this year, we thought it was very close to our concerns for our site. So we thought that with the participatory process, we are going to have real material for the participants. In our site we have two main ways to work: on the one hand, we have a very strategic site between the three cities of the Basque Country –Bilbao, San Sebastian and Vitoria–, so we have to activate new economic activities, but meanwhile, on that site, we have to activate minor architectures so that the site can offer another vision for the people. So we are working on two scales but also in different times. But we wanted to begin the participatory process for having a royal material for Europan. We have very hard environmental conditions, we have contamination in the ground, we also have the railway parallel to the site, we have many conditions for different uses. So we are thinking: “how can we make little interventions that could improve the conditions of the site?” So we can imagine in the future a really urban piece, because the site is close to the town. It’s a little town but it plays on different scales. So with that small interventions, how can we improve the conditions of the site so we can imagine a real urban place with urban, public spaces, economic activities, housing, etc.? Last month we made the first contact with different economic, cultural and social actors. We made an informative day with lectures. So now next week we have a workshop with about 40 people coming not only from the town, but also with regional government, because it is involved there, and we don’t know what kind of material we’re going to have, but we can imagine like an open map with conflicts, with opportunities, with conditions.

 

Carlos Arroyo: This is really interesting because if we are talking about processes and development, you are showing that the process has already begun before the launch of the competition. So it will already be working in that direction. The main question is how to provide the right information for the candidates from maybe the other part of Europe to understand what is going on and to provide maybe a fresh view on things. There has to be some imagination in the way that the material is prepared because it is a part of the project, we are not waiting for a project to arrive, we are already starting a process, we are already working in the direction of this process and we really have to make sure that we put the right kind of input in the briefs, the right kind of information, if it involves participation, if it involves people in the place. I strongly recommend the book of implementations where you can also see the testimonials from city representatives and people in the place, explaining how things work.