Uploaded on 2015-12-09 by AssilaWalid

After the completion of that studio and the familiarity of Citizen Design Science in this course, I can fairly say that this studio was purely CDS even though I did not know. However, my experience and final judgement on citizen participation in design is not easy, if not sometimes problematic. This is because: First of all, participation can be quite fake. Its trendy word these days in the planning sector, but not always genuine. We personally a few workshops with the community, but these were not the only stakeholders, and only those who participated gave their voice, so many others who would have liked to come never heard of the actions happening, are not properly reached or chosen deliberately not to be chosen due to biased reasons of the society or planning authorities. Secondly, participation is bottom-up, opposing to the top-down approach of traditional planning. And such an initiation is not easy s I have learnt from this studio experiment. The Project: A slaughterhouse site in Den Dam, Antwerp has been derelict for several years. It compromises a vast amount of this neighborhood, and due to its emptiness and lack of activities, it had been misused by drug addicts. The owner of the site wants to re-invest in it, and needs the permission of the municipality of the city. However, the municipality wants to develop the site according to the benefits of the market AND the surrounding inhabitants. At the start, the conflict that faced us was that the owner does not trust "local participation" because he felt their interest is not the same as his, and they would be too demanding. Luckily, a the end of our studio, that perception changed with the various workshops and actions we triggered in the community. We, the students, were architects and urban planners, but also had sociologists on the team. The idea was to gather information from the local community to know what their vision and needs are that can be fulfilled by this development, and then channel this information to the planning department of the municipality. 1. Awareness party: We invited all the community on an "awareness party" that will tell them what the plans of the municipality is, the owner's vision, and what we can learn from them that can be good for the development of the area. During this event, we benefited from the attendance of all kinds of segments of the community, old and young, men and women, employed and unemployed, etc. We then set few "interventions" from which we can (a) interact in a sort of game and (b) gather information. These were such as a plan of the neighborhood and asking to put stickers of thumbs-up on areas they like, thumbs down on areas they dislike and tell us why, hung pictures of shots of the re and tell us an adjective that best describes this place, place tags on where they want more green areas, more services, etc. on a map of the neighborhood, and other ideas. Such interventions were fun to be participated in by the people during the community party, full of informal data that was then distilled by us architects into more useful, readable and architectural plans and information. ![The SlaughterHouse Site Party][1] ![Like and Dislike map][2] ![Pictures and adjectives interventions][3] ![Community interacting with the interventions][4] ![Community interacting][5] ![Information map from data gathered][6] 2. Interactive interventions To provoke more inhabitants from the community to provide information, we distributed many boards where they can freely write their ideas and ambitions, and signs that can direct their attention to areas of potential. ![Attention sign][7] ![interactive board][8] 3. Questionnaires For questionnaires we had to crash into places where many people gather such as church events, school events, after-school mother gatherings etc. In addition, make sure one has many versions of the questionnaires in the various languages of the people to not exclude and leave out groups of people. ![Questionnaire samples][9] 4. workshops and information toolkit workshops are very useful. We invited everybody to be present, open invitation. We converted all the data we gathered into an "information toolkit". This toolkit is presented as information used to make proposals during the workshop. All the stakeholders are invited and can give their say. ![Participants discussing densities and program of development on 3D model][10] ![Using the toolkit information for design proposals][11] Conclusion Our toolkit was gathered and handed as an information booklet to the Planning Department of the municipality. It was considered very useful because (a) architects are trained to distill analysed data into useful design information, plans, maps, etc. and (b) they are creative and are able to translate imagination of social interaction into useful interventions to gather information from the built area and its users. This project was a successful experiment that showed that architects can come down to the bottom-up level and interact with the community to bring design plans and ideas that are useful to the people by listening and being part of them. [1]: http:// [2]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14496573281187779.jpg [3]: http:// [4]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14496577524342255.png [5]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14496578205090002.jpg [6]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/1449658008385063.jpg [7]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14496582708607448.jpg [8]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14496584297668783.jpg [9]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/1449659775542114.jpg [10]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14496601558482776.jpg [11]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14496602819439756.jpg