ASSISTING OR DAMAGING??
Now, you would suspect that having other people's ideas in the mix would be a positive thing; unfortunately, it is not likely to work out in such a positive way. In class today, we talked about the latter of participation, and the different impacts that participation can have on a project. I think that it speaks volumes that we only really had a handful of successful cases to look at for this.
The more participation that you have when
working on a design project, the more opinions there are; we all know that no two people have the
same exact opinion on something and especially something that they have a money involved in. Decision making on a project can be hard
enough and when you add a bunch of different opinions it could potentially
be dangerous for the entirety of the design and design process.
Having added participation from the people that will be occupying the building or home is necessary to create a valuable design for them; however, it is necessary as a designer to know when to stop having the conversations and start production on the project. It is important for the client to think that they are having enough participation in the design of the project to make it where they feel like their opinions are important and their thoughts are going to make a positive impact on design, the key word to that was ‘think’.
“Participation increases the feeling among individual citizens
that they belong in the community.”
Positive and helpful participation comes from when the designer knows the right and wrong ways to ask for it and when they know when to stop having conversations and start producing quality design. Sometimes more participation is needed for a design than others, you just have to keep in mind that ‘citizen control is dangerous’, and too much participation can lead to slower development times and also account for the lack of innovation within a design. I believe that there is definitely a time and a place for having an abundance of community participation and when it is only going to hurt the project.
I agree that designers must be careful when it comes to allowing outside opinions to enter the fray. Sometimes it is necessary though, to at least create the illusion of participation. For certain projects, community acceptance is required, and most of the time, the community will not be happy unless they get some sort of say (or at least think they do) in decision making. An example of this was with the Community Build Studios I was in. We had community dialogues to involve the members we were designing for. Although we gave many options for what site we may have been building for, we strategically emphasized the successes that one potential site could hold, and in the end, everyone involved agreed to pursue it. This was a prime example of controlled participation, which is the realm I believe architecture fits into.
ReplyDeleteIn class we discussed the dangers of having too much citizen control, and I appreciate your recognition of the need for balance here, but I would also like to point out the possible dangers of the mid-lower levels of participation as well. I think that for some of these other levels to be successful there still needs to be a strong connection between the community and the group/ person in control and an understanding of their differences as well. Without this there are potentially devastating consequences. One example of this is urban renewal. There were Citizen Advisory Committees which would lead us to believe that the community as risk and without power was being given a voice and some decision making power. But, looking back we can clearly see that urban renewal had devastating consequences for those very communities. In reality the community meetings were used to persuade and bully the community into signing off on plans instead of having discussions and giving any sort of voice to the community. Sadly this is usually the case in this type of situation. Racism, sexism, and other bias (recognized or not) shows up in the built environment every day; not including the people without a voice in a meaningful way only adds to the manifestation of architectural discrimination.
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