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Note 12 - Harvey's 'The right to the city'

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Note 12 - Harvey's 'The right to the city'

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Title: The right to the city.

Author details: David Harvey

Commentary:

Harvey believes that the anti-capitalist struggle is inherent in urbanisation where development functions as the key tool in the creation and absorption of surplus capital. The collective creation of the city and it's infrastructure, and those who inhabit the social and cultural terrains which enrich urban life, are lacking any right to the city, with those absent from power suffering through processes of discplacement and dispossesion.

A local example, urban redevelopment in West End and Newstead. The richer the "common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximizing interests".

Summary:

Harvey - The Right to the City

Capitalism, particulary neoliberal capitalism, form a ‘perverse ideology’

Urban Aporia’s

The FIRE paradigm → finance, investment, real estate (Josep Acebillo)

Tangible or intangible surplus generation?

“Urban business disguised as urbanity, the result of a perverse ideological system”

“Humans strive for the same emotional state of our successful ancestors. In a resource rich environment, we coordinate in groups, corporations and nations, to maximize financial surplus, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon. At global scales, the emergent result of this combination is a mindless, energy hungry, CO2 emitting Superorganism.” (Nate Hagens)

“In making the city man has remade himself”

Individual v Collectivist → consumerism and identity

“The politics of capitalism are affected by the perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital surplus production and absorption”.

Urbanism as proxy hegemony

“An uneasy alliance between state powers and financial institutions lead to neoliberal capitalism - class power protected at the expense of the working class, their standard of living, while the market is deregulated to do it’s work”.

The property market absorbed a great deal of surplus capital directly through new construction.

The green new deal the next forefront or extraction?

Astonishingly global integration of financial markets that use their flexibility to debt-finance urban projects.

“New urbanisation requires new financial institutions and arrangement to organise the credit required to sustain it”.

“Semi periphery metropolitan tract housing with easy credit → who then faced escalating commuting costs with rising oil prices and soaring mortgage payments as market-interest rates kicked in”

“Quality of urban life has become a commodity for those with money”

“Pacification by cappuccino”

“This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism can become the template for human personality socialisation”

“We increasingly live in divided, fragmented, and conflict-prone cities”

“Under these conditions, a coherent urban politic, already threatened by the individualistic neoliberal ethic”.

“Surplus absorption, through urban transformation (renewal), restructuring through ‘creative destruction’. This nearly always has a class dimension”.

“A process of displacement and dispossession lie at the core of the urban process under capitalism”.

As Leonard Cohen on sand, “what lets the light in” → what does the right to the city demand? Greater democratic control over the production and use of the surplus - over the deployment of the surplus through urbanisation.

The whole neoliberal project has been oriented towards privatisation of control over the surplus.

Michael Bloomberg - Building like Moses with Jane Jacobs in Mind

“One step towards unification of the struggles - focus where the rich creatively destroy the poor, and focus on their right to change the world, to change their life”.

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Note 05 - Carmona's 'Formal and Informal tools of Design Governance'

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Note 05 - Carmona's 'Formal and Informal tools of Design Governance'

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Title: The formal and informal tools of design governance

Author details: Matthew Carmona

Interpretation:

"Failing to utilize (all the tools) them more fully means that those who are responsible for shaping the quality of the built environment are typically doing so with one hand tied behind their back" - Carmona.

The many tools of governance include instruments and mechanisms which give guidance, informs incentives, apply methods of control, gather evidence, dissemenate knowledge, and resourceful assistance to augment outcomes. Collectively this 'toolbox' interfaces in many important ways, in effect stipulating what forms of urbanism emerge. Raxworthy speaks well on the dichotomy between subject and state, highlighting how values are inherent in this process. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.

Summary:

Tools of design governance

Used to steer public and private actors towards particular policy outcomes

Instruments

Approaches

Actions

Formal tools

Guidance

Baer (2011, 277) observes that “There are a number of words that mean approximately the same thing” relating to devices to guide human behaviour”

Using rules as the generic catch-all within which regulations (‘government-issued rules’) and standards (‘a profession’s internally devised rules’) can be located.

Carmona (2011) places an important limit on what can be included in the category of guidance, because this would imply an element of enforceability that guidance does not possess.

Fundamental qualities:

1. The degree of locational specificity

2. The degree of interpretation the guidance requires

1. Performance requirements

2. Prescriptive criteria

All the categories fit in with Carmona’s (2011) assertion that guidance tools do not include fixed ‘blueprints’ because the term ‘guidance’ “suggests a sense of direction for, but not an end solution to, a design problem”.

Four categories of guidance:

1. Design standards → generic, inflexible

2. Design coding → focus on form and typology

3. Design policy → parameters for negotiation and assessment

4. Design framework → masterplans, urban design frameworks et al

Incentive

Lang (1996, 17) identifies two ways of incentivizing developers to produce particular design / development outcomes, first, through direct financial incentives, and second, through what he calls trade-offs: “Financial incentives reduce the monetary risk to developers of making specific types of development. … Trade-offs tie developments which are uneconomic in the market place to highly lucrative development”.

The state aided/state encouraged nexus provides a first means to classify incentivization processes as they relate to design.

Processes of incentivization can also be classified in terms of what they are attempting to incentivize, namely whether they focus on facilitating the process of design and / or development or whether they focus directly on particular clearly defined outcomes such as the provision of public space.

Four categories of incentive:

1. Subsidy → granting state aid to projects (treasure)

2. Direct investment → investment by the state to stimulate develeopment

3. Process management → streamline the process aiming to incentivise good design

4. Bonuses → additional benefitis in exchange for public amenity

Control

Equally, if incentives are viewed as the ‘carrots’ for good behaviour then control might be seen as the ‘stick’, and as a disincentive to bad behaviours.

Control processes themselves reflect one of two major types. They are based on fixed legal frameworks with unquestioning administrative decision making as typified by American, European and Japanese zoning systems. Alternatively they are discretionary with a distinction drawn between law and policy, as is the case in British town and country planning; the latter enacted through ‘guiding’ policy and plans, skilled professional interpretation in the light of local circumstances and political decision making (Reade 1987, 11).

Reflecting their relative strengths and weaknesses, many administrations adopt a mix of the two basic forms of regulation for different purposes. In the UK, for example, planning, conservation and environmental protection are discretionary whilst building control and highways adoption processes are fixed technical processes, open to little interpretation and no recourse to appeal (apart from in the courts).

Both forms of decision making retain the potential to contribute towards what has been described as a regulatory tyranny (Carmona 2009); the first because of its perceived arbitrary, inconsistent and subjective nature, and the second because of its lack of flexibility or inability to consider non-standard approaches.

Three categories of regulatory system:

1. Discretionary → flexible but uncertain

2. Fixed → certain but inflexible

3. Crossover → responsive but slower

Four categories of control:

1. Developer contributions → non-optional societal price to rectify negative externalities

2. Adoption → public benefit in the form of development and transference

3. Development consents → reactive consent to proceed

4. Warranting → appraisal and permit to ensure safety and legality

*level of intervention (lesser → greater)

Informal tools (tools without teeth)

Because formal processes will always be defined within and limited by the legislative frameworks within which they are created (and by the minds of the politicians and technocrats who draft them), it maybe that informal, non-statutory, means are ultimately required to break through the tried and tested, but all too often unsatisfactory, ways of doing things.

Returning to Salamon’s (2002, 2) view that the neo-liberal era has brought with it a proliferation in the tools available to government, he also argues that many of these ‘new’ tools share an important characteristic in common: ‘they are highly indirect. They rely heavily on a wide assortment of third parties

Administration represents the other side of the tools coin in that an administrative infrastructure, appropriate procedures, and the full range of human, financial and skills resources are required to operationalize any sort of tool (Carmona 2016).

three systems might be characterized as ‘traditional’, ‘indirect’ and the ‘private’ administration of design.

Evidence

gathering an evidence-base about design and design process as a means to: support arguments about the importance of design; underpin advice about what works and what does not; and to monitor progress towards particular policy objectives or to gauge the state of the built environment.

Research → elucidate the processes and influences shaping the built environment

Audit → understanding place, may precede or occur in-situ (ie. the state of ‘placemaking’)

Knowledge

Research underpins the range of knowledge tools, the main purpose of which is to spread knowledge about the nature of good design, good and poor development practices, and why it matters.

In the absence of formal intervention and / or delivery powers, it was logical to seek to influence those who did have such powers, and the most straightforward way to attempt to do this was through generating and disseminating knowledge that would shape their practices.

Promotion

advocacy role, helping to advance particular normative design and design process aspirations based on evidence or practical experience.

Instead of waiting for organizations and individuals to seek out knowledge, these tools take the knowledge to them, seeking to package key messages in a manner that engages attention and wins over hearts and minds to the importance of good design.

Evaluation

tools have the potential to shape particular outcomes rather than just the decision-making environment.

tools through which judgements are made about the quality of design by a party external to, and therefore detached from, the design process. This brings us up against a key problematic ‒ the extent to which it is possible, or not, to systemize such evaluation

Indicators → seek to measure and represent aspects of performance

Design review (informal) → practice outside of statutory frameworks, evaluation through impartial expert opinion

Certification → recognition of status and benchmarking

Competitions → conceptual and project, raising standards and rarely mandated

Assistance

processes are often encouraged by the relevant authorities in order to try and ensure first, a better outcome, second, a more efficient processing of the formal application for consent once it is made, and third to help develop a more trusting and collaborative relationship between applicant and authority (xxi).

Beyond these ad hoc and essentially reactive processes, more proactive opportunities exist to engage directly in projects or to otherwise shape the decision-making environment within which design occurs.

Financial assistance → transference of resources

Enabling → directed assistance, engaging in an educational manner for legacy

Community Participation

participation is not singled out as a tool in its own right, but is instead treated as an activity underpinning others;

guidance → to improve content, unanimity, avoid discord, improve outcomes

control → beyond consultation into pre-consent processes

evidence → understanding place through revealing the aspirations and preoccupations of communities

knowledge → targeted education

assistance → enabling activities

Toolbox

The low levels of public engagement with many place-focused regulatory processes is in part explained by this communications gap (until and unless individuals perceive themselves to be directly impacted; Hester 1999).

Failing to utilize (all the tools) them more fully means that those who are responsible for shaping the quality of the built environment are typically doing so with one hand tied behind their back, particularly when it comes to shaping the all-important decision-making environment within which project and place-specific design decisions occur.

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Note 03 - Busquet's 'Defining the Urbanistic Project: Ten Contemporary Approaches'

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Note 03 - Busquet's 'Defining the Urbanistic Project: Ten Contemporary Approaches'

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Title: Defining the Urbanistic Project: Ten Contemporary Approaches

Author details: Joan Busquet

Interpretation:

An abstract but enjoyable approach to understand the many applications of 'urbanism' in it's contemporary form. Themes of reconstruction and transformation are in response to the functionalist urbanism deployed through modernism, it's rehabilatory method cleverly hijacked by global capital and finance in many of it's applications, with some conservative (or progressive?) connection to historicism which itself may actually be applied through an evidence based understanding - what has worked in the past has elements which need to return. Acebillo makes similair reference to understanding the past as guide to future.

Summary:

Introduction

Proposal of a specific taxonomy of the most salient lines of current urbanistic design work.

Cities, ostracized by the deployment of functionalist urbanism in the post-war years, are experimenting with an unprecedented level of transformation and rehabilitation.

Not all urbanism fits within categories, but each has a specific set of methods and instruments which can foster city building.

Ten Contemporary Approaches

1. Synthetic gestures

1. key buildings with urban synergies, big energy to trigger broader urban revitalisation, usually backed by a broad city restructuring plan - example: guggenheim bilbao

2. Multiplied grounds

1. the large urban artifact as a driver, transformation of emblematic parts of the city creating new centralities through conversion/redefinition - example: euralille

3. Tactical manoeuvres

1. minimum critical mass as a driver, ‘there is almost always something to be improved’ - in low investment contexts - example: malagueria by siza (infrastructural spine)

4. Reconfigured surfaces

1. the restructuring of fine grained open space, the aggregation of small scale projects with moderate means, provides a new lease on life without the cost of large restructuring - example: Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam

5. Piecemeal aggregations

1. the urban fragment as the intermediate scale (18-25 city block), confronting various briefs where integration of overlap, competing and coalescing demands exist - example: battery park city

6. Traditional views

1. the old city brought up to date with functional needs of contemporary life

7. Recycled territories

1. large landscapes and decentralisation, transformation and restructuring of large tracts of land where human settlement participates in a broader ecological setting

8. Core retrofitting

1. reorganising and reconfiguring historical and traditional fabrics to guarantee their operation, updating infrastructure and overcrowded fabric for contemporary purposes/objectives

9. Analog compositions

1. rethinking the masterplan, seeking a ‘project’ orientation with the city seen as open, taking advantage of small and intermediate scales and the developing framework (physical and political) in which small projects can aggregate

10. Speculative procedures

1. experimental investigations in urbanism from other theory-based disciplines, formulating new principles and repertoires of innovative value - frequented through competition and in schools of design

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Note 04 - Carmona's 'Investigating Urban Design'

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Note 04 - Carmona's 'Investigating Urban Design'

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Title: Investigating Urban Design
Author details: Matthew Carmona

Interpretation:

Urban design is very much the mongrel discipline. As the amalgam of planning (spatial and social), architecture (building scale), and landscape architecture (landscape scale), the research methods intently guide the discipline to evidence based intuition with flow on effects the the disciplines epistomology and the knowledge of the general public. Through the range of meta-approaches, urbanity can be understood both in evidence of its acquired metrics, or through invesitagtion of experiental and subjectivities. What is important here is that the process and methodolgy leans equally on both.

Summary:

Introduction

Urban Design: the process of shaping places for people; new and old, physical and social

Urban design - the intentional shaping of cities for people, and ‘Urban Design’ as a postmodern critique of modernist urbanism

Urban design as an inter-disciplinary research field with methodologies that cut across approaches and epistemologies

A Mongrel Discipline

Urban design is in fact a mongrel discipline that draws its legitimising theories from diverse intellectual roots - straddling these roots to connect silo-based disciplines, an ‘amalgam’, integrative

Urban design knowledge exists as:

1. A focused amalgam of core knowledge and practice pragmatically drawn from other fields both practical and intellectual

2. A distinct and developing field that has reworked and recast borrowed knowledge by:

1. Agglomerating it together into a singular and coherent field of knowledge

2. Generating new knowledge around what is unique to the subject and practices inherent to urban design

The Power of Research

A considerable discord exists between those taking a social science perspective and those hailing from design backgrounds

Large numbers of grand projects have been incorrectly promoted on the basis of their social benefit, when such benefits turned out to be largely illusory

Both perspectives are incomplete, social science leading to space-lessness, design leading to place-lessness

Socio-economic potential will always influence space and context should always inform design, social science and design need to be reconciled to move beyond partial views of the territory

‘The physical dimension of planning, the space shaping nature of architecture, the socio-economics of the sociologist’, combing the right side of the brain with the left

Choosing the Right Approach(es)

Why is research in urban design important?

Research influences (and is influenced by) what society reflects (or the market) as valuable knowledge

Urban design questions aren’t rational in nature, being difficult to identify and frame

‘Cities are not rocket science, they are more complex than that’

The processes or urban design are subject to human vagaries, in essence unpredictable and poorly understood

Even we rationalise, the research only provides a snapshot of a particular place and time that varies according to context, with no clear line to process or product making funding hard to justify

Designing an obesity pill would deliver tangible benefits, designing a city to encourage exercise and healthy lifestyles is infinitely more complex

The benefits of urban design research and a better urban environment are huge, the mongrel discipline perhaps needing to emerge from within its traditional contemporaries into a unique and established discipline

How do we conduct urban design research?

Four grand families of research methods:

1. Scientific method, based on logic, systematic and measurable evidence and empirical investigation with reproducible methods

2. Social science methods, human social phenomena including politics and economics, mixing both qualitative and quantitative methods (positivist and anti-positivist)

3. Humanities methods, interpretation and critical analysis of phenomena, exploring the context and meaning of theory and it’s interpretations

4. Design methods, design and research led practice using experimentation (real and imagined) to explore problems, under the premise multiple solutions are possible

Three fundamental characteristics of research:

1. Research evidence, primary vs. secondary - generating original or interpreting existing sources of data

2. Research knowledge, subjective vs. objective - uncovering and examine facts and truths (positivist) or speculative knowledge, relativist and abstract which is never ultimately right or wrong

3. Research journey, inductive vs deductive - moving from specific to general (including generating theory) or from general to specific, testing theory through gathering evidence

How should urban design research be used?

Research should be advancing knowledge in the discipline, generating new information, or recasting and incrementally improving existing understandings.

Research is for other researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and users of the urban environment, and is equally valid whether informing practice or in academic debate

Theoretical work will be most powerful if, over time, it informs practice

Urban design research must communicate with relevance to the real world, with transparent language (both language and illegible graphical representations)

Urban design is diverse and in this sense there is no normative urbanism or set of principles that apply everywhere

The Book

(Interdisciplinary) Meta-approaches to Urban Design Research

1. Philosophical approaches

1. Using theory and critique to understand

2. Process investigations

1. focus on the normative tools, systems, procedures and networks that shape potential urban design outcomes

3. Physical explorations

1. analytical understanding of shape, configuration and growth of space as a physical product of the city, including activity, use, and movement

4. Propositional experiments

1. research and pedagogy through design process and creative speculation to reveal solutions to urban problematics

5. Performance enquiries

1. direct and indirect investigation of human and stakeholder enquiries, investigating the nature of space-in-use and other performance dimensions

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Title: Emergent Urbanism's

Author details: Julian Raxworthy

Interpretation:

This discussion commences with notions of time - informal urbanism, as an emergent process in marginal spaces, versus tactical urbanism, improvisation, informality and (often) immediate affectation.

As discussed in Raxworthy's landscape lecture, informality emerges in the gaps of the system, much the way small vegetation emerges in the soil profile between two pieces of pavement. Before undertaking a literature analysis, the author makes an interesting read, that 'wealth' can be viewed as the distribution of open space (an economic amenity) - for instance, Mumbai provides several interesting examples of this.

Thomas Piketty is the first cab off the rank - exploring how capital gains have now exceeded the return on productive output, thus disincentivising the labour prerogative and putting great power in those with access to capital. This also has another interesting side effect - that access to assets eclipses the use of human capital. How sad.

David Harvey's right to the city is next elaborated. Commencing with the view that rights to private property and profit trump all other notions of rights, Harvey questions this discourse and critiques the global urban instruments of finance and ownership, highlighting how capital and finance are now the template for human socialisation - the perverse neoliberal ethic. Raxworthy posits that design, as practised in the 21st century, is the creative leveraging of real estate value. And always we have to be careful to avoid pacification by cappuccino - bread and circuses?

Hernando De Soto proposes bringing the excluded back into the formal economy, by finding ways to connect these people back to systems of taxation (which itself is a redistributive mechanism - if you pay it).

Urban planning in the global south (Watson and Satge) is explicit in its view that methodologies of the south are fundamentally different to those of the north. In this sense place (and context) matter - epistemologies and heuristics aren't universal. Another key point is to say that modernity and universality don't occur without coloniality. The book breaks urbanisation into two models - 1 the Marxist/structuralist general theory (universal) and 2 the post-structural/post-colonial urban theory (bottom-up). This is seen in the failed import projects across the developing world where western methodologies are applied incongruently with the context. The book offers the idea of conflicting rationalities - the mimetic use of ideas was copying the underlying assumptions of the subject. This is a recipe for disaster. The key ideas in this piece are that the module doesn't solve anything (a core theme in architectural history) and that to successfully pursue design, one must get specific and understand these rationalities.

David Gouverneur builds on Grahame Shane's model proposing informality in settlement patterns has armatures made of three main elements - corridors, patches, and stewards. In other words, lines, nodes, and an engaged population give life to these objects.

Several key themes are explored in the conclusion - the idea of sites and services (infrastructural) approach to urban development, open building and 'half houses', and the use of infrastructure to validate the existence of informal settlements and invest in the self-generation and built aspects of the informal.

Raxworthy leaves with the following provocations:

Urban economic questions are not abstract

Capital and labour systems highly affect urbanity

Capital is a tool to acquire 'richness' (but not wealth)

And a workable approach could be to understand what people want and provide the hard infrastructure (the sites and services in between) for emergence on the ground.

Summary:

Emergent Urbanisms

Informal urbanism → development on the leftover spaces and the city margins

Tactical urbanism → improvise, informal and immediate affectation

Time based approaches to the city → situationism and other modes

Unequal scenes → day to day inequality

Formal vs Informal

Informality is seizing gaps in the system

Wealth as distribution of open space (an economic amenity)

Rural to urban migration was filling a labour lack → migrants or entrepreneurs?

Thomas Piketty - Capital

Capital gains exceed growth on output/income - if you don’t have capital, you aren’t likely to succeed

Gini coefficient

Rental price and land price as the key drivers of the city - density increases and land becomes scarce (related to sprawl)

The price system knows neither limits nor morality (the price of everything, the value of nothing)

Taxation systems are redistributive

Inequality is back to where it was in the 19th century

Access to an asset eclipses the human capital

David Harvey - The right to the city

The rights of private property and profit trump all other notions of rights

‘In making the city man has remade himself’ - it is the right to change ourselves by changing the city

If you don’t have property, do you have a right to the city?

Urbanisation is a process of mobilising surplus capital, through boom and bust cycles

Global urbanisation depends of remaking financial instruments to arrange the credit for city making

Quality of urbanism has become a commodity - the forces of culture (the things we love) are the forces of inequality

The template for human socialisation - a perverse neoliberal ethic

Design as leveraging real estate value (movement of capital)

The planet as a building site aligns with a planet of slums...

POP - pacification by cappuccino

Hernando De Soto - The other path

We need to bring the excluded back into the formal economy (formalising the informal)

^The shining path vs the other path (Peru)

Finding ways back into taxation

Vanessa Watson, Richard Satge - Urban Planning in the Global South

Thinking from the south → the methodologies are fundamentally different in their operation

Place matters - epistemologies aren’t universal

There is no modernity (universalisation) without coloniality

Urbanisation 1 - marxist/structuralist general urban theories (universal)

Urbanisation 2 - post-structural/postcolonial urban theory from below

Metricisation (not just smart city) - evidence based rationale which treats difference as just empirical variation

The developing world is full of failed import projects

Insurgent citizenship - a practice that comes from the citizens who make the city

Conflicting rationalities - when we copy ideas across we are assuming the subject (story about the uncircumcised man - they were seen as boys)

The module doesn't solve everything

The key idea - get specific and understand the rationalities

Nabeel Hambi - Small change

emergence from fine grained specific situations

an intelligent practice which builds on the collective wisdom of people and organisations on the ground (the local), which then is rationalised in ways that can make a difference globally

making the ordinary special, and the special more widely accessible

small (how things start) change (that is what development is about) and small change because this can be done without the millions typically required

David Gouverneur - Planning and design for future informal settlements

informal armatures - shape the informality in advance

corridors - infrastructure and activity (attractors - intensify and trigger, protectors - slow and buffer)

patches - urban infill where self constructed (receptors - secure the land, and transformers - important economic drivers developed by the public sectors)

stewards - protect the public realm by engaging the society

Sites and services

give land tenure and provide services - let people build themselves

The architecture of good intentions

The systemic focus is what changes lives

Open building

A sites and services approach where minimised structure through which people can improvise

Infrastructure

Investment to support the self generated and built aspects of the informal, validating their existence (set up the infrastructure that provides the services)

Summary

Urban economic questions are not abstract

Capital and labour highly effect systems

Capital as a tool to acquire ‘richness’

Approach from the bottom up - actually understand what people want, or provide hard infrastructure that allows for emergence on the ground

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By J. ACEbillo From 52 propositions it proposes to understand glocal urbanity as a new modernity derived from the Axial Age. It proposes to understand the city, also as a socio-technological process. Integrate concepts such as Complexity, Urban Metabolism and Second Order Cybernetics into our disciplinary corpus.

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Bonus Note 11 - Josep Acebillo's Disruptive Urbanism

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Bonus Note 11 - Josep Acebillo's Disruptive Urbanism

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Title: Disruptive Urbanism
Author details: Josep Acebillo

Do not go to Syracuse, but if you have been there, return as soon as possible to improve our society, as Plato did.

Interpretation:

The first book in a series, the next analysing the 'disciplinar potentiality offered by a critical revision of neo-medievalism'. The 52 proposals offered in this book are reactionary and its thesis aims to reestablish urbanity - having been degenerated by a perverse idealogicial system of finance and capital, and its global manifestation. Acebillo's understanding is that of the regional scale, hence the subtitle, glocal urbanity. Describing an 'urban corpus' of concepts both technical and abstract, the city-region emerges and transregionalism becomes the dominant relation as the nation-state dissolves. Tangibilities and intangibilies work in tandem, with urban social capital (natural, human and infrastructure) forming the underlying strategy in dealing with urban complexity.

Summary

Seven(ish) disciplinary (urban design) domains
1. Devaluation of urbanity during the post-fordist transition introducing globalisation
2. Possibility of understanding the new global urbanity as a new modernity, or as a matrix derived from the axial age. Understand the city as a sociotechnical process. universal-stakeholding
3. Integrate into our disciplinary corpus concepts like urban complexity and metabolism.
4. Understand the need to increase social, human, and natural capital.
5. Proposed a new trans-regionalism in symbiosis with the glocal scale.
6. Foster a more disruptive urbanism composed of tangible values and intangible virtues.

52 propositions
1 Three key vectors in an urban model, globalisation leading to:
1. socio political -> supranational political context Political
2. economic -> neo-tertiary economy Economic
3. technological -> new technological paradigm Technological
2 Geopolitical context frame by three cross-disciplinary discourses geopolitics
demographic boom demographics
ecological discourse ecological
socio-political relating to diversity and migration flows sociology political
4 FIRE paradigm
Finance, insurance, real estate
FIRE has led to the creation of urban aporias, via disciplinary desertification
Urban business disguised as urbanity, the result of a perverse ideological system (refer financial crisis)
What is human progress?
6 Can modernity be interpreted as an updatable operating system?
7 The axial age
[[Karl Jaspers]] described the Axial Age as "an interregnum between two ages of great empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness".[11] It has also been suggested that the Axial Age was a historically liminal period, when old certainties had lost their validity and new ones were still not ready.[12] - [Axial Age - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial\_Age)
8 Globalisation will not be possible withut strengthening our spirituality and even updating religions; a new ideological framework able to renovate current models
9 Interactive vectors of urban culture
evolutionary matrix = family + nature + technology
10 Technology as a tool to pivot between past, present, and future
11 Territorial Isotropy
the land has more capability for programme and function
12 Interstitiality
13 Fracmentation
14 Icebergs
New spatial typology in subteranean - for social-economic and ecological reasons
15 Recycling
Negative impacts in processes of obselescence
Restoration, recycling, reuse, demolition all affect the behaviour of the urban structure
16 Intermodality
Efficient mobility systems built around HUBS, nodes of urban and regional centrality
17 Interactivity
18 Unbundling Infrastructures
19 New Logistics and the Port-City
network society
20 Global airports as regional clusters
Transport HUB and neo-tertiary cluster significantly affecting the regional socio-economic structure
21 Logisitics and Geopolitics
New logistics routes, significant geopolitical changes
22 New post-industrial mobility matrix
Beyond mobility to an interactive process of tangible and intangible elements (including the regeneration of public space)
23 Invariants of territorial culture
Diversity has threated homogeneity but driven heterogeneity
Urban culture has retained some invariants
water as a sine qua non
infrastructre to facilitate socio cultural interaction
building of icons to highlight identity
use of orthogonal grids as geometric models
24 Interaction and complexity
Complexity to analyse people and cultural interactions
25 Urban thermodynamics
The city as a complex open system
parameters: stability, reversibiility, fluctuations
26 Rupture and Recovery of Urban Balance
The city as a constant and intermittent series of actions which break the urban balance, with counter tendancies to recover to state of balance
dissipation and homeostatis; boom bust cycles
urban resilience - capacity to carry change
metabolism - cycling energy and matter
27 Urban Resilience
capacity of a system to resist and reacto to serious perturbances
28 Urban Metabolism
exchange of mass, energy, and information between the city and it's surrondings
triple urban systems
nutritional-energetic
thermodynamic
ecological
29 Metabolic efficiency
urban systems comprised of three subsystems which define metabolic efficiency
built environment
transport
human activity
31 [[Social capital]]
Allowing society to sustain itself and be operative and able to translate citizens wishes into practical actions
the 'third sector'
allows individual interest to be reconciled with general interests
32 [[Human capital]]
synthesis of value generated by peoples capacities; the stock of knowledge and skills people have and their ability to apply them to improve the system
restore and revitalise through creativity
33 [[Natural capital]]
earth as a source of wealth
the stock of assets and natural services, renewable or non-renewable, which, as they are scarce, need to be preserved and replineshed to guarantee optimum social development
valuable and with diminishing yield, these need to be socioeconomically rationed like other assets
34 [[Infrastructure]] as fixed [[Social capital]]
[[Infrastructure]]; as fixed [[Social capital]] , form the backbone of urban fabrics
High functional range (transport, social, cutural, health, energy et al)
two key functions make up the essence of urbanity
urban [[public space]]
[[affordable housing]]
35 Obsolescence of modern-industrial metropolitanism
socioeconomic paradigms of the network society have generated practical obsolesce of the model
permanent deurbanised crusts (former industrial areas)
exhaustion of the westphalian nation state
neo-metropolitanism, the city-region, a new transregional territorial culture
36 New regional visions - Storper's socioeconomic theories
new macro urban constellations (new interaction between natural and urban systems)
global to glocal through three regional viewpoints:
socioeconomic, ecological, and urban
37 Regional ecolocial perspective - Forman's land mosaic
land mosaic theory
38 New regional urban perspective - archipelago model
built urban systems that emerge in an unbuilt context (natural and agricultural ecosystem)
centralities formed by mature historic cities, new developments and clusters make up a polycentric structure
39 Structure of the intermediate spaces in the city region: tertiarisation of the primary sector, Desakota phenomenon
![image.png](../assets/image_1645230807372_0.png)
It comes from Indonesian desa "village" and kota "city".
40 Regional clustering - efficiency of corridors
connections between cities and clusters become functionally porous and efficient corridors
main arteries
41 Territorial interpretation of the principle of elective affinities
evolution of binary constellations to ternary
42 Disruptive innovation and new Glocal Urban Models
43 Towards a more disruptive urbanism: Technology as pivot two
44 Tactical-methodoligcal principles: demolition as a tool to promote urban innovation
demolition as a constructive incentive, to remove obsolete or inappropriate structures, creating voids to foster urban innovation
45 Tactical-methodological principles: urban acupuncture
the 'plan', is slow, inflexible and generally unconditional and inoperative
a system of projects, strategically scattered across the land biocities_concept retrofit/revitalise/replace + universal stakeholding + compact + dense + three dimensional, the other is the self
46 Tactical-methodological principles: introduce chance and random elements into the stochastic processes
be like the archer, embrace randomness but direct toward the target
47 Structuring principles for a more disruptive urbanism: reconsider development recognising the trilateral nature of space
the observer and the observed are part of the same object, reflexivitiy
three way composition of space [[Edward Soja]], 'Thirdspace'
how space is lived
how space is percevied
how space is designed
48 Structuring principles for a more disruptive urbanism: promote the patterns that connect, in a world tending towards differentiation and indifference
find the patterns that connect all living creatures
homology - the relationships between two parts of object a, are similair to two parts in object b
'Being different within a single pattern', find the patterns connecting different individuals and cultures, while retaining our own differences and singularities
49 Structuring principles for a more disruptive urbanism: temperance as a disciplinary reaction to encourage moderation
practice an attitude of moderation to face the challenge of sensorial provocation, the proliferation of dispensable and superfluous urban dynamics
50 Intangible Ideological values: promote greater spatial justice
spatial justice involves the control of surplus capital generated by urban development depense degrowth
raising the intensity of interdisciplinary collaboration to guarantee a fairer urban discourse
51 Intangible Ideological values: the value of parsimony
space-time has evolved into space-time-individuality
fast pace of life, frenetic mobility leading the personal and environmental dysfunction
"the mass tourist is not a traveller, he is a consumer of landscapes and exotic cultures"
Occam's razor: the simplest solution is often the best
52 Intangible Ideological values: the value of harmony
the unity and concordance of man with all things
Can neo-medievalism be considered a disciplinary incentive?
"Return to a territorial culture, where architecture (in the virtuvian sense) and infrasturcture (as fixed social capital) play a more vertebrador role, reasoning the most adequate proportion between the logic and the narrative, reinterpreting the interaction between the funcuntional, perceptive and decorative aspects".
Do not go to Syracuse, but if you have been there, return as soon as possible to improve our society, as Plato did.

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Note 01 - Grahame Shane's Urban Design - An Overview

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Note 01 - Grahame Shane's Urban Design - An Overview

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Title: Urban Design - An Overview

Author details: David Grahame Shane

Interpretation:

Grahame Shane's conception of urban archipelago's aligns with the views on Josep Acebillo, refer note 11. The four thematic models of urbanism evolved in a catalytic period of history, an 'after' period with eerily similairities to the one in which we read/write this now. The idea of reconstruction and development are in two sides of the same coin, interesting one inferring redevelopment of something one existing, the other as development for developments sake. Underlying these notions of development are relatively perverse idealogical requirements often imbuing power through the application of finance and capital. Key to understanding the archipelago model are it's interrelations, with fragments and clusters coexisting and agglomerating with priveleged links between them. There is much to unpack here on mimetics and the nature of in and out groups, informality and the global south.

Summary:

Introduction

After the second world war, urban design emerged as a separate professional activity in Europe and America.

The new term was partly in response to the necessity of addressing war damage, while also to assist planning for the impact of the automobile.

At the time, some saw the new for a new field between architecture and planning, with planners working at a large scale and architects dealing with the single building.

By 1945 the largest cities containing the world urban population (30% of the 3 Billion global) were located in Europe and a few large American cities, with outliers like Beijing and Tokyo.

The European metropolis had expanded via industrialisation however many infrastructures at the end of the war lay unused or in ruins.

European architects dreamt of controlling every facet of great metropolitan centres, urban design in the imperial age a grand urban affair.

By the beginning of the 21st century the picture had completley changed.

Over 50% of the world’s population would live in cities, 3 billion urban people, with 33% in informal settlements.

The location of global population had also shifted, with Asia overtaking many European capitals.

The form of the city had also changed, the megacity eclipsing the compact metropolis of the 20th century, a dispersed logic of informal and formal developments connect by complex infrastructures.

Four models or themes are identified to have occured during 60 years following 1945 - the metropolis, megalopolis, the fragmented metropolis, and the megacity/metacity.

Different urban actors in different periods created different urban models, using the basic elements of enclave, armature and heterotopia.

Urban Design - An Overview

Intense urbanisation of the last 60 years has been the accidental by-product of industrialisation producing great wealth and great poverty.

Oil provided the new energy source for this process, and small petroleum powered engines transformed the lives of the rich and poor, in the city and countryside.

As the 21st century continues, the cost of dependence on fossil fuel in becoming clear, with climate and global warming threatening megacities built adjacent river estuaries and costal plains.

Americans led the way in oil-based development, however their use inefficient due to low cost and subsidies. The low energy efficiency has seen American’s consume 10 times as much energy as the global average individual. As cities shift, there is much to learn from Asian economies operate with 1/13th the American energy per capita.

This shift sees the traditional Eurocentric narrative unworkable with new urban actors entering.

Urban design innovation meant the rapid transformation of modernist prototypes in hybrid with local climate and culture.

By the end of the 20th century, old metropolitan cities were importing innovations from their former colonies.

Varying urban design strategies have emerged as populations shift from Europe to Asia.

In broad terms China seems to cherish the modernist metropolitan model, with India investing in infrastructure and practicing a less prescriptive, bottom up pattern of development.

In western cities, increases in oil prices threaten the dispersed spatial logic (suburbs) that has made public transport uneconomical.

Global urban actors, patterns and models

Urban actors, and their beliefs, build cities.

All cities, even randomly looking, are products of beliefs and actors with energy and organisational skills which manifest as chaotic swarming products of individual choice - made in the individuals best interests.

Cities are about people living together and this requires organisation in managing the affairs of the community and larger city.

Managing via cybernetics - urban modelling and self organisation.

Cybernetics is the art and science of managing information flows through sorting and feedback mechanisms.

Analysis of this data helped designers create complex representations of urban fragments in virtual space, as well as identify patterns in seemingly chaotic informal environments like favelas.

Urban actors manipulate a limited set of urban elements in building their urban models and cities, making models which work for them in a particular time and place.

The enclave - a more or less bounded space, the armature - a linear spatial organisation device, and the heterotopia - a specialised enclave which can hold conflicting urban activities in the same place, at the same time (often vertically), and contributing to the overall stability of the city (through it’s capacity to absorb change).

Urban actors are able to reflect on their models, reorganise elements, and transform models to fit local circumstance and time.

Global European empires broke down into nation states dominated by the two superpowers of the cold war.

The Russian urban model focused on the metropolis, with a central empire and satellite cities in form of a miniature clone.

The American model, the megalopolis, linked linear networks of cities, originally through railway networks and costal plaints, then through the oil fuelled infrastructure and roadways for the automobile.

European cities and their shrinking empires straddled between models, making hybrids based on the safety net of a welfare state.

Japan and the ‘Asian tigers created hybrid models with stronger, more centralised governments - the fragmented metropolis.

Latin American nations developed a characteristic model including non-industrialised informal settlements where new immigrants cold build their own houses within a megacity model.

The American model proved triumphant by the early 90’s, however the externalities and cost to ecological, financial, and social elements became apparent, with Asian style megacities emerging as an alternative model.

As global financial institutions emerge as sources of capital, inter city competition intensifies.

Conclusion

Urban Archipelago’s

It is tempting to see the four urban design models as 15 year terms in a sequential periods of development.

After the second world war, a period of reconstruction followed the metropolitan model of Europe’s crumbling imperial system.

During the cold war, America developed a new megapolitan model based on oil instead of coal, and exported the model to Europe and Asia after 1960 in the golden age, lasting until the early 1970’s.

The system became unstable as the result of a series of oil shocks, setting in motion the fragmented metropolis model with stable, smaller urban patches financed by global corporations.

As the global system reached it’s limits inside a financial meltdown, global urban populations shifted to low and middle income Asian style megacities.

The four models present at once as patches in most cities, forming a network of symbiotic interrelations.

We can view such fragments as archipelagos, clusters of urban island, with privileged links connecting them.

In the archipelago model, all models co-exist in constellation which people have the ability to live together amongst their differences.

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Note 02 - Krieger's "Where and How Does Urban Design Happen"

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Note 02 - Krieger's "Where and How Does Urban Design Happen"

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Title: Where and How Does Urban Design Happen

Author details: Alex Krieger

Interpretation:

Urban design can indeed function as a frame of mind. It's emergence, and the birth of the discipline was more rebirth in form, or a kind of metamorphosis. Development, complexity and specialisation witnessed in late 20th century paradoxically led to the need for a generalist discipline - one more interested in the space between (and it's occupation) than the space itself. As Sert comments (perhaps dismayed), urban design does remain in the 'fog of amiable generalities', but perhaps this is exactly where it needs to be?

Summary:

Introduction

In 1956 Jose Luis Sert convened a conference at Harvard GSD to assemble evidence on behalf of a desired discipline he called urban design.

A wide array of participants seemed to concur that the widening mid-century intellectual split between the ‘art of building’ and the ‘systemic nature of planning’ was not helpful to city building or post war rebuilding.

The notion of a new discipline, and the focus on urbanisation, were occurring in both the United States and Europe.

Participants hoped to stem the perceived split between design and planning.

Shortly after, Harvard would begin to offer post graduate urban design curricula, lending weight to the idea of professionally trained urban designers essential for a rapidly urbanising world.

Urban design is the ‘part of city planning which deals with the physical form of the city’, ‘the most creative phase of city planning in which imagination and artistic capacities play the important part’. (Sert)

At the beginning of the conferred Sert identified an ambitions goal: ‘to find the common basis for the joint work of the architect, landscape architect, and the city planner’... ‘Urban design being wider in scope than these three professions’.

50 years later, a precise definition of urban design has not been accepted.

In a world producing unprecedented urban environments, urban design is an increasingly sought-after expertise.

Territories, both spatial and conceptual; defined as a ‘spheres of action’.

Urban design and the ten spheres of urbanistic action

1. The bridge connecting planning and architecture

UD to mediate between plans and projects, to translate objectives of planning into physical strategies, to translate public policy and program into architectural concepts of appropriate urban form

Planning before design is subtly incorrect, it is not a sequential process, rather an interactive and iterative one.

2. A form-based category of public policy

Agreeing on specific attributes of good urbanism to encourage these through regulatory requirements.

This includes the incorporation of formal and aesthetic judgements in addition to existing measurable criteria, public policy pertaining to environmental quality and beauty

3. The architecture of the city

Seek to control the shaping of the public, and therefore common, areas of the city.

Shaping public space is considered the first role of the architect/urbanist.

4. Urban design as restorative urbanism

The form of the pre-industrial western city holds immense power over city dreaming amongst professionals and the public.

The traditional city seems at once legible, human scaled, manageable, and aesthetically pleasing.

Such elements are absent in the modern metropolis, why not mobilise to regain these?

New urbanist’s attempt to do this, advocating a return to ‘time-tested’ principles of urbanism, now appealing to a disillusioned suburban culture

The public is particularly sympathetic, for a return to walkability, civic streets and squares, low rise, high density, defined neighbourhoods gathered around valuable institutions, intricate layers of vehicle free human space still holding much appeal.

5. Urban Design as an art of “place-making”

The provision of distinct, lively, appealing places for congregation to alleviate the homogeneity of many contemporary urban areas.

The creation of exceptional places to serve human purposes.

Is modern life able to be practiced under traditional iconography?

6. Urban design as Smart Growth

Advocating for suburban growth management and reinvestment strategies for older rings around city centres

With aims to control sprawl and make environmental stewardship a more overt part of urban thinking

Opportunistic expression, over 90% of development takes place at the periphery of existing urbanisation

Suburban areas are not non-urban, they merely provide a different urban experience, or intensity.

The contemporary urban designer will be more conversation minded and smarter about managing land and resources.

To manage urban growth requires dealing with elements that cut across jurisdictional boundaries - like land conservation, water management and mobility

7. Urban Design as the infrastructure of the city

Engineering criteria are not themselves sufficient city making tools, and transportation is just one category of urban infrastructure.

The urban designer attempts to address the calibration of mobility with other social needs while advancing new, or reviving old, methods to integrate city form and transportation systems.

This is what fuels the modern fascination with transit oriented developments.

The twentieth century loves affair with the car - the ultimate personal mobility device, has limited the range of conceptualising urban form and transportation.

8. Urban design as landscape urbanism

The incorporation of ecology, landscape architecture and infrastructure into the urban discourse.

Sert’s 1956 conference produced rhetoric on the integrity of landscape architecture to urban design.

Valuable urban design is to be found at the intersection of ecology, engineering, design, careful programming, and social policy.

Nolli is a binary conception of the city being made of buildings and voids, the white (and the various hues of) today radically green in landscape urbanism.

9. Urban design as visionary urbanism

Urban design vision and hypothesising models for spatially organising communities

Design professionals cannot be mere absorbers of public opinion while waiting for consensus to build, they must offer new ideas as well.

The heroic form giving tradition may be in decline, having witnessed immense harm from universal ideas.

New visions may not be seen in deeds, but in understandings of urban culture.

How directly engaged in the real world should urban design be?

10. Urban design as community advocacy

Urban design connotes large scale thinking - about substantial settlements of the scale of grand urbanism

Urban design now approximates what was once termed community planning.

“A store is also a storekeeper” - Jane jacobs

Urban design has an association with citizen participation

The focus of planning increasingly appears to the public as abstract, and unattached to immediate concerns and daily needs.

Urban designers are not shapers of cities, as much as custodians of the qualities valued by the community, qualities that need protection and fostering.

Conclusion

Urban Design as a frame of mind

Urban design has emerged as an important part of managing modernisation.

Instead of moving toward professional specificty, urban design has come to represnet the many ways for engaging and facilitating urbanity.

Urban design as the process which produces or enhances urbanity.

Perhaps Sert is disappointed that half a century later there remains a ‘fog of amiable generalities’.

Urban design is less a technical skillset than a mind set among varying disciplines seeking quality in community form, and the enhancement of urbanity.

One may rejoice in the many spheres of urbanistic action for passionate lovers of cities.

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Title: What is decidim?https://xabier.barandiaran.net/2018/04/24/what-is-decidim/
Author details:  Xabier E. Barandiaran

Interpretation:

An open-source participatory democracy for cities. This is a tool for political participation, giving citizens control of the data, their city, and importantly its design. A mimetic form of social media redesigned to work for the political - creative bureaucracy. This is public policy through co-creation, and has been applied at the city and neighborhood scale. The end goal of decidim is a socio-political, self-organised network for the city.

The development was publically funded, with local SME's forced and encouraged in open source to collaborate. This interdisciplinarity informed a healthy diversity and the public investment is mutualised having touched many hands/minds - this is genuine community building (in the digital sphere).

The software doesn't just apply a use licence, it dictates a social contract - a democratic code to be accepted upon it's use and within the tools community.

Summary:

Decidim [http://decidim.org], from the Catalan «let’s decide» or “we decide”, is a digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, a digital platform, built entirely and collaboratively as free software.

The platform allows any organization (local city council, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood or cooperative) to create mass processes for strategic planning, participatory budgeting, collaborative design for regulations, urban spaces and election processes.

By “participatory democracy” we mean that form of “government of the people and by the people” in which people take part as equals or peers (from latin pars, part, and capere, to take).

By taking part we mean that people take the part of sovereignty of political life that belongs to them. And this should be an equal part for each, democracy is something that is done among peers.

The term “digital infrastructure” makes reference to a set of tools, resources, data-sets, documents, codes (legal, computer, etc.), interfaces and services that are digitalized or made accessible by digital means.

All these, when organized as an infrastructure, make possible to deploy a participatory democratic system in any organization (be it a municipality, a cooperative, an association, a union or a community).

By “free and open” we mean that the project’s goods (the assets of the infrastructure) do no fall under the form of private property, that excludes others from access, usage, copy, modify and re-publish or reuse these resources but, instead, displays all the legal, technical and social means necessary to share them and open them to collaboration.

the term “public-common’s” indicates that the project is mostly financed and made possible by public institutions and is managed and designed by an open community

For this infrastructure to be a common’s it is important that these partners organize democratically in relation to the project. In this sense Decidim is a reflexive infrastructure that uses the very infrastructure to democratize itself.

Specific examples of each of these include: a citizen initiative for directly changing a regulation (Initiative); a general assembly or workers’ council (Assembly); a participatory budgeting, strategic planning, or electoral process (Processes); a referendum or call to vote “Yes” or “No” to change the name of an organization (Consultation).

So, for example, the various phases of a participatory budgeting process (where members of an organization are called to decide how to spend a budget) can combine components in the following way: at an early phase public meetings can be opened for citizens to analyze different needs classified by districts. In turn these meetings can lead to the design of a survey. The survey results can next be used to define a set of categories for projects to be proposed. The proposal component might then be activated for participants to create and publish their projects as solutions to the identified needs. These proposals can be commented and after two weeks of deliberation the voting component can be activated to select among the projects with a budget-expenditure system. Participants can then be called to a public meeting to evaluate the results and an assessment survey can then be launched for those who could not attend the meeting. Finally, the accountability component can be activated to monitor the degree of execution of the selected projects and people can comment on it.

What makes Decidim particularly powerful is this combination of components within spaces, which provides an organization with a complete toolkit to easily design and deploy a democratic system adapted to its needs.

All members and partners of the Decidim project must endorse and follow a “social contract” (https://decidim.org/contract) that defines a set of guiding principles.

1. Free software and open content:

2. Transparency, traceability and integrity:

3. Equal opportunities:

4. Privacy with verification:

5. Democratic quality and guarantees: the platform must guarantee the democratic quality, the non-discrimination and equal opportunities for each participant and proposal.

6. Inclusiveness and multilayerness

Decidim was born in an institutional environment (that of Barcelona City Council), directly aiming at improving and enhancing the political and administrative impact of participatory democracy in the state (municipalities, local governments, etc.).

But it also aims at empowering social processes as a platform for massive social coordination for collective action independently of public administrations.

Corporate digital platforms (Amazon, AirBnB, etc.) are disrupting private services and markets. Decidim comes to fill the gap of public and common’s platforms, providing an alternative to the way in which private platforms coordinate social action (mostly with profit-driven, data extraction and market oriented goals).

Decidim is more than a technological platform. It has required to assemble a variety of codes, realities and dimensions that go beyond programming code. We define it as a “technopolitical project” where legal, political, institutional, practical, social, educational, communicative, economic and epistemic codes merge together. Ultimately, Decidim is in itself a sort of crossroad of the various dimensions of networked democracy and society, a detailed practical map of their complexities and conflicts.

the political (focused on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations)

the technopolitical (focused on how the platform is designed, the mechanisms it embodies, and the way in which it is itself democratically designed)

the technical (focused on the conditions of production, operation and success of the project: the factory, collaborative mechanisms, licenses, etc.).

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Many people ask what is this project called " Decidim" to which I have devoted my last two year of work with complete dedication. I wanted to share a brief summary here. This text is the introduction of the Decidim's White Paper (I am writing with Antonio Calleja and Arnau Monterde), to be published soon. I have systematized this text myself but it is really the product of a big group of people that have contributed to this project since its inception (Arnau Monerde, Andrés Lucena, Antonio Calleja, Carol Romero, Pablo Aragón and many others).

Table of contents

Introduction

Decidim [ http://decidim.org], from the Catalan "let's decide" or "we decide", is a digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, a digital platform, built entirely and collaboratively as free software. More specifically, Decidim is a web environment (a framework) produced in Ruby on Rails (a programming language) that allows anybody to create and configure a website platform to be used in the form of a political network for democratic participation. The platform allows any organization (local city council, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood or cooperative) to create mass processes for strategic planning, participatory budgeting, collaborative design for regulations, urban spaces and election processes. It also makes possible to connect traditional in-person democratic meetings (assemblies, council meetings, etc.) with the digital world: sending meeting invites, managing registrations, facilitating the publication of minutes, etc. In addition, Decidim enables the structuring of government bodies or assemblies (councils, boards, working groups), the convening of consultations, referendums or channelling citizen or member initiatives to trigger different decision making processes. Yet, the Decidim project is much more than that.

Definition

Decidim is a public-common's, free and open, digital infrastructure for participatory democracy. It is convenient to explain the terms of this definition in inverse order.

By "participatory democracy" we mean that form of "government of the people and by the people" in which people take part as equals or peers (from latin pars, part, and capere, to take). By taking part we mean that people take the part of sovereignty of political life that belongs to them. And this should be an equal part for each, democracy is something that is done among peers.

The term "digital infrastructure" makes reference to a set of tools, resources, data-sets, documents, codes (legal, computer, etc.), interfaces and services that are digitalized or made accessible by digital means. This infrastructure is primarily a software platform for participatory democracy. Participants can create proposal, sign and support them, comment, receive notifications, attend public meetings or receive the minutes. Administrators can design participatory processes, define organs, configure types of initiatives or set up consultations. The infrastructure also includes documentation, design (icons, images, logos, etc.), legal documents, datasets or training resources, among others. All these, when organized as an infrastructure, make possible to deploy a participatory democratic system in any organization (be it a municipality, a cooperative, an association, a union or a community).

By "free and open" we mean that the project's goods (the assets of the infrastructure) do no fall under the form of private property, that excludes others from access, usage, copy, modify and re-publish or reuse these resources but, instead, displays all the legal, technical and social means necessary to share them and open them to collaboration.

Finally, the term "public-common's" indicates that the project is mostly financed and made possible by public institutions and is managed and designed by an open community constituted by public-servants, members of different associations, university researchers and students, activists and staff from foundations, workers from different companies or simply volunteers that commit to the principles of the project. For this infrastructure to be a common's it is important that these partners organize democratically in relation to the project. In this sense Decidim is a reflexive infrastructure that uses the very infrastructure to democratize itself.

Platform features and functional architecture

Since the digital platform displays and embodies both the means of project organization and its democratic principles, it is important to explain how the platform works. Users of the platform (participants) interact through participatory mechanisms known as components within different participatory spaces that channel their democratic power to specific results. These are the frameworks that define how participation will be carried out, the channels or means through which citizens or members of an organization can process requests or coordinate proposals and make decisions. Initiatives, Processes, Assemblies and Consultations are all participatory spaces. Specific examples of each of these include: a citizen initiative for directly changing a regulation ( Initiative); a general assembly or workers' council ( Assembly); a participatory budgeting, strategic planning, or electoral process ( Processes); a referendum or call to vote "Yes" or "No" to change the name of an organization ( Consultation). The more notable components that are combined into spaces to deliver participatory mechanisms include in-person meetings, proposals, blogs, debates, static information pages, surveys, votes, results and comments. So, for example, the various phases of a participatory budgeting process (where members of an organization are called to decide how to spend a budget) can combine components in the following way: at an early phase public meetings can be opened for citizens to analyze different needs classified by districts. In turn these meetings can lead to the design of a survey. The survey results can next be used to define a set of categories for projects to be proposed. The proposal component might then be activated for participants to create and publish their projects as solutions to the identified needs. These proposals can be commented and after two weeks of deliberation the voting component can be activated to select among the projects with a budget-expenditure system. Participants can then be called to a public meeting to evaluate the results and an assessment survey can then be launched for those who could not attend the meeting. Finally, the accountability component can be activated to monitor the degree of execution of the selected projects and people can comment on it. This is but one example of how components are combined in a space, but there are many other combinatorial possibilities. What makes Decidim particularly powerful is this combination of components within spaces, which provides an organization with a complete toolkit to easily design and deploy a democratic system adapted to its needs.

The social contract

All members and partners of the Decidim project must endorse and follow a "social contract" ( https://decidim.org/contract) that defines a set of guiding principles. The social contract can be summarized as follows: 1. Free software and open content: Decidim will always remain free and open to collaboration, without legal or technical obstacles for the use, copy and modification. To ensure this we use a set of licenses: Affero GPLv3 for the code, CreativeCommons By-SA for the content (text, images, design, etc.) and Open Access Database License for data. This means that Decidim will always remain auditable, collaborable, transparent, appropriable and trustworthy, all of which is fundamental for a democratic infrastructure. 2. Transparency, traceability and integrity: the content of participation will always remain transparent, traceable and integral. This means that all the content must be accessible and downloadable, it should always be known what happens with each proposal, its origin, in which result or decision is was incorporated or why it was rejected or left behind, and the content needs to be displayed without been manipulated, any modification (if required) must be registered and be accessible and auditable. 3. Equal opportunities: "The platform will offer equal starting opportunities to all participatory objects (proposals, debates, etc.) for them to be viewed, discussed, commented, evaluated or treated without discrimination of any kind" (direct quote from the contract). 4. Privacy with verification: participants must retain privacy of their personal data combined with verification. Personal data should never be displayed, nor sold or transferred to third parties while, at the same time, the unicity and democratic rights of participants must be preserved (meaning there cannot be two verified users corresponding to the same individual with democratic rights and all participants with such rights must be verifiable). 5. Democratic quality and guarantees: the platform must guarantee the democratic quality, the non-discrimination and equal opportunities for each participant and proposal. 6. Inclusiveness and multilayerness: the platform must comply with accessibility standards, its use must favour the integration of online and offline participation and organizations must deploy the means for mediation and training of participants.

Instances

The best known and intensively used instance of Decidim, as a digital platform for participatory democracy, is www.decidim.barcelona, with (as of March the 1st) more than 28,000 registered participants, 1,288,999 page views, 290,520 visitors, 19 participatory processes, 821 public meetings channeled through the platform and 12,173 proposals, out of which over 8,923 have already become public policies grouped into 5,339 results whose execution level can be monitored by citizens. The instance that actively explores more functionalities is meta.decidim.org, the community portal that designs and supports the project. There is also a demo site with the latest version available for exploration and a training instance open to anybody to learn how to configure, administrate and use the platform. There are currently more than 20 instances of Decidim for organizations of different sorts ranging from municipalities such as Helsinki or Pamplona, to regional governments like the Junta de Castilla la Mancha or the Generalitat de Catalunya, NGO networks such as Fundaction or QuorumGlobal, cooperatives like Somenergia, or the National Commission for Public Debate ( Commission Nationale du Débat Public) in France.

A sustainable ecosystem

Developed at Barcelona's Laboratory for Democratic Innovation, Decidim is the result of the joint effort of a network of collaborating entities and multiple participants leaded by Barcelona's City Council. Appart from the organizations that use the platform and whose participants and administrators report bugs and suggest improvements, there is a network of 17 different collaborating entities, from software companies to institutional consortia, from research institutions to civil associations. The meta.decidim community uses an instance of the Decidim platform to organize the different dimensions of the project. As of April the 21st it has over 300 registered users, it hosts minutes of over 112 public meetings, details of 8 assemblies or working groups, 4 participatory processes (welcome process, bug reporting, feature proposals, and training workshop process) together with various initiatives and a consultations aimed at defining the roadmap and software design of the platform, bug reporting, community and project governance, research and development. Official documentation and code are developed on Github ( https://github.com/decidim) where the project hosts 21 repositories with over 41 developers' contributions. They all together generate a sustainable ecosystem that governs, produces and provides services over the platform (deployment, adaptation, configuration, training, consultancy, administration, etc.).

Democracy and social empowerment

Decidim was born in an institutional environment (that of Barcelona City Council), directly aiming at improving and enhancing the political and administrative impact of participatory democracy in the state (municipalities, local governments, etc.). But it also aims at empowering social processes as a platform for massive social coordination for collective action independently of public administrations. Anybody can copy, modify and install Decidim for its own needs, so Decidim is by no means reduced to public institutions. There are different ways in which participatory democracy infrastructures can boost social, economic and political self-organization. Decidim is starting to be used for these purposes: for the internal organization of consumer and producer cooperatives for example, it is also helping youth movements organize and design strategic planning, and it might soon be used to coordinate massive strikes or other forms of social action. The modular nature of the software architecture is also making possible for these organization to develop their own components and improvements (such as crowdfunding, membership management, etc.) and to plug them into Decidim, expanding its potential. Corporate digital platforms (Amazon, AirBnB, etc.) are disrupting private services and markets. Decidim comes to fill the gap of public and common's platforms, providing an alternative to the way in which private platforms coordinate social action (mostly with profit-driven, data extraction and market oriented goals).

The political, the technical and the technopolitical

As we have repeatedly stressed, Decidim is more than a technological platform. It has required to assemble a variety of codes, realities and dimensions that go beyond programming code. We define it as a "technopolitical project" where legal, political, institutional, practical, social, educational, communicative, economic and epistemic codes merge together. Ultimately, Decidim is in itself a sort of crossroad of the various dimensions of networked democracy and society, a detailed practical map of their complexities and conflicts. We distinguish three general planes or dimensions of the project: the political (focused on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations), the technopolitical (focused on how the platform is designed, the mechanisms it embodies, and the way in which it is itself democratically designed), and the technical (focused on the conditions of production, operation and success of the project: the factory, collaborative mechanisms, licenses, etc.). The political plane is best illustrated by the use of Decidim in a city or organization, the type of democratic processes and decisions that are made through it. In other words, it covers what kind of politics can be done using Decidim: what kind of governance, conflict and power relationships can be channeled through it: the kind of democracy it is capable to produce. Its model instance is decidim.barcelona, what happens within, how it alters the political space of the city. The second plane, the technopolitical, includes matters concerning the digital architectural design of Decidim: its interfaces, features, design principles, data policies, user experience, etc. It is a primarily a reflexive space of how technologies structure political processes. It is embodied in the meta.decidim platform and the community that surrounds it. Finally, the technical plane encompasses issues concerning primarily the programming and legal codes (information and legal infrastructures), but is also includes issues of education and knowledge (epistemic infrastructures). All three dimensions are part of the project.

Table 1: Systematization of various aspects of the Decidim project in the political, technopolitical and technical planes with the city of Barcelona as a reference.

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Many people ask what is this project called "Decidim" to which I have devoted my last two year of work with complete dedication. I wanted to share a brief summary here. This text is the introduction of the Decidim's White Paper (I am writing with Antonio Calleja and Arnau Monterde), to be published soon.

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Title: Subject and State

Author details: Julian Raxworthy

Interpretation

A fascinating look at the polarities between the subject and state. Particulary interesting was the unpacking of 'subjectivity' and the provocation as to how the social actually makes its way into design.
Another provocative idea is the right to difference - even within a standardised system. Through observation one could observe the cultural lure of the modular/one size approach (perhaps easily economised/rationalised) however some understanding of their strength in diversity would nullify sense in this approach.
When discussing zoning verses place, Raxworthy makes some nice comments on how both infrastructure and zoning are not benign - exemplars showing infrastructure being used to segregate in a negative way, whereby zoning segregates in a (sometimes) positive manner (quality of life; but suburbs aren't really great for that either). Ultimately a fundemental truth is observed here - there is no black or white, everything exists on a spectrum. Note this lesson in many religions and our cultural understanding of chaos and order, or the yin and yang.
Next the lecture succintly unpacks the dichotomy between state and subject - a move from the abstract to pragmatic, with values informing effects, and effects implemented (as instances) through use of a variety of different instruments. Some punchy hot takes conclude the talk - urban design is too focused on activities, and not subjectivities (agreed), and that we (as designers) are too fixated on design as a visual/spatial metaphor. I am looking forward to reading Michael Sorkin's 'Local Code'.

Summary:

Paternalism

How does the social make it’s way into design?

Is the state my father? Should they limit my autonomy for my own best interest?

Can the state speak for the people without consulting them?

Subjectivity - ‘you’ vs ‘an aggregation of abstract individuals’

What was once best practice is now highly critiqued - the value system/set is forever shifting

The right to difference (as opposed to modularity, even in a standardised system) - see Jean Renaudie

The danger in evidence based design is that it treat the individual as a metricised organism, rather than a thinking/feeling subject

Subjectivity infers a sense of ownership

But the state - ‘We know what’s best for you’

Zone vs Place

Planning has evolved from a spatial discipline to a social one

Infrastructure is not benign - it can be used to segregate groups

Infrastructure is outside the city - therefore it is typically owned/developed by the state (this is changing with PPP’s)

Infrastructure is reliant on economics and finance for its development

The state uses the private sector to develop/build infrastructure

Zoning is not benign - some things you don’t want to live next to

Project for public spaces and the flexible chair - but it needs someone to manage it (privately owner public space)

Places need people to manage them - they are not static

Representation

Zoning is essentially about separating functions

Modern ‘bode’ is a blending of strategic zoning (Robert Moses?) and subjective experience (Jane Jacobs)

The state and the subject

The state - a governing institution with a responsibility to the subject

Values - towards the subject, as a responsibility

Effects - how do we create infrastructure to facilitate values to the subject

Modality - strategic planning (abstract)

The subject - you as a subject, you having an experience

Instruments - mechanisms to catalyse circumstance, creating effects

Instances - implementation of a desired effect (in a place) to manifest the states values in the subjects experience

Modality - statutory planning (tactics through land use and development)

Closing

Urban design is too focused on activities, and not subjectivites

Planners are attempting to mitigate the negative impacts of misguided architecture

Michael Sorkin (Local Code) looks to mediate the state and the subject

We are too fixated in design as a visual/spatial metaphor - design the rules/mechanisms/text

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Alternate precedent idea; neomedievalism (urban cities, edges, thresholds, the wall)

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Alternate precedent idea; neomedievalism (urban cities, edges, thresholds, the wall)

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Note 13 - Lewicki et al's Cities in the Neomedieval Era

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Note 13 - Lewicki et al's Cities in the Neomedieval Era

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“What is required to make a good Middle Ages? First of
all, a Great Peace that is breaking down, a great  international power that has unified the world in language, customs, ideologies, religions, art, and technology, and then at a certain point, thanks to its own ungovernable complexity, collapses. It collapses because the ‘barbarians’ are pressing at its borders; these barbarians are not necessarily uncultivated, but they are bringing new customs, new views of the world”. - Umberto Eco, 1986

Intepretation

"Welcome to the new middle ages" - Lewick, p21

Summary

Umberto Eco believed that many problems of the middle ages have returned in contemporary tmes - a term coined neomedivalism.

Many thinkers of then 20th and 21st centuries believe that the social, political and economic trends of globalisation can be compared with trends occuring during the middle ages.

In comparision to prognostics, the use of foresight infers forward vision and a planning more rooted in reality - future actions based on established, visible trends.

Eco spots signs of neomedivalism in further processes such as the alienation and structural decentralisation of the metropolis -with enclosure of neighborhoods with minorities who reject integration.

Neomedievalism in economics would assume the integration of ethical considerations in theory, the emergence of neofeudalism and themes of paternalism in job relations. An era of social dyanmics and high financial risk, with more people willing to waiver some freedom and individuality for stability of life.

Urbanology (Stanislaw Lose) - differing from planning by focusing on the human in urban space, not on the structure of the city, for which human activitiy is only a by-product.

Neomedievalism is present with modern institutions resembling those from the middle ages.

Neomedievalism may become a coherent theory of globalisation.

Nation states are in decline, transforming into network states.

Cities will strongly benefit from 'thin regional identities' and their potential to integrate network structures.

Urban policy built on human spontanetity may help reconicle the interests of different groups and create cities with unique, indivudual characterisitcs.

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Note 10 - Raxworthy's 'City and Landscape'

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Note 10 - Raxworthy's 'City and Landscape'

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Title: City and Landscape

Author details: Julian Raxworthy

Interpretation:

A great overview of the fundamentality of landscape - the surface condition as derived from geology and water catchments. Julian commences through discussion of density and the relationship with the openness of the landscape - the remaining quality/s of a surface after urbanisation. In this sense density and ecology are oppositional.

The next topic explores metabolism and the relationships humans have with the landscape - the ecological services we are tied into and how a catchment influences many locations within the system, downstream and adjancent. People in the landscape are discussed next, an interesting emergence (will come up again later) in that the most dynamic and versatile dwelling modes are often the most long lasting - an illuminating principle in relation to our experience modernity.

Cities of stone and water are explored next, logical due to their fundementality. The discussion finishes with an exploration of regionalism and landscape urbanism - two approaches (different scales) that look to a variety of tools and methodologies to understand the city in relation to the landscape/nature. Some key terms here are patch dyanmics - patch, corridor, matrix, and emergence, self-organisation and process (systems).

A really valuable lens through which to approach (and one that I am particulary aligned to) however to date you can see the primacy of landscape lens and it will be interesting to further connections with the built form/infrastructure and see what emerges.

Summary:

Density and Landscape

Densities and the openness of landscapes

Densities relationship with sprawl, relative to three dimensionalitiy

Coverage isn’t density

Floor area ratio; relationship between coverage and FAR

Density is in opposition to ecology; how much green space is left over?

Metabolism

Catchment; an area with a watershed boundary

Topography and water, influence of orientation and aspect

Ecosystem services

Regulation → quality

Supporting → feed into life

Provisioning → matter

Cultural → ethics

The way we cover the surface has big impacts downstream (and in the groundwater) → impervious surfaces, densification has impacts to how much water goes into the system or releases as water vapour

Urban heat island and the effect of compounding

You can’t regulate what people plant on private land

People in the landscape (the more dynamic the longer the occuapation)

Informality, temporal, being able to move in the landscape

Renaissance and point zero, everything outside is ‘primitive’

Static verses dynamic practices

Bantu people and cattle, emergent in the landscape, a form of temporary territoriality (as opposed to capitalism which accounts for everything and confers ownership, private property et al)

We treat monumentality like history, and ephemerality doesn't exist

Khoikhoi were moving temporary dwellings and cattle seasonally

These people were moving dynamically across the landscape, often to provisioning services (water sources, food)

Cities of stone (the most basic element)

Geology is fundamental, materially and for structure

Inca - reverence to site, protection of natural stone

Rio - intrusions of granite in geography

Landscape architecture → approach geology and then catchment to understand landscape

Stone breaks down into soil... (or dirt)

Cities of Water (set up from topography)

Ankor Wat, an ancient broadacre city, possibly lost to climate induced sea level rise

Amazon jungle → constant moving and reoccupation, planting food gardens and leaving them before returning

Brisbane floods → adaptation or intervention in planning/real estate (what stops these from moving? our attached to economics and the present)

Regionalism (a new approach to understand the city and the landscape, larger)

The greater system a city is tied into → often around catchment/topography

McHarg layers (Layers/GIS)

Bedrock/geology is permanant

Relief

Geology

Hydrology (rock and water are inverse)

Slope

Soil

Urban ecology

Anne Whiston Spirn → understand the city as nature

The crack between paving; a soil profile

Richard Forman

Patch, corridor, matrix → patch dynamics

Patches of vegetation joined by corridors creating a matrix

The closer the patches the higher the benefit

Landscape Urbanism (work with the systems thinking through process, not artifact)

Ecological functioning as logic setup

The landscape can’t move because it has been purchased and owned

Recovering Landscape (James Corner)

Ecological thinking asks to understand how things intersect

The stick in the sand → working with the systems of the landscape already (emergent properties from the physics, eg. flocking)

James Corner shifts water depths to alter biodiversity

Process, emergence, self-organisation

STOSS flood protection precedent, how do we store and catch water?