Thematic file

Participatory architecture and mass housing

Dosar Tematic

PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE AND MASS HOUSING

text: Lorin NICULAE

The diversity of contexts in need of another kind of architecture and a design approach grounded on a different paradigm is tributary to the emergence area: in Europe, participatory architecture arose as a reaction to the failure of modernism to solve society’s fundamental problems, fuelled by Kropotkin’s and Bakunin’s social and communitarian essays adapted by Ward and paired with the neo-Marxist approach of the Frankfurt School. In America, the social, political and economic background is inextricably linked to the civil rights movements and the left-wing, neo-Marxist ideologies inspired by European philosophers such as Labriola and Gramsci, as well as American philosophers who deepened the Italian theorists’ ideas, like Goodman and Alinsky. The efforts to readjust architecture to the idea of equity and social responsibility generated controversies, turbulence and ruptures within the profession as architects not only authored remarkable projects but also texts, manifestos and works which laid the foundation for an axiology of participatory architecture. Initially based on intuition, the domain was subsequently discovered and developed by architects.
The context of the rise of participatory architecture in Europe. The reaction to Modernism
Making its debut in Europe in the sixties, against a background of large-scale opposing student movements and drawing on John N. Habraken’s manifesto and the approaches promoted by Giancarlo De Carlo (1969), John Turner (1976) and Nabeel Hamdi (1995), the architecture of participation was defined by theoretic endeavours paired with the practice of a plethora of important architects advocating for an equitable architecture basing its discourse on the failure of Modernism to fulfil the aspiration towards democracy, freedom, equity and rationality. What Jürgen Habermas called „the Project of Modernity” should be understood in relation to the originating socio-political context: the armed conflicts and the riots of the 19th century, the clarification of the Enlightenment ideals, the Industrial Revolution, the development of the railways and sea routes entailing mobility and urbanization (Habermas: 1981).
Cesare Beccaria, cited by Zevi, stated in 1764: „The attempt to organize a group of individuals in a symmetrical and monotonous way, as only lifeless matter can be organized, means having a false conception of utility” (Zevi; 2000:67).
„The Industrial Imperative” was one of the main engines animating the modernist architects’ creativity and generating new ideals and visions on housing in an effort to eradicate low-quality dwellings, the only type of houses that workers during the Industrial Revolution had access to.
It is all too easy to see that Modernism failed to achieve such a desideratum so the voices criticizing the residential neighbourhoods in the second half of the 20th century started to proliferate in the seventh decade of the same century. Konrad Lorenz, the founding father of ethology and a recipient of the Nobel Prize, noted that the new urban residential developments are deprived of information, resembling the malign cells of a tumour. The dwellings lost the genetic information they needed to integrate into the urban tissue, defined as a complex structure made of evolved historically-based relationships inside which the new information-deprived cell multiplies continuously, eventually destroying everything. The consequences are overpopulation, lack of identity, living in an environment in which „people cannot and will not establish social contact, «over the fence», with their neighbours, for fear that they would see the reflection of their own desperate image” (Lorenz; 1996: 30).
The criticism of mass housing had appeared and asserted itself notably in the industrialized countries during the 19th century, with England being the country where the Industrial Revolution and the economic depression following the Napoleonic wars triggered extensive, abhorrent and despondent mass housing. Robert Owen, animated by the ideals of utopian socialism, failed to create a model grounded on egalitarianism at New Harmony (Indiana), in 1825. It is only in the second half of the 19th century that the intellectuals began to go over workers’ neighbourhoods and denounce the miserable living conditions they offered. The traditional production model (be it agrarian or manufacturing) placed in the vicinity of the house had disappeared along with the shift in production ratios and was replaced with residential areas separated from the factory, triggering a reconsideration of housing and giving rise to residential neighbourhoods. The criteria regarding return and profit had supplanted those relating to place and family; the newly-built environment of the houses had become unhealthy, unbreathable and inhuman in no time. In 1883, Andrew Mearns published a devastating pamphlet entitled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor.
Very few people reading these lines have any idea about the aspect of these shack neighbourhoods where tens of thousands of people are gathered together in the middle of horrors reminding us of the slavery period. (...) A sanitary inspector reported that he found in a basement a family comprising a father, a mother, three children and four pigs. (...) Over here, seven people live in a basement kitchen and in the same room lies the body of a dead small child. (...) The destitution of these children living in such places is the most painful and shocking element of these discoveries1.
Dickens, Booth, Rowntree roamed the hopeless streets of London, Manchester and York and described them in violent tones, blaming the inequity of Victorian housing as the average surface of a proletarian house was inferior to that destined to a convict in prison (Hall; 1999: 35). This situation mobilized philosophers and even led to the emergence of philosophies of action.
This problem was not affecting only London, although the capital of the British Empire was the largest city in the world in the 19th century. In Paris, in 1891, over 330.000 people lived in conditions of overpopulation. In Berlin, they tried to find a solution for overpopulation by means of a city project carried out by the Chief police officer James Hobrecht in 1858 and Berlin Mietskasernen soon turned into one of the most insalubrious and abusive European neighbourhoods (ibidem: 46, 47). In England, some voices, such as Charles Booth, suggested, in an utterly undemocratic and unfair way, the displacement of both workers and factories, namely nothing more, nothing less than creating proletarian colonies.
The solution adopted by the administrations of the main metropolises dealing with overpopulation and unsanitary housing was the massive construction of peripheral proletarian neighbourhoods, a phenomenon made possible with the introduction of the underground and the efficient organization of the aerial public transport. The extent of the territorial spread led to an increase in the distance to cover in order to reach the city centre so many of the tenants left the new houses only to move back to the slums they had initially come from. However, the fact that they had running water, sanitary groups, a patch of grass and, generally speaking, a sensibly lower housing density, made the residents of the new neighbourhoods take possession of their terrains and houses and customize them according to their needs, which generated a negative reaction and a strong offensive on the part of conservative architects, horrified by the „disfiguration” of London brought about by displaying the subculture of the poor. Starting with the 1920s, the peripheral neighbourhoods began being compared with „the growth of a cancerous tumour” (ibidem: 101), and 1937 sees the foundation of a Royal Commission on the Geographical Distribution of the Industrial Population, whose objective was to stop the development of the metropolitan area and proposed the solution of Le Corbusier’s apartment blocks (ibidem: 101).
The garden-city proposed by Ebenezer Howard in 1898 was equally a social city in which Kropotkin’s desiderata of freedom and cooperation formed the basis for urban planning and were grounded on local administration and self-governance (ibidem: 110). The method led to the apparition of the towns of Letchworth and Hampstead followed by peripheral garden-satellites such as Ealing, where architects Unwin and Parker cooperated with the inhabitants with a view to outlining the residential areas, the two towns illustrating for the first time the application of social participatory architecture principles (ibidem: 278).
In Spain, the garden-city model was taken over by Arturo Soria y Mataand implemented in La Ciudad Lineal. In France, Tony Garnier individually elaborated in 1898 a project called Cité industrielle which proposed the zonification that was to achieve arguable success since the Athens Charter (1933); in Germany, Theodor Fritsch anticipated the city of the future in 1896, two years before Howard.
In 1909,Raymond Unwin published the book Town Planning in Practice. An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs in which he summarizes his vision on urban planning. In chapter XI, Of Co-operation in Site Planning and How Common Enjoyment Benefits the Individual, Unwin states that „To some extent, the planning of sites and buildings will, no doubt, be taken in hand by the community, as organised in its municipality; but there seems no need to wait until the development of corporate life and feeling has reached the stage at which it would seem natural for the community to carry out for itself through its own officials the entire development of its towns and homes; it may be better that smaller bodies, more responsive to the initiative of individual pioneers, should deal with the more detailed work. (376).
Unwin was a declared advocate of the cooperative origin of urban space and he illustrates this, throughout the book, by making reference to German architecture. According to Unwin, the decline of the community’s architectural product owes to the disappearance of the medieval way of producing architecture by self-conscious communities, organized in guilds, whose constructions accounted for „the expression of something in the life of those who built them” (375); recent democracy „left the individual in the hopeless isolation of his freedom” (375). In the first English garden-cities, Unwin achieved cooperation with the communities through the Tenants’ Societies. In his book, the English architect deplores the fact that, in certain situations, the cooperation functioned normally and stopped only with the purchase of the terrain, thus missing the advantages a cooperation carried out throughout the entire design process would have brought about.
As a matter of fact, Unwin’s approach to Hampstead with respect to the housing layout and the dimensional differences of the streets were so innovative that it took a decision of the Parliament to complete his project. In his writings, Unwin warns British planners with regard to the fundamental error of crowding the suburbs with exactly the same type of housing and the danger of building for social classes, whose effect is „harmful both from a social and an economic and aesthetic point of view”.
Unwin’s visionary spirit did not attract any adepts in a time when mass housing was much more convenient than garden-cities in all respects, and the urban sprawl progressed consistently, disorderly, oppressively and blindly until the break of the Second World War. By 1918, as a response to the increasingly conspicuous disappearance of the user from urban thought and practice promoted by the paternalist outlooks, the Scottish visionary town planner Patrick Geddes stated that „Town planning is not mere place-planning, nor even work planning. If it is to be successful, it must be folk planning. (...) Its task is not to coerce people into new places against their associations, wishes, and interest. (...) Instead its task is to find the right places for each sort of people; place where they will really flourish (1918).
Geddes draws from Russian prince Pyotr Kropotkin’s thinking expressed in his ultimate work, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in which the author argues that mutual aid and cooperation rank among the most important factors in the evolution of species. Kropotkin shows that the medieval city reached in the 13th century a high level of self-governance by means of the sovereign parish (103). Geddes met Kropotkin during the latter’s exile in London in the last decade of the 19th century, like he met Ebenezer Howard, and the prince’s theses on the self-governance capacity and the pursuit of moral good defining each individual2are found in the writings of the Scottish planner.
However, the population of urban peripheries with social housing, proceeding in force throughout Europe, especially after the end of First World War, was doubled by a phenomenon of territorial occupation by the poor and the construction of shelters using precarious, recycled materials, which led to the apparition of slums lacking elementary facilities. The Modern Movement tried to obtain social equality through industrialization and progress. Drawing on Le Corbusier’s phrase, J.J.P. Oud stated that the house will hold relevance to the masses only when it becomes a machine because it is only by means of mass production that social housing can serve society as a whole; manufacturing production is limited to a much narrower and well-off audience (Stamm; 1978). The ideal of building enough houses for all people led to the organization of the second CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) in 1929 and the minimum set of essential housing functions began to prevail in relation to their aspect. The doctrine of New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) made possible the belief that a functional, comfortable and efficient object need not be essentially beautiful but embraced by the society, the same way industrial objects are beautiful due to the simplicity and efficiency of their usage. Moreover, New Objectivity encouraged the idea of demolishing poor residential neighbourhoods located in the city centres in order to make room for the great metropolitan projects thus giving rise to the gentrification phenomenon, that is, the mass relocation of poor inhabitants on the city outskirts (Frampton, 1996: 289), an idea successfully implemented by Haussmann for the urbanization of Paris.
The Modernist ideal placed order, rationality and accessibility among the prerequisites for individual freedom. Last but not least, architecture was seen as shaping the society. Hannes Meyer, the Bauhaus director between 1934 and 1930, said: „Architecture is a process of giving form and pattern to the social life of the community. Architecture is not an individual act performed by an artist-architect and charged with his emotions. Building is a collective action” (Sinclair, Stohr; 2006: 36).
Nevertheless, after the urban centres and suburbs all around the world were studded with entire neighbourhoods of context-immune modernist apartment blocks or endless networks of identical standard social houses, it became obvious that such finality values could not build a bridge between universal truth and specific regional features, progress and tradition, the universal style and local cultural identities. Under the leadership of Le Corbusier, The International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) were nothing but utopias in which the god-like architect determined the destinies of the many based on his intuition on discipline and order. Article 22 in the Athens Charter, a document published by Le Corbusier in 1933, denounced the suburbs as being, more often than not, mere collections of cottages hardly worthy of being preserved.„Precariously built little houses, cardboard huts, cobbled shelters made of the most unsuitable materials, the abode of the wretched creatures cast into a chaotic life, this is the suburb (61)!
One can notice Le Corbusier’s concern for unity and discipline, diversity being regarded as the bad outcome of poverty and lack of perspective.
At the opposite pole, in his report on the modernization of the colonial city of Lahore (Punjab, India), Geddes militated for using local work force and the entire plan was to be completed through „real and active citizen participation”, thus anticipating, by 50 years, participatory urbanism. In 1969, the Skeffington report was the first document issued by the British government raising the issue of public participation in design. It was only in 1969 that Reyner Banham, Paul Barker Hall and Cedric Price published in New Society a manifesto for the autonomy of the built environment, suggesting an experiment meant to show how people want to live (Hall; 1999: 297).
In 1976, participatory architecture was officially accepted as part of the profession with the creation of a workgroup within the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), whose role was „to examine the relationship between the profession and the communities” (Hamdi; 1995: 20). Yet this did not assume the form of a revelation. The joint efforts of an entire generation of architects made it possible.
Inspired by cooperative communist thinking grounded on consensus and independent from the ideas concerning the central government advanced by Bakunin, Kropotkin, Landauer and the American Paul Goodman, to whom he dedicated one of his books, writer Colin Ward influenced the British academic world thanks to a substantiated defence of the autonomy and production of built environment. After the Second World War, Giancarlo De Carlo, by now one of the most articulate voices of social participatory architecture, was invited by the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, where he advocated for a bottom-up approach to the housing problem and the generous idea of social participatory architecture was adopted by student John Turner who rediscovered Geddes thanks to Mumford’s book, The Culture of Cities (Hall, 1999: 282). In the seventh chapter of his monumental work, Mumford discusses „the social basis of the new urban order” and details the concept of „modern housing by communities”(Mumford, 1998: 465), seen as the totality of the exchange relationships between the government agencies in charge of house building, architects and users assembled in self-governable cooperatives (ibidem: 471). Similar to Pyotr Kropotkin, Mumford regards the medieval borough as the ideal city. In accordance with the social participatory architecture paradigm, Colin Ward, De Carlo and Turner would generate the anarchist theoretical trend3 advocating for a quasi-total autonomy of the built environment in relation to the state (an exacerbation of positive freedom), the only autonomy management system being the cooperative contract between community members, similar to that of the medieval guilds.
Giancarlo De Carlo (1919-2005) is one of the prominent members of the renowned Team 10, together with Georges Candilis, Aldo Van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Jacob Bakema. Founded in 1953, during the ninth CIAM Congress, Team 10 (or Team X) brought dissension amidst Modernism. Disappointed with the functional separation proposed by the Athens Charter, namely, Housing, Work, Recreation and Transport, the young generation of architects sought other principles for the structural development of the city. The reply given by the team to the report of the eighth CIAM in 1951 was simple, condensed in one paragraph: „Man may readily identify himself with his own hearth, but not easily with the town within which it is placed. ʻBelongingʼ is a basic emotional need – its associations are of the simplest order. From ʻbelongingʼ - identity – comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails”. (Frampton, 1996: 271).
Team X calls into question the very problem of achieving equity at the expense of renouncing belonging and identity, absent at the level of mass housing. At the same time, the slum, the outcast and poor neighbourhood is ranked as an example for covering a set of basic indispensable needs. In the Doorn Manifesto (Holland) in 1954, Team X formulated eight principles; the first states that „it is useless to consider a house except as a part of a community owing to the inter-action of these on each other”.
The tenth and last CIAM, held at Dubrovnik in 1956, gravitated around the Smithsons’ „association diagrams” and the different levels of human association. The concepts on debate were identity, cluster and mobility. Also, Van Eyck presented the importance of human associations. Therefore, „the functional city” programmatically ceased to exist. It is not by chance that Le Corbusier and other founders of CIAM did not take part in the congress.
The Congress in 1959, held at Otterlo, made the transition between CIAM and Team 10. Aldo van Eyck presented the diagram „By us, for us” illustrating the principle „if man is both the subject and the object of architecture, it imperatively needs to create the latter for the sake of the former”4.
Modernism failed from a democratic point of view precisely because it subordinated its ideals to a system of power (be it capitalist or communist, individual or collective, it is of no importance) which eliminated the user’s individuality from the field of architecture (each system having its own specific methods) and led to the man’s alienation from his own dwelling. In his article in 1989, Modern and Postmodern Architecture, Habermas shows how the system based on workforce mobilization, the management of land, general urban living conditions and the building layout, led to the concentration of large masses of people in the suburbs as the Modernist project failed to integrate the social home or the factory into the city. House building began to include economic and bureaucratic factors detached from the concept of family and tradition.
Conceptually speaking, the failure of Modernism derives from the method used to produce mass architecture, namely industrialization. Assuming the industrial model that had transformed manufactured goods into large series products, thus making them available to an increasingly wider public, Modernism tried a large-scale approach to producing identical social houses as a unique solution to the housing crisis at the urban level, without questioning the city’s need for industrialization. Basically, modernist architects sought a method to solve the problem instead of focusing their attention and creativity on the necessity of solving the problem or the topicality of the problem. Consequently, the issue of housing shortage in the urban environment was resolved with the aid of the social housing neighbourhoods meant to be inhabited and used by Marcuse’s „one-dimensional man”.
The German philosopher based at The Frankfurt School crucially influenced the freedom movements in 1968 and legitimated, through his writings, the idea of revolution with a view to acquiring new forms of freedom (Châtelet, Pisier; 1994: 586).Making use of „critical reason”, Marcuse distanced himself from the pessimism of the Frankfurt School, underlining the importance of not renouncing the idea of creating a better society, no matter how utopian this endeavour might seem. In the essay entitled Repressive Tolerance, written in 1965 and dedicated to his students from Brandeis University, Marcuse states that „remembering and preserving the seemingly utopian historical possibilities are the intellectual’s duty and obligation” (1969). It is exactly the lit fuse that the student movements of the time needed.
The second half of the 19th century shed light on a bleak trait of Modernism, stemming from its affiliation to progress and not from its own ideology: the communist pact. Adopting all the Marxist system errors5, as well as the Leninist suppressing violence, the East-European communist architecture consented to rely on destruction, demolition and the forfeiture of private property.
Marcuse criticized both left-winged (communism, Leninism) and right-winged (utilitarian liberalism)totalitarian systems, analyzing them from the perspective of their outcome, that is, „the one-dimensional man”: conformist, alienated and displaying false needs created either through an ideological mechanism or consumerism.
Together with Baudrillard, Derrida and Lyotard, Michel Foucault condemned the totalitarian tone of the universalist discourse of Modernism, exposed the imposture of the universally valid truth, advocating for the adaptation of methods to the diversity of human existence and emphasizing understanding rather than conversion. Yet the isolated position of the French philosophers did not represent a support for participatory architecture, which needed a philosophy oriented towards action and social change which it was going to find in the 1960s in Marcuse and Habermas and, starting with the 1980s, in Rawls’ theories of justice as well as the communitarianism promoted by Sen, Dworkin, Walzer, Taylor and Sandel. Bruno Zevi, fascinated by the organic architecture Wright practised in America and influenced by Marcuse, from whom he takes over the concept describing the one-dimensionality of the contemporary world, rebelled against the new dogmatism of the International Style and noted in 1981: „We are currently witnessing a series of phenomena in the field of «demassification», a refusal of the one-dimensional, of the neurosis generated by the systematic search for productivity, a refusal of the brutalizing repetition and monotony of work and the separation between intellectual and manual activity. Desperately seeking his identity, the man challenges the monolithic conceptions and the uniform behavioural patterns, wishing to be both a producer and a consumer, aspiring to combine work and play, the abstract and the concrete, the objective and the subjective. The third stage of history is already heralded through the phrases self help and do ityourself”6 (Zevi; 2000: 5).
Similar to Pyotr Kropotkin, Howard, Unwin, Mumford and Ward, Zevi glorifies the medieval borough from the perspective of the exercise of creative freedom and, criticizing Modernism from the inside, postulates: „the standardized house and the god-like architect are from now on anachronistic notions” (ibidem), the user expecting „to take part in the project in the lived environment and author or at least co-author it” (ibidem). Zevi’s role in participatory architecture is crucial, especially in terms of assimilating from Modernism what Modernism acquired in relation to Classicism, that is, „the creative freedom” of the architect.

Continuare

The European founding thought
In 1958, the 30-year old Austrian artist Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt, better known as Hundertwasser, launched the series with the Mouldiness Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture7, a text at the borderline between pamphlet and manifesto in which he accuses the deprivation of contemporary man of the capacity of building for himself as „the tangible and material uninhabitability of slums is preferable to the moral inhabitability of utilitarian, functional architecture” (op.cit.). Hundertwasser denounced three flaws of collective housing production which resembles prismatic cages for chickens or rabbits:
1. The architect has no relationship to the future users of the building as he designs for the average citizen retrieved from the polls;
2. The builder has no creative or emotional connections to the building; if he wished to manifest his ingeniosity by digressing from the project, he would be sanctioned but this would only happen if he showed some signs of caring about the aspect or functions of the building, which is not the case because he does not build for himself;
3. The user is just a consumer, having no connection to the space he occupies and which he feels alien to (ibidem).
The recovery of the architect-builder-user triad and its eventual union in one and the same person becomes an act of moral restitution opposing the functionalists’ vandalism (ibidem). We will notice the presence of a similar idea in the works of Hassan Fathy and Cristopher Alexander.
In addition to the manifesto in 1959, Hundertwasser gives several examples of architecture illustrating the positive freedom to build, namely autonomy: Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, the poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the cities, the peasants’ or primitives’ houses, the American illegally-built self-made houses, the stilt houses and houseboats as well as Lucien Kroll and Christian Hunziker’s anarchitecture projects.
In 1960, the 32-year old Dutch architect John Nicholas Habraken inititiated the series of fundamental theoretical works on participatory architecture and formulated its concepts by publishing Dragers en de Mensen (Supports and People). In 1967, Martin Pawley, one of the most authorized voices in European architectural critique, published in Interbuild Arena the article The Perfect Barracks and the Support Revolution; soon after, an unofficial English translation of the original Dutch text, a spiral-bound book, began to circulate among those interested in finding out the ideas in Pawley’s article. Starting with the introductory paragraphs, the article heralded that just when mass housing had become a common accessible good, a young Dutch architect named John Habraken had the audacity to state that this good is actually a mischief of the contemporary world. He even came up with the solution for the necessary change. We notice the influence of Hundertwasser’s idea regarding the preference for barracks to the detriment of functionalist architecture, an idea which was to find its most eloquent expression in Turner’s discourse.
In 1970, Pawley also published a reverberating article in Architectural Design entitled Mass Housing: The Desperate Effort of Pre-Industrial Thought to Achieve the Equivalent of Machine Production. On this occasion, Pawley consolidated the notion of support in Anglo-Saxon specialty literature.
It was only in 1972 that an official English translation was published by Architectural Press in London under a modified title: Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing; this 12-year interval between the first issue and the translation is indicative of the fact that the vision in the book clearly surpassed the understanding and acceptance potential of the time.
As a matter of fact, Habraken’s book followed the same path as an informal house does –it is only after it is built and validated by years of usage that it acquires the necessary authorizations –it was only after it was informally recognized through copying and unofficial dissemination (admittedly depriving Habraken of copyright but at the same time conveying European notoriety), that it was officially translated into an international language.
In his work Supports, Habraken mentioned several fundamental concepts of participatory architecture:
1. The beneficiaries’ involvement in the design process is a necessity;
2. The social housing crisis stems from failing to adapt the method to the user: „the blind machine” of statistics and macroeconomic analyses loses sight of the individual and his needs;
3. The expression of a house is the sum of the activities it makes possible;
4. The users must not only have ownership but also hold possession of the house. The built environment offered to the users must be capable of renewing;
5. The notion of house is entirely subjective and is not tributary to a particular form;
6. The house is an act, not a product, and the user must not become a „house consumer”8;
7. The relationship between the user and the built environment must be „a natural relationship”.
Habraken’s work must be analyzed in the context of its time, against the background of the 1960’s avant-garde, which accounts for the somewhat naive trust of the author in industrialization and industrial design. We should bear in mind that 1957 saw the launch of the first satellite. However, the importance of the work does not lie in the architect’s insight into implementing supports, but in the extremely articulate discourse criticizing social housing production as well as the idea of promoting the user in the field of architectural creation, which qualifies it as the programmatic document of social participatory architecture.
Coming back to the period when Supports was published, Aldo van Eyck declared in 1969:
„Instead of the inconvenience of filth and confusion, we have now got the boredom of hygiene. The material slum has gone (...) but what has replaced it? Just mile upon mile of organized nowhere and nobody feeling ʻhe is somebody living somewhereʼ. No microbes left - yet each citizen a disinfected pawn on a chessboard, but no chessmen – hence no challenge, no duel and no dialogue. The slum has gone. Behold the slum edging into the spirit” (Mathew; Tiesdell; 2007: 213).
Modernist determinism was also opposed by Giancarlo De Carlo who, in the context of the 1960s student riots in America and Europe, underlined the student architects’ explicit need to practice an architecture other than „class, racist, violent, repressive, alienating, specialty-oriented or totalitarian” [2005 (1969): 4], to change the architect’s role in the society, to democratize the profession departing from the ambiguity of the architect’s social function. Indeed, throughout history, the architect’s role was either that of a high priest in Ancient Egypt or a chief builder in Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Yet in all these historical periods, the architect found himself in a position of power since architecture entails materials, territory, funds and above all, the authority to take action. In time, somehow subordinated to power, the architecture profession specialized in searching for formal and technological solutions while giving up motivation and consequences, the architects contending to answer the question „how we build” and avoiding the fundamental question „why” (ibidem: 5).
The Italian architect’s manifesto, Architecture’s Public9, published in 1969, resumes the important themes enounced by Habraken in 1960 and analyzes them from the perspective of power relationships. While Habraken merely ascertains the social housing production crisis and tries to provide a technical solution based on supports, De Carlo approaches the ideological essence of architecture and firmly asserts that it takes a fundamental shift in the profession’s ideology to trigger a change in the quality of the architectural product.
Yet since he works only with the architect-user binomial, De Carlo excludes from his discourse the concept of power, namely, the sponsor or the local authority and, from this point of view, one may say his vision is an idealized one. Looking at his manifesto in the context of the evolution of participatory architecture practice, we can conclude that the architect must become a catalyst to the relationship between the group affected by poverty and the authority seeking to solve the problem of the inadequate built environment used by the group.
The architect-user binomial should be regarded critically and from a different angle. Not always is the user able to express his needs. The dialogue with the architect leaves them both enriched as participatory design is also meant to educate groups subjected to deprivation, including those often lacking elementary education Otherwise, if the individual freedom to built does not bring about a unitary constructive discourse, we are dealing with the phenomenon promoted by Lucien Kroll, anarchitecture, an exacerbation of the positive freedom of creation.
Ending his criticism of Modernism, seen as a phenomenon „situated” within the existing system of power and reaching an agreement with it, De Carlo focused on what action needs to be taken in order to help architecture regain its role in securing the people’s and users’ fundamental need for an organized physical space. A genuine transformation must occur at the level of architecture practice with a view to entailing new behaviours. The architect-user dichotomy must be abolished, in the sense that architecture has to give up its authoritative normative-prescriptive role while the user must renounce his passivity; design, execution and use should represent aspects of the same process. Architecture will cease to be a form of repression, namely, forcing users to accept housing models created in the existenzminimum laboratories10.
De Carlo’s manifesto, despite the criticism justified by a historical and practical perspective on the phenomenon, has the huge merit of establishing the democratic background for participatory design, the only way to practise an architecture able to provide an adequate answer to the problem of extreme poverty housing. De Carlo’s anti-power discourse is tributary to Colin Ward’s anarchist ideas that the latter had already presented during the meetings the two of them had had.
The British architect Rod Hackney gained notoriety in 1973 when, two years after purchasing a house in Macclesfield, he found out that, along with another 300 dwellings in the vicinity, it was about to be demolished. Hackney organized a community protest after which 34 families got subsidies for rehabilitation. According to the architect, the rehabilitation works for the 300 houses took a period three times shorter than the building of an equal number of apartments; in addition, the cost was three times lower. In 1975, Rod Hackney was awarded the Good Design Award by the Department of the Environment (Hall, 1999: 309). Its subsequent activity consisted of advocacy actions strongly focusing on legislative issues and he succeeded to amend the Homes Act in 1974 with a view to increasing the funds allotted to urban regeneration works carried out by communities assisted by architects. „In the 60s, we architects took a completely wrong path. Community architecture will help us restore the integrity of the architecture profession (...)” (ibidem: 310).
Hackney’s example generated an experimental participatory intervention in Liverpool enjoying social success and RIBA saw the foundation of the Community Architecture Group. In 1986, Hackney became the president of RIBA and later on, the president of The International Union of Architects, thus bringing participatory architecture to the attention of professional and academic bodies around the world and promoting it as „the political architecture of the post-industrial era” (ibidem: 311).
Five years after the student movements in 1968, Bruno Zevi operated a codification of „the democratic language” (69) of architecture in his work, Il Linguaggio modernodell’architettura, and advocated, in the spirit of Adorno and Marcuse, for the architects’ descent „to slums, bidonvilles, favelas and barriadas” (52). The Italian architect proposed seven invariants standing for the creative types of freedom achieved by Modernism, four out of which are of particular interest to participatory architecture: listing, asymmetry as dissonance, „the temporalised, lived, socially usable space, able to receive and valorise the events” (40) and the reintegration of building, city and landscape meant to ensure „the genetic code” of a democratic architecture opposed to „humanistic approximations and repressive phenomena” (47).
John F. Charlewood Turner was born in London in 1927. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London; he graduated in 1954. Between 1957 and 1965 he lived in Peru, where he developed housing programmes for state agencies. Between 1965 and 1973 he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and taught at MIT and Harvard University, the Department of Urban Planning and Design. In 1973 he moved to London, where he taught at AA School and the University College of Environmental Studies. At present, he lectures all over the world and is extremely well-known due to Turner’s three laws summarizing his social, economic and psychological vision, and systematized by Colin Ward:
1. When people have neither the control, nor the responsibility for the housing process, their built environment can turn into a barrier to their personal fulfilment and a burden for the economy.
2. The important thing about a house is what it does in the life of the dwellers rather than what it physically is11.
3. The flaws and imperfections of your house are much more tolerable if they owe to you instead of others.
By 1952, Turner had met Colin Ward, Giancarlo De Carlo and Pat Crooke in Venice to discuss issues related to social housing architecture and in 1976 he shocked the academic world of architects and economists with the publication of his book Housing by People which focuses on housing, habitation and housing programmes made by people, for people. The novelty of Turner’s approach lies in the fact that he is not only an architect but also a philosopher of housing who reverses the custom standards for analysis and objectivization. Actually, at the time of its publication, the architects greeted Turner’s Peruvian experience with reluctance given that British planning had exported many models during a century but had never imported any. However, Turner brought from Peru the concept of user-author and challenged, through his writings, precisely the dominant and ever-present mechanism of mass housing. Furthermore, his work draws on the experiment the slum and the favella, paradoxically showing that an improvised shelter can prove more useful than a new house, according to „the standards”.
The importance of John Turner’s work for the current essay is crucial from at least two points of view:
1.It is the outcome of the architect’s practice and an endeavour deeply anchored in the reality of large-scale social housing programmes.
2. The work refers to the built environments affected by extreme poverty in Peru and Mexico, offering an inside look at the phenomenon and shifting perspectives: the point of the view of the central and local authorities producing potentially oppressive housing is replaced with the point of view of the user producing improvised yet sustainable shelters.
As a result of Turner’s contribution, social participatory architecture theory was supplemented with a series of antithetic binomials meant to highlight their affiliation to opposed theoretical paradigms: oppressive versus supportive, prescriptive versus proscriptive, heteronymous versus autonomous12. No matter how modest, the house must be supportive, namely sustain the family’s life and activities. On the contrary, an expensive house can engross the family’s budget, failing to meet the family’s needs in terms of contributions, taxes and utilities, in which case it becomes oppressive. The rules which should be applied to social houses must allow users the possibility to modify them within certain limits. Such proscriptive rules ensure the freedom of use, or the possession, to use the term defined by Habraken. Finally, the autonomy of the built environment must be encouraged to the detriment of the heteronomy imposed by an authority.
Influenced by Habraken’s theory of supports, Nabeel Hamdi is the British architect who designed and built the residential complex Adelaide Road Estate in Camden, London, in 1979. One of the pioneers of social participatory architecture, Hamdi is probably the most prolific theorist of the phenomenon, working on the theoretical contribution from the mid-1980s to the present day. Hamdi synthesized the founding thought of social participatory architecture and structured it in what he calls „the support paradigm” aimed at creating the framework for producing an adequate built environment fundamentally opposed to „the provision paradigm”, focused on controlling the building process and the profit obtained from the exercised control.
Hamdi conceived a comparative table of the two paradigms13, in which he included the objectives, the methods, the products and the key factors involved in each of the two theoretical systems. If the objectives of the provision paradigm converge to control and economic growth based on production, centralization and sectorialization, the support paradigm proposes resource allocation, the use of the existing resources, support for the local initiatives and economy, public policies for the employment of residents. At the same time, Hamdi militates for the revitalization of the current poor areas - slum upgrade -rather than demolishing them and building new ones, adopting, as we shall see, Jane Jacobs’ idea. In Romania, Augustin Ioan published in 2005, in an easily accessible electronic format, The Poverist Manifesto, which proposes a Christian perspective on community participatory architecture (Ioan, 2005: 7, art. 15),unique in the field of study, to my knowledge, and all the more valuable. The Romanian architect advocates for volunteering: „Pay the toll you owe by designing for the community” (ibidem: art.16), grounding his discourse, just like Alasdair MacIntyre, on Christian ethics able to provide common norms without annihilating individual freedom. Florin Biciușcă published The Poverist Manifesto as a prologue of his book The Cățelu Experiment.
The context of the American civil rights movement
„All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.” (Frank Lloyd Wright)
The critique of mass housing had appeared in America and Europe almost concurrently. Its main representative was the young journalist and police photographer Jacob Riis. A Danish immigrant, Riis published in 1890 a book called How the Other Half Lives, which he illustrated with a rich and moving photographic material14. Riis identified the major problems generated by the slums and outlined an urban analysis of the phenomena of immigration, overpopulation and low-level crime.
In 1894 it was expected that three out of five inhabitants of New York were tenants in buildings similar to those illustrated by Riis, with an occupancy rate of over 80%. The language barrier, poverty and overpopulation triggered tenant immobility resembling „a prisonership” (Hall; 1999: 51).Real estate speculation gave rise to the proliferation of (dumbbell buildings/tenements) promoting an „optimized” design, with 10 rooms out of 40 ventilated via a central lightwell (whence the term „dumbbell”), following an architecture competition in 1879 (ibidem: 52, 53). It was only in 1901 that the second New York State Tenement House Commission prohibited this type of collective housing thanks to the efforts and abnegation of the young Commission Secretary Lawrence Veiller15.
In the 1920s, American urbanism followed two socially distinct paths. The first one was based on urban expansion and the creation of satellites served by railways, with a high comfort level. The second direction focused on urban zoning aiming at the enclavisation of the poverty pockets in the built-up areas or their displacement outside the city, somewhere else than the garden satellites. It is highly-controlled urban planning pragmatically illustrating the slogan „Urbanization has its price” (ibidem: 79).
In the New World, the idea of participatory architecture made its endemic apparition in the first half of the 20th century and one of its avant-la-lettre practitioners was Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Even though his 1930-vision on Broadacre City attempting to provide a solution for overpopulation through a limitless dispersion of the inhabitants within the territory was deemed utopian and romantic, and his last writing in 1958, The Living City, was received with scepticism by the critics in the field, his ideas concerning an organic, democratic and decentralized architecture influenced the next generations of architects. Much more consistent than his theoretical work, his architecture practice began to place participatory architecture in the field of the possible by creating housing typologies which are cheap, easy to build by the beneficiaries and organic, that is, possessing a growth and development potential: the Usonian homes16.
In 1945, Wright published the volume When Democracy Builds17, in which he criticised the conviviality of urban habitation as „the increasingly helpless citizens” live „a rented life in a rented world”, condemned to live in „foolishly designed” buildings (1945: 2,3).
„Already it is evident that modern life must be more naturally conserved by far more space and light, by much greater freedom of movement, and by a more general freedom of the individual in the ideal practice of what we call civilization. A new space-concept is needed. It is evident that it has come in what we are calling organic architecture: the architecture of democracy. (...) When man builds his buildings, he builds his very life, he builds his society (...) The Usonian citizen (...) must abandon the expedient idea that money plus authority can rule the world and believe that ideas plus work can and will rule the world”. (ibidem: 6,7).
Wright advocated for the subordination of concepts like money, property and governance to the idea of human being. Decentralization and the change of design scale must be carried out by „that essential interpreter of humanity – the creative architect” (ibidem: 40), and the Usonian home meets the individuals’ social needs at the same time enabling them to manifest themselves. Organic architecture allows for „self-expression” equivalent to „the fruits of genuine individuality” different from „the mere personal idiosyncrasy of a general mobocracy” (ibidem: 49).
Starting with the 1930s, the execution of Usonian homes and the social and community scaling of the project in 1947, followed by the construction of no less than 50 houses in Pleasantville, New York, demonstrated the capacity of Wright’s genius to infer and implement a range of concepts which would clear out two decades later in America and Europe alike, due to Bruno Zevi.
From a theoretical point of view, in terms of outlining and implementing a new paradigm, participatory architecture emerged in America against the background of the civil rights movements in the 1960s, paired with the women’s emancipation and pacifist movements (Sanoff; 2000: 2).The anti-poverty movements grounded on the fundamental right to a dignified existence made American President Lyndon Johnson pass the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964 providing the legal context for the Office of Economic Opportunity, a body charged with the administration of federal funds for poverty programmes. Although the legislative initiative, commonly known as The War on Poverty18, failed to become popular, and spending the funds did not generate welfare, the main quality of the Act was that it provided institutional support for community development organizations which continued their activity even after Bill Clinton put an end to the government programme in 1996.
Known as Model Cities, the poor built environment revitalization programme was initiated in 1966 and entailed the citizens’ active involvement in urban planning decisions through a local structure called Community Development Agency.
One of the most representative personalities of the time is Saul Alinsky, regarded to be probably one the most efficient community organisers worldwide. Inspired by Gramsci’s neo-Marxist doctrine, Alinsky placed the fight for civil rights in relation to war and class struggle. Those owning the power will cede it to those who do not only by combat, stated Alinsky and consequently, the only modality to come to power is war. Highly practical, Alinsky wrote, in 1971, Rules for Radicals, a summary of his ideas, a reversed Prince dealing not with how those in power can and must keep it, as in Machiavelli’s text, but with how those who do not have it can and must achieve it. Often assimilated to a communist discourse, Alinsky’s ideas turned into a cult in the USA, being taken over by Jane Jacobs and Robert Goodman as well as Hillary Clinton and even Barrack Obama in present-day world19. The current research takes interest in Alinsky’s community organization methods which were embraced by architects like Paul Davidoff, Christopher Alexander, John Mutlow, Juan Diaz Bordenave, Samuel Mockbee, Andrew Frear, Brian Bell etc.
The founding American thought
In 1961, writer Jane Jacobs published The Life and Death of American Cities, which was to have a decisive impact on entire generations of American architects and planners, shaping an attitude towards the metropolis which Wolf von Eckardt called „jane jacobism” (1967:45). Lacking any architecture training, Jacobs achieved both an accurate radiography and a harsh critique of American cities, statistically demonstrating the falseness of the design concepts lying at the core of 20th century metropolises20. Emerging as a reaction to the oppressive urban planning promoted by the New York Public Works Commissioner Robert Moses and the neighbourhood demolitions he undertook in order to create new highways and parkings, and to the general national planning trend to set up widely stretching peripheries able to engulf the population displaced from the poor neighbourhoods in the city centre which had been wiped out and turned into parks, Jacobs’ work, a synthesis of the author’s activism against totalitarian urban actions, stands the test of time due to the general truths on the city. Carefully building her argumentation, Jacobs started from the objective analysis of easily quantifiable criteria (for example, safety as highlighted by the police reports), gradually and methodically reaching to the reasons why the new residential neighbourhoods failed to meet the criteria, eventually providing the necessary urban intervention method: participatory architecture.
By 1961, Jane Jacobs was one of the most authorized voices in architecture criticism, working as associate editor of Architectural Forum from 1952. From this position, Jacobs closely studied the method of translating urban design into reality, especially in relation to the so-called urban regeneration or revitalization, and her editorials denounced the deformity and regularity of the new neighbourhoods, the lack of perspective characteristic to the new social houses as well as the absence of real economic foundation.
Jane Jacobs restored the idea of traditional street serving an urban tissue validated by historical becoming, advocating both against the over-densification proposed by Le Corbusier, who abolished the street in favour of planes, and against the minimal density promoted by Wright, who reduced the street to a mere traffic artery.
In Jacobs’ vision, the functional separation envisaged by the Athens Charter should have been replaced with a multifunctional development crucial to urban life and community vitality. The alternative to bedroom neighbourhoods gathering people on the vertical, depriving them of basic services, surrounding them with wide green spaces rendering the communication between two neighbouring communities virtually impossible and characterized by controlled housing density caused by the impossibility of any spatial extension is high-density housing associated with an array of necessary functions and connected to a lively and vibrant street. High-level density poses no threats as long as there is community spirit and life outside the house.
Jacobs advocated for community involvement in the decision-making process thus triggering major changes and recommended inductive design based on local and concrete situations; the typically Modernist deductive design must be abandoned because of its totalitarian character.
In his article in 1965, entitled Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning, lawyer and architect Paul Davidoff raised the issue of ethics in architecture: „An architect must try to increase opportunities for all people and, acknowledging social responsibility, design for the needs of disadvantaged groups and individuals; he must accelerate the amendment of policies, institutions and decisions advocating against such objectives (apud Sanoff; 2000: 4).
In the United States, the adoption of the advocacy planning model - an argued support of multiple urban solutions - led the emergence of numerous Community Design Centres (CDC) animated by architects who embraced the participatory ideology to the detriment of the normative one and acted as representatives of the disadvantaged groups in relation to the authorities. Thus, 1963 saw the establishment of the first CDC in America, the Renewal Committee in Harlem aiming to change Robert Moses’ segregational urban policy envisaging community isolation not by means of fencing but by building a highway in North Manhattan. Led by Max Bond Junior and comprising mainly architects but also lawyers, editors (such as Richard Hatch, the author of the famous anthology The Scope of Social Architecture presented during the research) and community organisers, the group questioned the architect’s role in the society: „We are concerned with the change of the architect’s role. We take into account the transformation of an architect representing a rich client into an architect representing the poor seen as individualities and groups of interests” (apud Tucker; 1969:265). The committee, acting as a representative of many American intellectuals and artists of the time, advocated against the large developments in the suburbs lacking identity and referentiality and meant to shelter the poor population in the urban centres whose houses had been demolished in order to make room for parks, parking lots and highways.
It was on 15th July 1972 at 3:32 in the afternoon that the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe neighbourhood started, which made Charles Jencks proclaim the death of Modernism. Highly praised at the moment of its design and awarded by the American Institute of Architects, the urban development carried out by architects George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki in 1951 attempted to provide a solution to social problems using rational planning grounded on the study of human behaviour and faithfully observing the principles of the Athens Charter.
The neighbourhood was built using government funds allotted to the poor categories in St. Louis. The 33 fourteen-level apartment buildings were inaugurated in 1956. In less than 20 years’ time they generated so many problems related to crime, insanity, drug abuse they were called by sociologist Lee Rainwater „a federally built and supported slum”21.
In the 1970s,Christopher Alexander resumed Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas on house building by users and developed them in his project „People Rebuilding Berkeley” in which he proposed „autonomous and self-governed neighbourhoods” (Hall, 1999: 295).The American architect of German extraction suggested an architecture drawing inspiration from local resourcefulness paired with the architect’s own inventiveness, advocating for humanity and a direct relationship between the individual and the building process. Similar to Habraken and De Carlo, Alexander rebelled against the excessive bureaucracy regulating house building and showed that such a model is not even feasible.
The same year, Richard Sennet stated that „by extricating the city from preplanned control, men will become more in control of themselves and more aware of each other” (Sennet, 1992: 198). Jacobs, Sennet and Alexander expressed their disapproval of the top-bottom approach promoted by American urban planning according to which social life was just an outcome of different projects focusing exclusively on profit-related reasons, even when these took the form of social interventions, as is the case of Pruitt-Igoe.
Starting with the 1990s, American participatory architecture began to be influenced by communitarian philosophy and the moral doctrines with a marked impact on the period. Rawls’ theory of justice in 1971 generated several theories trying to reestablish justice and social equity, not in terms of general truths or natural rights as Modernism had unsuccessfully attempted, or in view of gaining rights in relation to the power system, but with regard to the current social rights. Michael Walzer pointed out that the individual is trapped inside certain „spheres” in which the value of the same common good is different. Ronald Dworkin underlined that „the maximization of welfare” is a necessary assessment principle according to which it is important if individuals manage to increase the value of resources (Dworkin, 1980: 191).Amartya Sentook things one step further, shifting the discourse from the sphere of the common good to that of individual capabilities we discussed in the chapter on poverty. The personal, intimate and subjective data of each individual affects the use of the common good. It is not their even distribution within the society that generates justice, but their conversion into individual accomplishments (Nay, 2008: 608).
Both following and drawing on the theories of justice, communitarian philosophy criticises the liberal system regarding society as a body of individuals with equal opportunities22. Michael Sandel shows that individuals build up their subjectivity in terms of the common good, not justice. Community justice is tributary to a project definition of the common good (Nay, 2008: 615).
Translated into architecture, these philosophical notions result in the architects’ participation and commitment to the ideal of social justice accomplished through participatory projects carried out in extremely poor communities in America or across the globe.
This time interval is tributary to the leadership of architects like Samuel Mockbee, Andrew Frear, Bryan Bell, Cameron Sinclair, Alejandro Aravena, whose attitude towards architecture still represents an opposition to the traditional production methods and a conceptual shift. In the era of globalization and deindividualisation, these architects reveal the force of the individual. If the person in question is an architect assuming the role of community organiser, he manages to change the built environment for the better through innovation, dedication and power of persuasion. If he is a local, he proves he can build well and that, despite constant social marginalization, he has the qualities and capacity the society needs yet rejects because of stereotypes and prejudice. Moreover, he succeeds in valorizing his capabilities by means of architecture.
In 2000, at Princeton University School of Architecture, Design Corps, a participatory architecture group in Pennsylvania led by professor Bryan Bell, organized a conference suggestively entitled „Structures For Inclusion: Designing for the 98% Without Architects”. The manifesto of the conference stated that „(...) millions of people live without having access to good design and having no contribution to the spaces of everyday use. Good design is thus reserved to those who have money and power and afford to pay the traditional fee. As architecture evolves towards new technologies, its professionals must work to continue the tradition of service to the community which was originally at the heart of the profession” (Pearson, Robbins; 2002: 6).
In the autumn of 2005, 30 professionals – architects, designers, experts and academic staff members – gathered at Harvard Graduate School of Design to find solutions that would help architecture gain an increased relevance at the level of communities in the economic, social and ecological fields, emphasizing the inclusion of community-specific problems in the public agenda. During the meeting, the Dean of the Virginia Faculty of Architecture asked the key-question of the debate: How can a community design movement be included in the public agenda and how can a design focusing on social inclusion, cultural identity and sustainability become a goal for the designers, professionals and political decision makers in the field of architecture?
Conclusion
Participatory architecture is founded on freedom as a supreme individual and collective value. While fighting for the eradication of extreme poverty and against depriving the individual of his capabilities (Sen), participatory architecture assumes an ideal grounded on promoting equal opportunities, potential fulfilment and social inclusion seen as expressions of freedom in the context of the philosophical system and government form harbouring them: democracy. The core, the very essence of the domain is represented by modern democracy modelled by Giancarlo De Carlo from an architectural perspective. Two key concepts assimilated to the idea of freedom and adopted by Kropotkin via Ward are expressed by Turner: positive freedom and autonomy, seen as alternatives to heteronomy, and the proscriptive rule, enabling freedom of action and multiple choices and opposed to prescriptive rule. Under the action of proscription (what not to do), positive freedom turns into freedom of action.
Habraken points out the need for individual possession regarded as the ability to transform the built environment both by regeneration and by establishing a natural relationship between man and the environment. The house is no longer conceived as an object finished once its execution is completed but as a process since the freedom of use and the transformation effected by the user generates an assumed indeterminacy of the form which becomes an expression of housing engendering a sense of belonging. Finally, the abolishment of the Modernist functional segregation offers the prerequisites for the emergence of a varied and ethological built environment, with supportive homes and community-based urban life.
Davidoff set the scene for pluralism and ethics with respect to the provision of equal opportunities through architecture.
Zevi conceived a system of invariants allowing for the architect’s creative imagination to be transposed into freedom as the architect no longer shuts himself inside the object but opens up to utilization, appropriation, transformation.
Hamdi elaborated a participatory paradigm which he called supportive and advocated, similar to Jane Jacobs, for the acceptance of historical organicity as a validating factor of the existent: only useful and good things stand the test of time.
The architects revealed the body of concepts at the core of social participatory architecture theory and elaborated methods for reaching their goals. The users’ involvement in the design mechanism, the house as a process, the user’s natural relationship with the house, the importance of possession, the regeneration of built environment through proscriptive rules, communitarianism, functional desegregation, autonomy and indeterminacy are all concepts indissolubly linking architecture to democracy, and the freedom of the creative act to the user’s freedom acquired through creation and appropriation. Grounded on philosophies of freedom and social action, the concepts of social participatory architecture are rooted nowadays in the social-liberal political doctrine and the communitarian philosophical vision.
Participatory architecture aims not only at changing the built environment and eventually setting a style but effecting the social change able to generate a shift in the sphere of social housing while relying on equity as a prerequisite for achieving individual freedom.
A revised and complemented excerpt from the author’s doctoral dissertation entitled „Arhipera_Social Participatory Architecture”, 2013

NOTES and Bibliography

Notes
1. Translated by Laurențiu Staicu, published in Peter Hall, Orașele de mâine, All, București, 1999, p. 29-32.
2. Unlike Hobbes or Rousseau, Kropotkin does not regard man as a debased and corrupted individualthat needs to be compelled by a state authority in order to achieve the common good. We recall here Pelagius’ main thesis, condemned as heresy 1500 years before.
3. The anarchism promoted by Ward, De Carlo and Tuner and dealing exclusively with the freedom to built should under no circumstance be confused with the violent and criminal anarchism shocking Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and which was suppressed for good reason and without hesitation by the authorities and rejected by the civil society (a/n).
4. Van Eyck, Projekten, 1948-61, p. 89, accessed at http://www.cleandesign05.co.uk
5. The Marxist system errors include ideas concerning historical finality, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the need for violent revolutions, the abolition of private property, land egalitarianism etc.
6. „Self-help and do it yourself” in the original text translated into Romanian by Gabriela Tabacu.
7.Hundertwasser, Mouldiness Manifesto Against Rationalism in Architecture, 1958/1959/1964.
8.The reader should notice the same critique that Marcuse makes on consumerism.
9.Widely commented in Annex 1 of the present paper (author’s note).
10.We can easily see that this desideratum was not achieved during socialism (for instance, in Romania people’s homes were demolished and they were moved to oppressive apartment blocks) or capitalism, when the struggle for profit led to the fall of the minimal surface under the minimum laid down by the law and the deprivation of homes of all legally eludible functions. In socialism, „the reclusion” of people in architecture was perfected with the aid of the force-ideology couple. In capitalism, faced with the pressure of the lending system, Romanians were meant to experience both ideologies. In 2012, the criticism of De Carlo’s relationship between architecture and power has never been so topicalin Romania. In the context of the administrative and territorial decentralization, thelocal public authorities took over the role of „Power” before 1989. At the level of cities, towns and villages, we witnessed totalitarian attempts to solve the problem of the groups living in extreme poverty by means of forced displacements to new living environments no different from thosethe vulnerable groups had access to prior to the local authorities intervention. Some of the most publicized are the initiatives undertaken by the mayors of Constanța and Baia Mare to create neighbourhoods for the poor; the living conditions were outrageous as Le Corbusier’s existenzminimum amounted to 15 square metres for a family comprising two adults and a child – Baia Mare, the initial project for Postfunduș area.
11. The second law is taken from Turner’s book written in 1972, Freedom to Build.
12.We detailed these concepts in the in-depth presentation of Turner’s book in Annex 1 (a/n).
13. Reproduced in Annex 1.
14. In original „How the Other Half Lives”.
15.Having a double degree in architecture and sociology, Veiller coordinated The New York Tenement House Commission between 1900 and 1901. He founded and led the National Housing Association between 1911 and 1936.
16. The adjective Usonian was coined by Frank Lloyd Wright to define his new applied organic and democratic vision - United States Of North America/USONA.
17.When Democracy Builds, in original.
18.War on Poverty, in original.
19. Hillary Clinton’s1969thesis on political science entitled „There is Only the Fight” makes consistent references to Alinsky and Obama himself was a community organiser and applied Alinsky’s methods. http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/communism/alinsky.htm
20. Jane Jacobs became the spokesperson of the intellectuals advocating for a living environment different from that proposed, through the use of authority, by the planners of the time. Malvina Reynolds is a composer who denounced the American suburban developments deprived of soul and identity in the 1960s: „Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky-tacky / Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes all the same / There’s a pink one and a green one / And a blue one and a yellow one / And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky / And they all look just the same”, Malvina Reynolds, 1961
21. http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/010/pruitt-igoe.htm
22. Ronald Dworkin had shown that neither the liberal equal opportunities nor the socialist equal situations can guarantee the observance of individual rights (Nay, 2008: 604).

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