People and their spaces
Can architecture be democratic? Most people also perceive their environment politically. But the combination of "architecture" and "politics" in the popular imagination evokes the image of a totalitarian leader who secures his eternity with monumental buildings and avenues. And if dictators are somewhat architects, it follows that architects are also somewhat dictators. They will just do something for the citizens along the way.
Architecture and spatial planning can be evaluated for their democracy, and there are strategies that make them more democratic. An obvious way to do this is to involve citizens in the planning process. This is easy to say and difficult to implement. The reasons are not only of a practical nature, that is, how to gather all interested citizens in the same place. Before that, it should be clarified who are the participants of participatory democracy.
Who should plan (everything).
Everyone affected by the construction decision should participate in the planning process. But who are they (and who chooses them)? This certainly includes the tenants of the future building or "users", but there are also the tenants of neighboring buildings, residents of that city and that country, and when it comes to symbolically strong places such as the collapsed twin towers in New York, Ground Zero - perhaps the right to decide have all the people of the world. 16/XNUMX is a global event, but does that mean we all get to decide what to build on XNUMX acres of land in Manhattan?
Political theory does not provide answers to these questions. There are no general criteria for determining to whom something justifiably "concerns". For years, Ground Zero was the most famous construction site in the world. "We are listening to the city" participation exercises were organized, in which many New Yorkers participated in a series of moderated conversations. But the relatives of the victims of the terrorist attacks felt, not without reason, that their voices should carry more weight. Issues of authority and jurisdiction are not easily resolved even among elected officials. For example, is the word of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg worth more than the word of New York State Governor George Pataki, who ultimately chose the chief architect of the project, Daniel Libeskind?
Libeskind himself, who called the process of preparation for the construction of the new World Trade Center "the most democratic in the world", gives another quality to the relationship between architecture and democracy. According to him, the democracy of the final product is even more important than the democracy of decision-making on the project. This "people's architect" insisted that he wanted "a space for people, not just corporations." But what is “people space”? The answer could be: a space where citizens recognize their country (and themselves) as bearers of democratic values. Certain materials are thought to symbolize certain values: glass, for example, signifies "transparency" (and democratic "responsibility"), and Greek and Roman statues the democratic ideals of the past. Libeskind also chose the symbolic height of the Freedom Tower at 1776 feet, commemorating the year the US Declaration of Independence was signed (this was apparently Pataki's idea).
The problem with such representations of democratic values is that they are not equally understandable and accessible to everyone. Someone needs to explain to the innocent bystander why the tower is exactly 1776 feet tall (and perhaps also that the spear was originally supposed to stand on the edge of the roof to echo the torch in the hand of the Statue of Liberty). Not everyone will understand the well-intentioned attempts to make this building symbolic. Who else remembers that Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the original World Trade Center, believed that the Twin Towers represented "man's faith in humanity" and "his need for individual dignity"? Such statements reveal to us the pretensions of the architect, but they do not have much influence on the political experience of their work.
Democratic decoration
Sometimes the works erected in her honor literally deny access to democracy: it is nice that German citizens see their representatives from Norman Foster's glass dome on the redesigned parliament building in Berlin - as the supreme sovereign, they are symbolically elevated above their representatives. (Parliament House in Canberra follows a similar logic.) But de facto, they remain distant spectators - they can't even hear what is being said on their behalf. Representation of democracy and access to the democratic process are two different things: "democratic decoration" ("Look through the glass, it's democracy") in this case separates us from the space where democracy takes place.
Star-hitects
We are left with two, perhaps less obvious but coherent ways to understand the relationship between architecture and democracy. One boils down to the democratic imperative that architects should not work for authoritarian regimes. Of course, they don't have to take responsibility for the context of their actions. They can say that their buildings are politically subversive and that people change the meaning of even the most totalitarian buildings. The Nazi buildings in Berlin today house the offices of the liberal democratic government. They are also a reminder to citizens of the totalitarian past. One could say that if the ideal of democracy is collective autonomy, then that process is more important than a piece of glass (here) and an allusion to the heroic Founding Fathers (there).
But too much indulgence in assessing the political status of clients overlooks the fact that "star-hits" who sell their name (or brand) to authoritarian regimes in Central Asia - think of the iconic buildings of Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan - are in direct service of the strategic goals of those regime. Oil dictators like Ilham Aliyev yearn for cultural prestige and international recognition, and ancient architects deliver them both, thus supporting the legitimacy of governments, which in turn give them the freedom to build (demolish and relocate), which they do not have in their own countries. Libeskind, who refuses to work for despots and their "homogeneous systems", rightly insists that it is impossible to separate "formal geometry from the context, that is, the clients and the morality of those states".
Space for free gathering
But what "morality" does democracy offer? It is certainly not written in stone, because democracy does not prescribe political meanings, but that does not mean that buildings in democracy are erected randomly. Democratic architecture provides a space (public and private) where citizens can freely assemble, debate and protest. Recent political events such as the Arab Spring or the upheavals in the south of Europe have shown that even in the age of the Internet and social networks, real physical space is still important. Democratic architecture makes room for what political scientist John Parkinson calls "democratic performance," whereby citizens are left to shape their political messages.
What exactly does that mean? Parliaments should have large, open spaces where people can come together and express their views (sometimes Orwellianly referred to as "authorised parliamentary space"). Parkinson emphasizes that these spaces should not be too comfortable: benches and greenery would attract tourists, and this is a "public with a purpose". This is not the same as "the people" - which as a whole never appears in a democracy nor can it be completely undisputedly represented. As the late French political theorist Claude Lefort said, the logic of representation in a democracy is different from that in a monarchy: the king represents a territory without remainder, while the place of power in a democracy is always empty and contested. What the people (never the People) can do is to march on Washington like in America. Making visible parts of the people, especially those excluded or forgotten - is part of the democratic function of the public space. That is why avenues should be clean and spacious: so that people can march and gather in the capital. Parliaments, therefore, never completely represent "the people", but neither do citizens gathered in public space. The German political scientist Philip Manow has pointed out that the reflection of representative buildings on the surface of the water well symbolizes the fluid, impermanent nature of democratic representation: neither assemblies nor assembled citizens ever represent a people without a remainder; they are transitory and occasionally delegitimize each other. By visually and, if possible, productively representing that dynamic, architecture and urban planning simultaneously symbolically represent democracy and provide it with a concrete space for action.
The principle of territoriality One may note that this argument reduces architecture to the shaping of official places, instead of emphasizing democracy as an everyday practice (one does not march on Washington every day). The most convincing answer - pragmatically, not philosophically defensible - is that in general, as Giancarlo de Carlo argued for example, citizens should participate in the planning process, whereby the best criterion for selecting the relevant part of the public is still the principle of territoriality. Simply put: the neighbor is prima facie interested and has the right to speak. When it comes to big projects, for example taking over the poor parts of the city from the middle class - the democratic public as a whole gets involved (and if necessary protests). Planning policies create urban patterns that, as with the distribution of wealth, raise fundamental normative questions about collective self-determination. They cannot be decided locally. Such are, for example, questions about justice and degrees of diversity, which must be the subject of the widest possible discussion in the political community. Then the other problems will not be solved by political theory, but by the actual voices of citizens.
(Public Seminar; Peščanik.net)
Translated by: S MILETIĆ
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