People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cities were invented to facilitate exchange – the exchange of ideas, friendships, material goods and skills. How good a city is at facilitating exchange determines its health – economic, social, cultural and environmental. Public space forms a vital conduit in this exchange process, providing platforms for everyday interaction and information flows – the basis and content for the public life of cities. At their best, public spaces act like a self-organising public service; just as hospitals and schools provide a shared resource to improve people’s quality of life, public spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone.

What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant. A new town square could be carefully, beautifully designed, but there was no guarantee that people would come and use it.
People have a wide variety of motivations, needs and resources that shape their personal capacity and desire to use the communal spaces within their town or city. This sometimes creates sharp inequalities between different people’s ability to participate in the wider public life of a city outside home and work.

We also found that public space is better understood less as a predetermined physical space, and more as an experience created by an interaction between people and a place. In other words, public space is co-produced through the active involvement of the user. This shift from a place-based to a userled understanding enables the quality of public space within a neighbourhood or even a whole city to be assessed in terms of how well it supports a range of ‘public experiences’, such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning.

So what might a user-led framework for public space experiences look like? The publicness of a space can be measured in terms of its ability to provide a platform for the creation of different types of experience by different people.

This process of co-production holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space. It is adept at countering some of the negative trends that are perceived to be undermining public space as well as working with the grain of these trends and creating positive externalities.

First, co-production helps to counter the decline in trust in other people’s behaviour and to generate a sense of community efficacy.
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Where the organisation of the spaces reflected the principles of co-production, however, there tended to be a much higher confidence in other people’s behaviour and greater openness to a diversity of activities and people; people felt safe, but were more willing to take risks, for example by talking to people they did not know or trying a different kind of activity.

Second, by drawing on the diversity of people in the creation of shared experiences, co-production helps spaces to avoid the twin dangers of a lowest-common-denominator blandness or extreme fragmentation. Because coproduced spaces are partly self-organised they tend to be much more flexible, responsive and therefore more able to simultaneously meet a diversity of needs.

Third, co-production is governance-neutral and can work in a range of environments – public, private and civic – to improve their quality. Public space works best where people are able to positively contribute to their everyday environments through their personal choice and actions. The implication for governance of every type of space – public, private or civic – is that more space and control needs to be given over to the people using it. This process of ‘letting go’ could also be the means by which different types of spaces are better connected together. Revitalising the public life of cities demands that we start with people rather than with physical space.

I said that Open Source and Peer-to-Peer could be applied to design for a locality…and Matías Echanove and Rahul Srivastavache are trying to adapt the principles of the Bazaar described by Eric Raymond to urban planning.

1. Necessity is the mother of invention: What do residents need? It is not for planners to guess, but for them to say.
2. No need to reinvent the wheel again: Lets see what works in here and elsewhere and expand on it.
3. You don’t really understand the problem until after you start implementing the solutions: It doesn’t have to be an all out “redevelopment”, we can start small and keep building knowledge from that.
4. With the right attitude interesting (and unexpected) issues will come up and make the plan & development better.
5. Letting go: Lets not feel proprietary about the plan, or rather let other people feel proprietary about it as well. Our common goal is to have the BEST/optimal solution, and everyone has something to contribute.
6. Residents should be co-planners and co-developers: They are the biggest assets of planners and a lot of time and attention should be spent to cultivate their active participation. We don’t need to be design or planning genius, but rather to find the best way to activate the collective intelligence of the residents.
7. The plan should be publicly accessible on the web and in the planned area itself: with updates every weeks so people are part of it and can react immediately. Listen to what people (everybody) have to say and immediately incorporate it. It can always been modified along the way.
8. If we have enough people looking at different aspects of the plan, any issue can be recognized and addressed quickly: Finding the issues is the biggest challenge. Once we found it someone will have an idea about how to solve it.
9. Finding an efficient way to get people’s input is more important than input itself.
10. If residents are treated as the most valuable resource of the plan, they will become the most valuable resource of the plan.
11. Being able to recognize good ideas from others is (almost) better than having good ideas oneself.
12. Realizing that our concepts are wrong might lead to the most striking and innovative solutions.

Por otra parte, dado que gestionar ciudades y territorios consiste en realidad en gestionar personas, es si cabe más importante que en el caso del software que el proceso se desarrolle de un modo colaborativo dando participación a los propios usuarios que de este modo pueden convertirse en actores del proceso. Ciertamente, la planificación actual, por ejemplo en España, está muy alejada de estas ideas, pero deberíamos pensar por las razones de esta discrepancia. Posiblemente estén más en los fallos del sistema actual que en la supuesta utopía del paradigma del bazar.

(via | Juan Freire)