Justificación

Nel Janssens

The following text elaborates on the importance of ‘Critical Design’, a particular implementation of designerly thinking to study problem-setting for the worldwide urbanisation process and the effects this has on our physical environment.

The introduction gives a ‘State of the Territory’ which summarises some facts that are well-known nowadays and problematic issues of the urbanisation process.

This chapter concludes with some questions that are considered especially relevant to investigation by means of (critical) design.

The second sectionbriefly presents two design projects that show the strongly imaginative approach so typical of the so-called conceptual design practice. This focus on imagination and thinking beyond daily reality and common practices is often related to Utopian thinking.

The nexttwo sections show that this unconventional or non-conformist thinking is essential to developing a critical perspective on the issues at stake and as such is intrinsically part of ‘Critical Design’.

The last sectiongives the specific characteristics of ‘Critical Design’ and argues that this way of designerly thinking should be more actively developed and used in research on the futurity of our physical environment.

1 Introduction

State of the Territory

Urbanisation nowadays is everywhere,

driven by revolutionary technological development and huge population growth, gaining almost explosive speed,

N. Janssens

Department of Architecture, Sint-Lucas Brussels, Belgium and Chalmers School of Architecture, G¨oteborg, Sweden

N. Janssens is an architect-urban planner, currently conducting doctoral research on the topic of

‘Critical Design in Urbanism’ at the Department of Architecture, Sint-Lucas Brussels, Belgium

G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 6

C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

105

escaping more and more from the designer’s control, landscaping the territory of the earth,

in fact. . .

defining the quality of our living environment itself.

In 1800,only 2% of the world population was urbanised. In 1950, only 30% of the world population was urban. In 2000, 47% of the world population was urban. More than half of the world population will be living in urban areas by 2008. By 2030, it is expected that 60%

of the world population will live in urban areas. Almost 180,000 people are added to the urban population each day (Habitat 2001, p. 1).

The future of most of humanity now lies, for the first time in history, in urbanizing areas. The qualities of urban living in the twenty-first century will define the qualities of civilization itself (Harvey 2000, p. 40).

Worldwide

the territory is being consumed

by fast growing settlements of different kinds:

city districts, outskirts, infrastructures, gated communities, paradise islands, slums,. . .

an almost monstrous growth fed by

seemingly uncontrollable urban consumption of energy, raw materials and space,

causing equally uncontrollable sociological and ecological transformations of the life environment in every remote corner of the earth.

Collection and analysis of data on these phenomena is now a never-ending activity,

rigorous studies on the effects of the urbanisation process are abundant,

‘technically’ or ‘theoretically’ speaking there is even a solution to present for each of the many problems at hand.

Yet. . .

multi-levelled, multi-scaled and highly dynamic as it is, the issue of urbanisation of the territory

seems a messy, confused, turbid, ill-structured problem and therefore in the end

always manages to escape the many acts of technical problem-solving.

It is not by technical problem solving that we convert problematic situations to well-formed problems; rather, it is through naming and framing that technical problem solving becomes possible (Sch¨on 1986, p. 5).

So, perhaps we need to ‘reset’ the problem. . . We need to invest in training our intellectual skills to re-name and re-frame hard-to-grasp situations.

Therefore, and if we agree that

the worldwide process of urbanisation is one of the major challenges of the immediate future,

we need a review of the common concepts, categories, paradigms,. . . in short, of the ‘language’¹of urban planning.

Urban planning still struggles with a language that is deeply rooted in dualistic thinking:

the urban/city versus nature/the landscape, urbanisation versus ecology, built-up versus open, urban = unhealthy and dangerous versus rural = healthy and safe, public versus private,. . .

the relevance of maintaining these dichotomies is questioned however and in an attempt to overcome this oppositional thinking

categories are merged:

the urban landscape, urban ecology, sprawl, rurban, public–private partner ships. . .

The dichotomies of ‘humanity and nature’, ‘technology and nature’, ‘mind and matter’, ‘self and world’ are not real per se. They are the result of metadesign. These dichotomies result from the use of a dualistic, rationalistic, materialistic epistemology – modernity’s most com-mon mode of perception and conception – the analytical and classificatory consciousness that separates subject and object, the observer and the observed, into dualistic categories.

Most people are unaware of how profoundly their experience, values and aspirations, their entire worldview, are still affected by metadesign impulses that go back to Descartes and even Plato (Wahl 2006, p. 1).

The doubting of dichotomies fits into a more profound shift of consciousness, from dualistic thinking to more holistic thinking,

but the merged terms still seem more descriptive than imaginative.

We lack appropriate, critical and, above all, inspirational language to conceptualise the future territory

How can we create the poetry of our urban future?

How can we create imaginative conceptions and notions, powerful visions and concepts?

How can we develop a mental frame that creates a view on an open space of?

possibilities?

How can we enforce the ability to name and frame problematic situations in such a way that a direction is set for action and technical

problem-solving

These questions press somewhat for more active involvement of conceptualisa-tion and imaginaconceptualisa-tion, instead of, or besides, yet more analysis.

These questions therefore appeal for enhanced designerly thinking.