Cancel
  • Journal
  • Events
  • Film Mosaic
  • More
    PresseOm CAFxFilm submissions
    Jobs
    Projekter
    Sommerskoler
  • Social
  • Facebook
  • Vimeo
  • Youtube
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Da
    En
  • Account
  • Become a member
En del af
Climate Care
·
Artikel
·
25.7.22

Caring Techniques: Making Design Documents Work for Democratic Futures

How do 'mess' and 'care' intersect in the paperwork of 1970's social housing planning and design?

Skrevet af:
Heidi Svenningsen Kajita
Læsetid
00
Landscapes of Care
Climate
Excerpt from diary (May 1974) documenting visits to Ralph Erskine Arkitekter AB's site-office in the Byker Redevelopment, Newcastle upon Tyne. The architects considered their social-and pedagogical services equally as important as their design work. Furthermore, they kept their doors open for tenants to bring their small and large queries and complaints directly into the office. Source: Arkitektur-och designcentrum, Stockholm.

Can architectural communities become better at working with those who do the daily work of sustaining the places in which we live? What model can planners and architects follow to care about users’ needs and complaints that are not typically part of their written and drawn work? My research in architectural design looks at the messy, uncategorized intersection of paperwork with humanity.


From fixed solutions to open-ended processes 

Climate science tells us that we are living in a damaged, broken world and that it is time to phase out fossil fuels and change our behaviour. As governments pursue “green solutions” to address these complex challenges, we need to re-think the democratic processes that guide us. From an architectural perspective, I challenge the idea of “solutions” that assume a certain fix to end a problem. The task of designers has historically been systematized autonomously for the production of such “things” as buildings, landscapes or infrastructure. But while the work of architecture and planning uses documents—drawings, time schedules, contracts—for the construction of new and better things, it also involves long-term negotiations with many stakeholders. An architect’s knowledge and services can expand far beyond information about building. This porosity is promising, when architectural work is seen to support and repair breakage along unpredictable paths of democratic engagement. We need open-ended work that disrupts normative routes of progress. We need design processes that can involve care.


Caring Practices

Issues of care, often linked to ideas of “time poverty,” “family-work balance” and “social depletion,” comprise social capacities needed not only for maintaining households and communities, but also to sustain connections more generally. Both natural and social resource exploitation now affect everyone. Dealing with our damaged, broken world requires far-reaching changes to knowledge production, global capitalism and democracy. Scholars examine caring practices, often with feminist perspectives from various disciplines, to re-think democracy and to question prestige and power. Moral systems, they show, have historically upheld a divide between public functions, such as politics and law, and devalued caring functions such as domestic work. Instead, care ethics makes the often invisible labour of cleaners, care-takers, technicians and so on visible and central to politics and different perspectives of power. Democracy in all its practices could thus become more caring, and caring could entail everything becoming more democratic.  

From the perspective of care ethics, we are all interdependent. Care is not a concern for victims. There is no ‘we’ and ‘them’. Care is everywhere in the ordinary everyday. In this sense, we have to take Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s definition of care seriously, when they ask that “caring be viewed as a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”

Tronto brings this definition into the context of architecture and planning and proposes care as a critical concept that will “require a fundamental reorientation of the disciplines.” They are caring about things, and often about the wrong things.” She explains that care does not emphasize the completed building as its objective, but instead deals with who this “thing” engages over time and how.  Because the legal and ethical responsibilities of capitalised economies organises architectural production towards things—towards fixed ends as opposed to relationships and processes—we need to look for caring practices in efforts that capitalised systems overlook. If caring practices are a species of activity, these activities do not happen at “the most general level.” Instead, as Tronto suggests, specific practices are nested within other care practices. If care is not just a naturally motivated disposition or affective connection, but is rather a technical term for the complex, skilled practices for addressing the needs of others, then what are the skilled activities that architects can bring to the caring purposes of repair work? How do we even gain sight of care in architects’ work smoothed by a capitalised ethos?

Byker Ralph Erskine tillsammans med ett barn. Flyttat från fältet fotograf: Manchester Daily Mail. Source: Arkitektur- och designcentrum, Stockholm.


In the ruins of welfare-state planning

In Northern Europe, the consolidated social and capital programmes of the welfare state’s housing and other welfare institutions was underpinned by decency and a collectivist ethos. Large-scale post-WWII housing, for example, has helped align architecture and planning expertise with the rationale of welfare for all. But these environments are also managed foremost on an evidence-driven and causal logic that tends to by-pass the messy complexities of caring and everyday doings. When architects and planners set up urban environments to fit determinable behaviours and effects, the critical and creative agency that citizens bring to places over time is often rendered invisible. Communities who maintain relationships again and again deal with measures of austerity, assimilation strategies and financialization continuously—not in professionalised time frames. These practices on the ground are essential to maintaining households and broader ecologies, because, as Tronto points out, people feel safer and are more attentive to their environment when they perceive that caring is part of everyday life. But how might design processes engineered for environments with fixed purposes and time scales come to include the life-sustaining web of care? 

Sara Ahmed embraces a queer perspective, which she explains as the strange and wonky, to examine knowledge production and how knowledge labour can unlearn old norms to produce a more inclusive society. In her proposal for “sweaty concepts”, she explains that inclusive ways of knowing “come out of a bodily experience that is trying,” and she asks us to “stay with the difficulty.” Not eliminating the effort or labour becomes an aim for knowledge production in itself. In the case of writing, she says, “we have been taught to tidy up our texts, not to reveal the struggle we have in getting somewhere.” On paper, the struggle of tangled, democratic processes is often tidied up to ease the processing of information. Could sweaty and caring practices be nested in paperwork? In the context of architecture and planning, care labour does not lead to a certain style or typology; so, to find examples containing clues for care in paperwork, I turn to the often-hidden aspects of architects’ work. 


Caring techniques

Through an ethnographic construction of research, I examine how documents were used during design to mediate and enact social processes, specifically documents from the original design processes of large-scale housing of the 1960s and ’70s. One example from Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, is the heritage listed Byker Redevelopment first designed by Ralph Erskine Architects AB between 1969-82. The architects famously established a site-office from where their practice came to mark a paradigmatic shift towards participation in planning. I focus on the scarce evidence of residents’ voices in the documents from the archive of this site-office. Now in the RIBA Collection in London, the architects’ vast paperwork reveals that records acted in communicative processes between designers, residents, contractors and public administrators. While the records functioned as conventional instructions for buildings and landscapes, the execution of those instructions involved concerns outside the office, such as the requirements and complaints of residents. I exemplify here, how residents’ voices and particular concerns and doings can be embedded in architectural design processes, and thus how information moves across a broad range of both contractual and non-contractual genres. In the archive, new genres, from questionnaires to lists, letters of complaint, and poetry, show that the architects approached these documents with care and some difficulty, and transferred the non-expert voices into design processes.

The work of care happens in all that we do, at all levels of the design process, from decision-making to mundane drawn and written work. Working with lists, the architects cared about resident complaints, such as those about creaking floorboards in overcrowded flats, which were transferred into building information and then as instructions for repair in Clerk of Works lists; floor details were eventually re-designed in later stages of the development. In another instance, residents said that overcrowding led children to congregate noisily in shared spaces between buildings. This concern, raised in lists and letters of complaint and even in poems in a local journal, was transferred to records evaluating design of front gardens. When information is efficiently transferred between documents, the material and social information, normally not alike, combine through the processes they amass. 

The difficulty of making the administrative apparatus actually “give a damn”—as Ben Kafka says—about the paperwork it processes is the “demon of writing.” In the archive, this odd, informal, sweaty demon can be traced in the work of communicating with residents. Pointing to noise and overcrowding, residents reveal not only faults in construction but also the broader problems they experienced with authoritative planning. The architects put residents’ complaints into the paper record alongside documents submitted by technicians and public administrators. They laboured with care to make the most personal kind of concern act on more general terms. By circulating information between unlike document genres, the architects responded to concerns and that response had far-reaching consequences for planning policy and participatory design methods. 


Caring techniques are not solutions to fix our broken world but rather activities within open-ended processes. Historical and ethnographic analyses of documents used in design processes can provide crucial clues for how to deal with the hidden matters of care. Design documents pertain to construction but can be made to inscribe both systemic and particular social relationships. Architecture and design are more than processes that lead to objects; they are dynamic processes in which experts care about others and work with sweat in the difficult place between totalising views and site-based ways of knowing and doing, attending to the unpredictable. To paraphrase Tronto, when we can think about caring as part of a democratic system, then that system will become both more caring—and better at it.

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Copenhagen Architecture Festival; residents in public/social housing who often already know what takes me years to examine; the architectural community, both scholars and practitioners, that I think and practice with; and to Lenore Hietkamp for editing this text. The research for this text is funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Heidi Svenningsen Kajita (PhD) is assistant professor at the Department for Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen. Her research deals with how architecture and planning can (re)produce social processes focusing on the history and transformation of welfare state large-scale housing. She draws on ethnographic-architectural methodology to combine knowledge of users' everyday practices, normative frameworks for the built environment and architects' drawn and written work. For more info see personal website: www.bureaus.dk

‍

WORKS CITED
1) See “A European Green Deal”:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en. See also the Danish government’s strategy “Green solutions of the future - Strategy for investments in green research, technology, and innovation”: https://ufm.dk/en/publications/2020/green-solutions-of-the-future-strategy-for-investments-in-green-research-technology-and-innovation. Last accessed October 2021
2) Categories marked in citation marks refer to Nancy Fraser. “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review 100. July Aug, 2016. P. 99.
3) This last sentence is a paraphrase from Joan C. Tronto,
Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. 1st ed. Cornell University Press, 2015. The argument and terms presented here also refer to e.g. Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny, (eds.), Critical care: architecture and urbanism for a broken planet. MIT Press, 2019; and María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
4) Joan C. Tronto,
Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 1993. P. 103.
5) Joan C. Tronto. “Caring Architecture.” in Krasny and Fritz
(eds.), Critical care: architecture and urbanism for a broken planet. MIT Press, 2019. P. 26.
6) Ibid. P. 27.
7) Joan C. Tronto.
 Who Cares?: How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. 1st ed. Cornell University Press, 2015.
8) This quote and those that follow are taken from the introduction to Sara Ahmed,
Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017. P. 13.
9) The examples are drawn from ongoing research see e.g. the paper “On File and As File: Tracing communicative processes in the Byker archive” by author and Katie Lloyd Thomas presented at the symposium
The Practice of Architectural Research: Perspectives on design and its relation to history and theory in the panel “The Lenses of the Researcher.” https://architecturalresearch.be/recordings/
10) Ben Kafka,
The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. Zone Books, 2012. P. 27

Sign up to our Newsletter

Hej! If you want to know what CAFx is up to, you can use the form below to sign up to our newsletter, sent every other Friday, and receive updates on our latest projects, events and Journal content directly to your inbox.

Past issues

Success

Thank you! You have successfully been subscribed to our newsletter.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
  • Climate Care
    Collection
  • Skrevet af
    Heidi Svenningsen Kajita
  • Samarbejdspartner
  • Denne artikel er tilgængelig som PDF.
    Download
  • Tidligere festival år
    CAFx' contribution for the new SPACE10 Library
    "Can I Get A Roof Over My Head, Please?" 
    A Room of One’s Own Rooted in an All-Connected World
    Where Does Inclusive Design Meet Film?
    Film and Architecture Workshop Tirana: Leave No One Behind
    Tre begivenheder at se frem til i 2023
    New Platform LINA - OPEN CALL for sustainable architecture
    Den sultne by: Interview med Carolyn Steel
    CAFx' direktør Josephine Michau er valgt som kurator  for Den Danske Pavillon på  Arkitekturbiennalen i Venedig 2023
    Infrastructures of Longevity Takeaways
    Kysterne, tiden og alt, hvad der lever, gror og er i bevægelse
    Two Practical Experiences in Atacama Desert
    Caring Techniques: Making Design Documents Work for Democratic Futures
    In Defence of Messiness
    In the Midst of Concrete Monsters
    Carrying Things Together
    The Fragility of Becoming an Ecosystem of Practicess
    Landscape of Terms: Expanding a Lexicon
    Methodologies of Softness
    An Interview with Soft Agency
    Publikation: Pandemic Resilient Cities
    Den humane by
    Firmitas, utilitas, venustas
    Arkitekturen må fortsat være nysgerrig på sin fremtid, men også på sin fortid
    Politikerne har kun købt den populistiske vinkel på arkitekturens virke
    NO / YES
    Eksperimentalismen leve!
    En by, der fungerer og føles som en skov
    Fremtidens arkitektur handler om relationer
    Tema: Sundhed og arkitektur
    Architecture is Political
    Den kritiske arkitekt
    ”Hvad mener arkitekten?”
    Et involverende narrativ: Skitse til en klimaetisk arkitekturpraksis
    Byen er vores chance for at leve bæredygtigt
    Det er vores pligt som arkitekter at bygge bro mellem kunsten og videnskaben
    Do politicians, administrators and managers still read in these days?
    Klimatilpasning af vores byer er ikke en sag alene for arkitekter, ingeniører eller planlæggere
    Arkitekturen forfladiges, når den reduceres til, hvilken farve teglsten der vælges til at forskønne de bagvedliggende betonelementer
    A call to architects in every part of the profession to take action in their own architectural practice
    Fremtidens arkitektur skal være arkitektur med krop og evigt liv
    De fleste nybyggede boliger er bygget til den samme målgruppe: den velstillede kernefamilie
    Særliggørelsen af det almindelige - en ode til bæredygtigheden
    Det 21. århundredes arkitektur må gøre plads til de små aktører
    Planetære programmører
    Vi står over for et klimaspøgelse, der kræver en total transformation af individet og samfundet
    Arkitektur er samfundskunst
    Kun én kvinde har modtaget Pritzker-prisen som selvstændig arkitekt
    Bydemåde – Arkitekturens manifester mellem krise og kald
    A Conch Manifesto
    Det, som var rigtigt i går, er ikke nødvendigvis det, som er rigtigt i morgen
    Arkitektur er ideologi i fast form
    International Manifest Stafet 2023
    Bogudgivelse: The Welfare City in Transition – A Compilation of Texts and Images 1923 – 2020
    Natalie Mossin og Marianne Kofoed: Kære overborgmester,
    Johan Hage: Kære overborgmester,
    Dan Stubbergaard: Kære overborgmester,
    Arkitektfællesskabet: Kære overborgmester,
    Kenneth Balfelt Team: Kære overborgmester,
    Nils Holscher: Kære overborgmester,
    Jonas Sangberg: Kære overborgmester,
    Thing Brandt Landskab: Kære overborgmester,
    Martin og Rosa, STED: Kære overborgmester,
    Jan Koed: Kære overborgmester,
    Jesper Kusk Arkitekter: Kære overborgmester,
    Ed Durie: Kære overborgmester,
    Einer Seerup: Kære overborgmester,
    Juul Frost Arkitekter: Kære overborgmester,
    Anna Esbjørn: Kære overborgmester,
    Hanne Schmidt: Kære overborgmester,
    Adept: Kære overborgmester,
    Future Architecture Rooms
    The World’s Recovery
    Curated Apertures
    Potential of Borders and Shared Cultural Infrastructure
    Nye sammenhænge
    Covid-19 and Cities
    Re:habilitation
    The Corona Curtains
    A Naked City and a Creative Lockdown
    Spring Doesn’t Pause
    Tanker i en forandret by
    The Corona Crisis and the Built Environment
    Byen blev pludselig meningsløs
    The Very Nature of the Pandemic is about Human-Environment Relations
    Pandemics & Architecture
    Pandemien vil sætte sig dybe spor
    We Need to Reorganize the City
    Morten Birk Jørgensen: Kære overborgmester,
    Christian Pagh: Kære overborgmester,
    Ellen Braae: Kære overborgmester,
    Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen: Kære overborgmester,
    2.x Gladsaxe Gymnasium: Kære overborgmester,
    Kristine Holten-Andersen: Kære overborgmester,
    Kristian Ly Serena: Kære overborgmester,
    Rambøll: Kære overborgmester,
    Curt Liliegreen: Kære overborgmester,
    Maria Wedel Søe og Jens Bertelsen: Kære overborgmester,
    Lars Autrup: Kære overborgmester,
    Uffe Elbæk: Kære overborgmester,
CAF X
Samlinger
Climate Care
Vis alle
Artikler
-
9.11.22
Infrastructures of Longevity Takeaways
In order to change how the built environment is designed and constructed, it is needed to understand the impact of decisions beyond the spreadsheet.
Artikler
-
9.11.22
In order to change how the built environment is designed and constructed, it is needed to understand the impact of decisions beyond the spreadsheet.
Podcasts
-
21.12.21
Generationer af omsorgsfulde klimaagenter
Kræver den grønne byudvikling radikale initiativer fra fremtidens arkitekter og byplanlæggere?
Podcasts
-
21.12.21
Kræver den grønne byudvikling radikale initiativer fra fremtidens arkitekter og byplanlæggere?
Podcasts
-
21.12.21
Planning for Uncertainty
How do architects and urbanists develop projects in a time where the future seems even more unpredictable than ever before?
Podcasts
-
21.12.21
How do architects and urbanists develop projects in a time where the future seems even more unpredictable than ever before?
Podcasts
-
9.11.22
Care – Connectedness and Equitable Green Recovery
Three different yet interconnected methodological perspectives on the role of care in the study, making and maintenance of space.
Podcasts
-
9.11.22
Three different yet interconnected methodological perspectives on the role of care in the study, making and maintenance of space.
CAF X
Journal
Relateret
Artikler
-
3.3.23
CAFx' direktør Josephine Michau er valgt som kurator  for Den Danske Pavillon på  Arkitekturbiennalen i Venedig 2023
Temaet for udstillingen bliver klimatilpasning og fremtidens kystlandskaber.
Artikler
-
3.3.23
Temaet for udstillingen bliver klimatilpasning og fremtidens kystlandskaber.
Artikler
-
9.12.21
Jytte Abildstrøm Mygind: Kære overborgmester,
Jeg tog på trækursus i Jærna idet jeg havde læst om vandforsyningsskove – det var mageløst
Artikler
-
9.12.21
Jeg tog på trækursus i Jærna idet jeg havde læst om vandforsyningsskove – det var mageløst
Artikler
-
7.12.21
Jan Koed: Kære overborgmester,
Forestil dig en »Sønder Boulevard« fra Langebro til Bispeengen med en ådal nordvest for Søerne.
Artikler
-
7.12.21
Forestil dig en »Sønder Boulevard« fra Langebro til Bispeengen med en ådal nordvest for Søerne.
Podcasts
-
9.11.22
Gender bias in urban space
Podcast about the gendered city and how we can plan for a more equal urban space.
Podcasts
-
9.11.22
Podcast about the gendered city and how we can plan for a more equal urban space.
CAFx er Skandinaviens største årlige arkitekturfestival, der siden sin etablering i 2014 sætter fokus på de steder, hvor arkitekturens forvandlinger krydses med liv.
  • Journal
  • Alle artikler
  • Podcast
  • Artikler
  • Film
  • Samlinger
  • Events
  • Kommende
  • Livsform
  • Event arkiv
  • Film mosaic
  • Om Film Mosaic
  • Se film
  • Guidelines
  • Uddannelses materiale
  • Deltag
  • Mere
  • Om CAFx
  • Presse
  • Jobs
    Projekter
    Sommerskoler
  • Social
  • Facebook
  • Vimeo
  • Youtube
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
Lyt med på
Apple Podcast
Lyt med på
Google Podcast
  • Kontakt
  • Copenhagen Architecture Festival
    Halmtorvet 27
    1700 København V

    E. info@cafx.dk
    CVR: 43054066
  • 2022 © Copyright Copenhagen Architecture Festival — CAFx · Datapolitik · Terms & Conditions
Cookies
We use cookies and trackers (including from third parties) to understand and optimize your browsing experience
DatapolitikAccepter