Abstract
This chapter describes urbanism as a social activity that balances individual desires and political and institutional contexts. The author argues for the design charrette as a design process that both reconfigures the professional division of labor and engages stakeholders prior to the formulation of design solutions and plans. The common understanding of the charrette as public participation represents an underestimation of its potential and its significance. Underlying charrette practice is the idea that good urbanism—that is, urbanism that reflects and contributes to the quality of community life—is necessarily the work of many hands, over time. This chapter explores what can be learned from charrettes with regard to the intersection of technical expertise, democratic political processes and the emergence of new forms of place-making practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Explication of the logic of the charrette process and its efficacy is based on the author’s research on the New Urbanist movement, involving observation of charrettes, and interviews with participants and practitioners. What began in 1998 as participant observation and interviews of New Urbanist practitioners became focused more generally on varieties of public process in planning. The original research was funded by a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Humanities, and a grant from the Graham Foundation.
- 2.
Seaside’s early form-based code is a single sheet of diagrams that focus on building typology and the way buildings define a public realm. The effect of the code is to guide each new contributor to the town as they realize whatever individual aspiration they bring to it. It outlines a few simple responsibilities to the common world that anyone choosing to build a house in the community is expected to take on. See discussion of the evolution of the plan and the Seaside code, by Andrés Duany and others, pp. 165–207 in Thadani (2013).
- 3.
This conception of the urban commons goes beyond merely the idea of the “right to the city” as manifested in the occupation of public space (Kohn 2016), to the idea of the public realm as constituted by the qualities of connection through a shared commitment to a common environment.
- 4.
The concept of “situated knowledge” was introduced into science and technology studies by Donna Harraway. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.
- 5.
For the purposes of this chapter, the NCI model provides a schematic framework of something like a typical charrette process, from pre-charrette to charrette, from charrette to implementation. However, it is recognized that the NCI model is an ideal-typical construction, defined in large part as part of an educational curriculum intended to help improve the practice of charrettes. It is rare for charrettes to follow the NCI model fully, and this is not to imply that the NCI model is by any means the only way to accomplish this sort of design-centered collaboration. It is used here to illuminate what are arguably key aspects of the process. The conclusions drawn here are derived from the author’s observations of charrettes and analysis of the logic of the process in terms of its sociological properties.
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Brain, D. (2019). The Practice of Urbanism: Civic Engagement and Collaboration by Design. In: Arefi, M., Kickert, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_4
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