A R H I P E R A International Summer School
of Participatory Architecture
THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT | Lorin Niculae THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING | Lorin Niculae
content
A FEW THINGS ON ARCHITECTURE FOR THE POOR | Augustin Ioan
FOR A “POST-APOCALYPTIC” ARCHITECTURE | Augustin Ioan
THE NEW VERNACULAR | Vintil Mihilescu
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Design Department at the University of Architecture
and Urbanism “Ion Mincu” (U.A.U.I.M.) since 1998.
Architectural experience since 1994. He received
his Bachelor in Architecture at U.A.U.I.M. in 1998
and his Masters in Markeng at U.A.U.I.M. in 1999, wring “The Social Representaon of Collecve Housing in Romania” (dissertaon). He graduated the U.A.U.I.M. Doctoral School in SD-SITT (2011) – “Arhipera_The Social parcipatory Architecture”, doctoral thesis. He began working in the area of
social architecture in 2007 and, starng from the year 2010, he has ran the Housing Department in Soros Foundaon Romania (S.F.R) by introducing the parcipatory design method for the beneciaries of housing projects. Currently, he is the Director of Community Building Department, S.F.R. In 2011, he founded the social parcipatory architecture group “Arhipera”; the group’s members
are voluntary architects and student architects who
work in the architecture programme for vulnerable
groups bearing the above menoned name. Founding member of “Ordinul Arhitecilor din România”. Humanitas Library
founding shareholder.
Lorin Niculae
trans. Silvia Gigoi
“What if you can’t prove you had a house?” (Hernando de Soto)
One of the most pressing urban planning issues of the world, and particularly of each country, is the urban housing for people in poverty and especially for people in extreme poverty. The global demographic growth happens mostly in disfavoured areas, where resources are scarce or absent. Besides social exclusion caused by poverty, disadvantaged groups cannot access basic facilities and, as far as the study is concerned, they do not have access to the architecture made by architects, with direct impact on the quality of built environment and on the quality of life. As early as 1995, Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper declared that only 2% of the population who bought houses consulted an architect (Bell, Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture 2004, 13).
In 2012, an enormous global social pressure, which particularly affected Romania was caused by the explosion of a precarious built environment and the unprecedented expansion of ghettos, slums, suburbs or extremely poor housing areas, which, however called in one part of the world or another, cause local authorities’ despair and urban and rural inhabitants’ as well, people who are directly confronted with this issue. Current architecture practice (if improvised shelters are considered to be part of) raises some serious stability and health problems for its users. Last, but not least, its volume and expansion are overwhelming.
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Given this situation, during the last decades there has been an imperative need for architecture to redene its eld of action, to become an “architecture of change”, not only aesthetically but also socially and ethically relevant. An architecture which is good as far as design quality and professional standards are concerned, must satisfy as many users as possible, it must be permeable and exible. Rather than creating blueprints for buildings, this architecture puts the emphasis on creating an economical, political and social network, capable of changing built environment in areas with extreme poverty and also changing the communities themselves as far as their social and material poverty is concerned.
It is time for mainstream architecture to take into consideration “the unseen face” of the profession and start looking for the necessary resources and energy to take part with responsibility in what is to become the prevalent built environment. It is high time for it to provide real solutions to real problems. Maintaining the architectural speech at a top notch or, in many cases, at a purely conceptual level in Romania in 2012 is similar to bishops’ debate on angels’ gender while Constantinople was being attacked by the Ottoman cannons. This paper is also a warning. In the absence of an active involvement of architects in developing the built environment for people in extreme poverty, other factors take over the problem. These are the local authorities who, in search for a solution and lacking the necessary know-how, go for authoritative solutions which, far from feeding the need, amplify it.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 25 (1) says that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, (...)” (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 2011)  including the access to housing in the system of factors that inuence the social performance of people and families.
As early as 2007, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union sanctions in article 34 (3) that: “In order to combat social exclusion and poverty, the Union recognises and respects the right to social and housing assistance so as to ensure a decent existence for all those who lack sufcient resources, in accordance with the rules laid down by Community law and national laws and practices.” (Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union 2000). These statements show that, from a political point of view, the need of intervention in situations of extreme poverty is known and assumed.
The commitment of the EU presidency generated the political line at the European Parliament and of the European Committee level for combating poverty by allocating nancing lines. Starting with 2014, these will also include housing, under the ethical aspect, as a premise for the improvement of social and economic aspects.
Lorin Niculae
Vântori, Neam county, 2010
Given this political, social and economic environment, it becomes crucial for Romania in 2012 to be capable of absorbing correctly the structural funds on affordable housing for disfavoured categories, whose access and administration will be part of the attributions of local public authorities, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. In order to have access to the European funds, they will have to work out local housing politics, as regulators (as they also did until now), and also as implementers. However, without a methodology, a guide-book or an intervention model for housing, the possibility of absorbing structural funds for housing does not necessarily imply the local authorities’ capacity of creating and drawing up eligible projects.
This certain deciency makes public local authorities liable to taking the wrong decisions, not out of bad intent, but because of lack of information on efcient techniques, as there is not a signicant built environment in Romania, enough to give an adequate answer to the problems. A few positive examples, insufciently publicised, are a drop in the ocean – it is very unlikely that local authorities in Constana had access to the practices in Sruleti (Clrai county) for example. What is more, assuming some successful examples from rural areas and adapting them to an urban methodology can end up as an useless attempt with an uncertain result.
Therefore, throughout this article, I am going to present the antithesis between social participatory architecture and authoritative architecture for mass housing with its tendencies in the context of radicalization of the political speech on administrative resources and efcient possibilities of “solving” the problem of living in extreme poverty.
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  Bleti, Ursrie, Prahova county, 2007 
A fundamental characteristic of the social housing is that it does not involve individualities (like an architect traditionally discusses with a client), but communities. One of the errors of rst years practice was negotiating the problem individually, only with the direct beneciaries of the social houses, without involving the whole community in the process. As a result, the community segregated in “the haves” and “the have nots”1. Another consequence was the total lack of involvement of the beneciaries in the process of building, stimulating their passivity and making the community an assisted one.
Social houses construction programs in areas of extreme poverty must follow the principles of social participatory architecture. The architect working in these conditions has to be a social architect. It is about, neither more or less, a change of paradigm of the architectural practice.
In the current paradigm, the development of a social housing construction project for beneciaries in extreme poverty starts with the attempt of eradicating a settlement, a built environment in extreme poverty, which represents an issue for local public authority. Once the town hall makes this decision, it requests a local urban planning to an urban design ofce, which will take over the project from the local authority, using the area placed at their disposal. Then follow the approval procedures, the architectural details, the authorization for construction, the technical project, the bid with the entrepreneurs and the actual construction of the social houses, followed by the freewill or authoritative resettlement of the poor from the slum to the new neighborhood. In fact, local public authority is both the beneciary and the nancier of the project, which develops only by the rules it establishes. The level of authority and control during the intervention is extremely high and the role of urbanists and architects is secondary, given the extremely low budget for this kind of actions. The typical hierarchical pyramidal model “top- down” is followed.
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 Architect
User
Consump- tion Lack of  possession C o n c o r - dance Anonymity 
Intervention THEME PROJECT EXECUTION HOUSE
Participatory
 paradigm 
Analysis of existing and  p r o j e c t i v e needs Resource man- agement
User+ Ar-
User+
 Architect
Participation P r o g r e s s i v e building  D e c e n t r a l i z e d  production
User+ Archi-
User
Table showing the stages of a project for social houses building in the two paradigms.
On the other hand, social participatory architecture suggests in the rst place starting “bottom-up” through the democratic process of consulting the citizens who are to be involved in the project. Even if the local public authority could be the initiator of the project, the consultative process involves a decision network, a consortium of people who make the decisions, where urbanists and architects have a more important word to say. Besides, the architects can start by themselves this kind of project, bringing the idea of change to the community and working on the project together with the people. Given these circumstances, they become social architects.
Trying to improve the living in extreme poverty and always confronting with low budgets3, I tried as a rst stage to nd minimal living formulas for the families included in the program. Anyway, this has been the architects’ pursuit ever since the activity of building for disfavored categories started, it sedimented during
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Mayor Radu Mazre’s proposal for solving the lack of social houses in Constana city.
As a rst stage, 1000 containers will be placed in Tomis Nord district in 2012. From http://lideruldeopinie.ro/41525/modulul-social and http://www.stiri.com.ro/stire-4212/  case-sociale-de-8-milioane-euro.html Social housing becomes “social mode”.2
the C.I.A.M. II4  (Arnstein 1969), by the conceptualization of existenzminimum, this term is translated nowadays in extreme housing , formulated by the American architects Deborah Gans and Matthew Jelacic, in their attempt of solving the issue of emergency housing for the refugees in Bosnia.
But social hosing is not and it should not be an emergency housing. Even if the budget does not allow the building of a new social house for a family of 12 members, it is important to build the minimum that can offer the necessary shelter, together with offering a maximum potential for development, accessible for the users.
ARHIPERA concept for an evolutive social house in Sruleti (Clrai county)
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The social house in extreme poverty is a living organism; its birth means offering shelter; its growth means adapting to the family’s needs and to the way of living preferred by the users. The house must be designed so as to contain in nuce the possibility of growth. The social house in extreme poverty must be an evolutive house.
The situation described in the present work opposes the practice of inserting the social house into a barren environment, inducing the development of social quarters. The social house that we propose is inserted into an existing environment of extreme poverty, on an existing allotment or on a newly delimited one, near a house that is unt for living, into an urban tissue that is in most cases unstructured. I would like to add that, although inserting the social house into an existing environment is the better solution, in some cases it proves to be impossible, when a community has occupied a land unt for living (exposed to pollution or to the risk of ood or of landslide, etc.), thus making it necessary to relocate the families.
To be a social architect does not mean to give up practicing your profession in order to design cages but, on the contrary, it means practicing it so as to change the world you live in for the better. It may seem naive if it weren’t true. In the context of the present credit shortage, many architects had to close their ofces for lack of orders. If in the years to come social houses will mean only very protable contracts between the municipality and the suppliers of containers or of prefabricated building parts, then we shall witness the cutbacks of the highly important sector of social housing from the body of Romanian architecture. More than that, such “radical” solutions generate segregation and the only long term effect is moving the poverty pockets from the centre of the town to the outskirts, where the desired surveillance, coercion and control can be implemented, claiming at the same time the valuable real estate allotments in the town centre.
If, on the other hand, the architects will put on their rubber boots for generating architecture where it does not exist, then architecture will start to matter not only as a sector destined for the elite (fewer and fewer this days), but also for the poor masses (which become more and more numerous), and the architects’ work and effort will contribute to diminishing poverty. This change is necessary and possible to make.
At the same time, in dening the social architect within the frame of his profession and at the level of power relation, he is a mediator between often opposed vectors: on the one hand – the administration, who wants to solve the problem; on the other hand – the poor people, who they themselves are the problem. The architect’s role is to understand the point of view and the system of thought of both parties and to supply an architectural solution capable of “opening the limit”, of making opposites meet. And this
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role is not impossible as long as the opposition of the parties involved is given by the inaccessibility of the opposed systems of thought. In other words, the architect is an intellectual, part of the public sphere, who can induce social change, and good architecture does good to many people.
This approach transfers the architect from the authority to the agora, to the public sphere dened by the community’s needs and aspirations. It is denitely not an easy decision to make. But the reward of generating change where it seems impossible, of bringing hope where there is none and of engaging all your creativity for producing architecture out of extremely little, is well worth it.
NOTES
1 Using Saul Alinsky’s words.
2 The example provided by Mayor Mazre was taken over in 2012 by
the Group of counselors PNL of Bistria, who proposed the resettlement in containers of the poor who couldn’t pay their rent for the town hall’s apartments. Mayor Andrei Rusu declared that “It’s an absolutely necessary solution because we need to clear the city centre”. We can nd here a traditional form of extra-muros exclusion of the poor.
3 Budgets are always low relating to the issue’s scale. (author’s
note)
4 The critics of the congress can be found in Giancarlo De Carlo’s
“Architecture’s Public”, commented in this chapter.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” JAIP , 35. no.4, 1969: 216-224.
Bell, Bryan. Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
Bell, Bryan and Katie Wakeford. Expanding Architecture. Design as Activism. New York: Metropolil Books, 2008.
Blundell Jones, Peter, Doina Petrescu and Jeremy Till. Architecture and Participation. London: Taylor&Francis, 2005.
“Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.” European Parliament. 12 18, 2000. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/ pdf/text_en.pdf (accessed November 22, 2012).
Dean, Andrea Oppenheimer and Timothy Hursley. Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
Habraken, N. John. Supports: an Alternative to Mass Housing. London: Urban International Press, 2011.
Hamdi, Nabeel. Educating for Real. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1996.
 —. Housing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995.
 —. Small Change: About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities. London: Earthscan, 2011.
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 —. The Placemaker’s Guide to Building Community. London: Earthscan, 2011.  —. Urban Futures: Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction. Bourton Hall:
ITDG, 2005. Hatch, Richard C. The Scope of Social Architecture. New York: Van
Nostrand, 1984. Pearson, Jason. University/Community Design Partnerships. New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. Portereld, Gerald A, and Kenneth B Hall. A Concise Guide to Community
Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 1995. Sanoff, Henry. Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning. New
York: Wiley&Sons, 2000. Sinclair, Cameron and Kate Stohr. Design Like You Give A Damn:
Architectural Responses To Humanitarian Crises. New York: Metropolis Books, 2006.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. November 22, 2011. http://www. un.org/en/documents/udhr/.
Turner, John F.C. Housing By People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1976/2009.
Voicu-Dorobantu, Roxana, Ana-Maria Marinoiu and Florin Botonogu. “Social Housing: an Economic Issue.” Romanian Economic Journal, XI, no.29, 2008: 171-183.
Ward, Colin. Cotters and Squatters, Housing’s Hidden History. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2002/2009.
Whitehead, Christine, and Kathleen Scanlon. Social Housing in Europe.  London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007.
 —. Social Housing in Europe II - A Review of Policies and Outcomes.  London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2008.
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Since its appearance in 1960, starting with Habraken’s manifesto and continuing with Giancarlo De Carlo (1969), John Turner (1976), Christopher Alexander (1982) and Nabeel Hamdi (1995), social participatory architecture has been dened by the theoretical and practical work of a myriad of great architects. In 1969, The Skefngton Report (England) was the rst governmental investigation that raised the question of public participation in design. In 1976 participatory architecture was ofcially “accepted” in the profession by creating a working group in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), whose role was to “examine the relationship between profession and communities”  (Hamdi 1995, 20).
Social participatory architecture establishes the foundation of its discourse precisely on the acknowledgement of the fact that Modernism failed to full the aspiration of democracy and rationality. What Jürgen Habermas called the “project of modernity” must be understood in the social and political context that generated it: the armed conicts and revolutions of 19 th century, the decantation of the ideals of Illuminism, the industrialization, the extension of railroads and waterways involving mobility, the urbanization (Habermas and Weber Nicholson 1989)1. “The Industrial Imperative” was one of the main engines that startled the creativity of modern architects, generating new ideals and ideologies. Modernism
THE EMERGENCE OF PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE. CONTEXT
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tried to obtain social equality by means of industrialization and progress. Adopting Le Corbusier’s phrase, J.J.P. Oud said that the house would be relevant for the masses only when it has become a machine, because production can provide social housing for the entire society by creating series; manufacture production would serve only a limited and wealthier public (Stamm 1978).
The doctrine of New Objectivity (Newe Sachlichkeit) brought about the idea that a functional, comfortable and efcient object doesn’t necessarily have to be aesthetic, but it has to be accepted by the society, just like industrial objects that are aesthetic because of their simplicity and efcient use. New Objectivity also made way for the idea of demolishing poor residential districts in city centres in order to make room for the big metropolitan projects, involving mass resettlement of the inhabitants to the outskirts. (Frampton 1996, 289)
The ideal of Modernism brought order, rationality and accessibility among the premises of obtaining individual freedom. Nevertheless, since 1960, after cramming the districts with modernist blocks, immune to the context, or innite rugs of identical, standardized social houses in city centres and in the outskirts, it was obvious that these conclusive acts weren’t able to reconcile universal truth with regional particularities, progress with tradition, universal style with local cultural identities, social change with capitalism. Under the leadership of Le Corbusier, Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) advocated for utopias in which the demiurge architect decided the fate of the masses by means of his intuition of discipline and order. Article 22 of The Athens Charter (1933) denounced that “the suburbs are often mere aggregations of shacks hardly worth the trouble of maintaining. Flimsily constructed little houses, boarded hovels, sheds thrown together out of the most incongruous materials, the domain of
 poor creatures tossed about in an undisciplined way of life — that is the suburb!” (CIAM 1933). One can notice Le Corbusier’s interest for unity and discipline, while diversity is seen as a bad consequence of poverty and lack of perspective.
Fascinated by the technological progress, Le Corbusier was a declared enemy of the streets. In an era when transport was prone to become 100% airborne in a few years, Le Corbusier placed the airport in the centre of the city, turning the street and the sidewalk into an old, millenary and non-functional relic. For instance, one of the articles of Athens Charter stipulated that no block entry should be made directly from the street (art. 27). Pedestrians would have had paths and promenades reserved for them.
Giancarlo de Carlo (1919-2005) is one of the leaders of social participatory architecture, member of the famous Team 10, together with Georges Candilis, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson and Jacob Bakema. Founded in 1953, during the 9th  congress of CIAM, Team X (or Team 10) provoked a schism at the heart of
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Modernism. Disappointed by the functional segregation in Housing, Work, Loisir  and Transport proposed by the Athens Charter, the young generation of architects searched for other principles of structural development of the cities. The team’s answer to the report of the 8th CIAM in 1951 was a simple one, condensed into one paragraph: “Man may readily identify himself with his own heart, but not easily with the town within which it is placed. ‘Belonging’ is a basic emotional need – its associations are of the simplest order. From ‘belonging’ – identity – comes the enriching sense of neighborliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails” (Frampton 1996, 271).
Modernism failed from a democratic point of view precisely by enslaving its ideals to a power system (capitalist or communist, individual or collective, it doesn’t matter) which eliminated the user’s individuality from the eld of architecture (each system by its own means) and caused man’s alienation from their own house. Habermas shows in his article republished in 1981, “Modern and Postmodern Architecture” (Habermas and Weber Nicholson 1989), how the system of mobilization of workforce, of organizing the sites, of the general conditions of living in the city and last, but not least, of locating the buildings led to the concentration of large groups of people in the outskirts, since the project of modernity failed to integrate social housing inside the city, as it failed to integrate the factory as well. The construction of houses started to subsume to economic and bureaucratic factors, detached from the concept of family and tradition.
Therefore, Team X focuses on the feeling of allegiance and identity, indissolubly related to mass housing. At the same time, the slum and the poor outskirts are promoted as examples that satisfy a set of basic needs, that nobody can live without. In The Doorn Manifesto (Holland) in 1954, Team X formulates 8 principles; the rst one stipulates:” it is useless to consider the house except as part of a community owing to the inter-action of these on each other” (Smithson 1968).
The last congress, the CIAM X, held at Dubrovnik in 1956, gravitated around the Smithson brothers’ “diagrams of association” and the different levels of human association. The concepts discussed were identity, cluster and mobility. In Dubrovnik as well, Van Eyck presented the importance of human association. Thus, “The Functional City” ends its programmatic existence. It is not by accident that Le Corbusier, together with other founders of CIAM, did not take part in the congress.
The congress of 1959, held at Otterlo makes the transition from CIAM to Team X. Aldo van Eyck presents the diagram “By us for us” which illustrates the principle “Since man is both subject and object of architecture, it follows that its primary job is to
 provide the former for the sake of the latter” (Van Eyck 1948, 89).
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The housing problem explicitly formulated by theorists of social participatory architecture since 1960 resonates after 50 years, in an unexpected proportion, considering the present times, in which the explosion of slums, the rise in numbers of homeless people and the government’s incapacity to answer these issues in a democratic way requests an organized and aware architectural and urban response. The architects’ riot against houses without identity in 1956 generated an architectural phenomenon which was insignicant in size, an epiphenomenon that wasn’t able to change the primary, main-stream  phenomenon of construction of mass housing. This remained tributary to the economic criteria, the statistics, the standardization and prefabrication. The users of the social houses assumed their role of consumers granted by the developing agencies and the social house became the product that the economic rise of many countries was based on. The example of Pruitt-Igoe has been forgotten and nowadays the only difference is in form: we don’t build blocks any more, but low-rise developments which repeat on the horizontal the problems caused by modernist blocks’ lack of identity and referentiality. 
Starting with 2008, with the establishment of credit crisis, followed by the sovereign debt crisis, people began to acknowledge the fact that poverty exists and there is even extreme poverty, not only in the third world countries, but also in the developed countries and that there are no solutions for this problem yet. Social mass houses can’t be built in extreme poverty and this fact was emphasized by the disaster of the unsuccessful interventions starting from statistics and nancial calculations. On the contrary, practice proved that only small scale participatory interventions can be successful.
Baia Mare, Horea street, social building mainly inhabited by Romanies. 2011
International interest for social housing appeared in the last years as a result of continuous degradation of living conditions for the segment of population living in poverty in the context of a more and more acute social polarization, with the worst consequences: social segregation, marginalization, social exclusion. The
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emergence of homogeneous or discontinuous settlements in extreme poverty must generate a proper social, urban and architectural response as, for now, there is no National Operational Programme for improving living conditions for disfavoured people confronting this serious situation.
Baleti (Prahova), house built by Soros Foundation and Habitat for Humanity Romania, for a Romani family. One can see users’ preoccupation to maintain the house clean by  placing a doormat at the entrance and leaving the shoes outside. Clean and airy interior. Curtains were installed at the windows. Photography from august 2011. House inaugurated
on May 2010.
The response comes from central and local authorities who are trying to solve the problem in the normative paradigm, starting with the evaluation of the size and nature of the problem, deciding the budget and eventually handling the architect a pre-established project as far as the maximum admitted surfaces, the typology and, sometimes, even the nishings are concerned. The most serious issue that architects are confronted with is that their services are requested only after the games have already been made and the task has been received from the contracting authority. Contracting authority is the client, when, in fact, the community occupying the future designed social houses is as much a client as the former. Practically, architects operate in a “blind” system, in which the programme is dened by sociologists and economists and the real beneciary is inaccessible. The expression of architect’s knowledge, experience, sensitivity and creativity resumes only to a formal exercise, limited by a pre-established budget, designated to a beneciary dened by the average, without a real correspondent (for example, families of 2,5 members).
The only way to “escape” this system of contingencies, detrimental to the profession, is practicing a social participatory architecture that starts with the community and overturns the paradigm, providing the architect a central, creative role.
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1 Jürgen Habermas, Modernity: An Incomplete Project, essay rst
published as reading in 1980, when Habermas was awarded with Theodor W. Adorno prize in Frankfurt. It was then read in 1981 in New York and afterwards published as “Modernism versus Postmodernism” in the German journal “New German Critique”, no. 22, 1981, consulted at http://sernt55. essex.ac.uk/ar/ar936/f%20Week%206%20%20Habermas/Modernity%20%5BAn%20 Incomplete%20Project%5D.pdf
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frampton, Kenneth. Modern Architecture: A Critical History. New York: Thames&Hudson, 1996.
Habermas, Jurgen. “Modernity: An Incomplete Project.” University of Essex.  1980-1981. http://sernt55.essex.ac.uk/ar/ar936/f%20Week%206%20 %20Habermas/Modernity%20%5BAn%20Incomplete%20Project%5D.pdf (accessed November 30, 2011).
Habermas, Jürgen and Shierry Weber Nicholson. The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989.
Hamdi, Nabeel. Housing Without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement. London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995.
Smithson, Alison. Team 10 Primer. 1968. http://www.team10online.org/ (accessed December 18, 2011).
Stamm, Gunther. “Architecture of J. J. P. Oud, 1906-1963: An Exhibition of Drawings, Plans, and Photographs.” Great Buildings. 1978. http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Weissenhof_Row_Houses. html (accessed November 30, 2011).
Van Eyck, Aldo. “Projekten.” Clean Design o5. 1948. http://www. cleandesign05.co.uk/Architectural%20Solutions%20for%20Urban%20 Housing.htm (accessed December 15, 2011).
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“Houses are expensive. However, it is
more expensive not to build them.”
Bryan Bell (Bell and Wakeford 2008)
INTRODUCTION Next I will analyse the ensemble of methods specic to social participatory architecture applied in extreme poverty for the construction of social houses, as redened and conceptualized through practice. In its form presented here, the methodology is based on the structuring effort undertaken during the community building program of Soros Foundation Romania between 2009 and 2012. Briey and without going into details, the programme aimed at the strengthening of rural communities in extreme poverty, the construction of new houses, the rehabilitation of some of the existing ones, the completion the settlement’s functional matrix with the missing functions in the territory (usually services) and the insurance the sustainability of the projects. In 2009 and 2012, the programme was unfolded by Soros Foundation Romania (SFR) in partnership with Habitat for Humanity Romania, in Bleti (Prahova) and in Vântori (Neam). In 2011 and 2012 the project was completely undertaken by SFR and is carried on in Sruleti and Dor Mrunt, both in Clrai county.
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For the presentation of the methodology I will appeal to examples from the ongoing program, therefore the stated concepts will have a correspondent in the real situation. Although the subject of the study is social participatory architecture, we have to cope with a program that includes several subjects, as we shall see next. For this reason, I will also state very briey the other components of the program to allow the reader to envisage a complete image for placing, while keeping it in the right proportions, the participatory architecture.
 photos during a participatory meeting in Sruleti, jud. Calrai, from 31 August 2011
The scheme of relation system within the framework of community
building
Community building represents a recent concept promoted in participatory architecture by Nabeel Hamdi. It refers to building a systemic frame of social and production relationships at community level able to support the community, of which the relationship with the built space occupies a central place (Hamdi London). In other words, in order to replace the existing extreme poverty housing with the desired housing corresponding to the stability, aesthetics and comfort standards, it is necessary to place this objective in a system of mutual supporting objectives which converge to
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sustainability. Community building integrates housing, employment, health, hygiene, education and culture elds. Employment supports housing just as housing can credit with employment.
During this period, I have permanently up-dated the initial methodology to the actual situation and I have integrated the feedback of the three years practice. Denitely, this methodology represents a stage, a partial conclusion, offering a exible frame for organising and structuring the intervention, a methodology which is required to be adapted to every concrete situation on the site and to be modied and be completed according to new data, situations, groups of beneciaries, legislative or any other kind of changes.
The role of methodology seen, as I mentioned, as analysis of program-specic methods ensemble, is to supply the necessary minimum instruments and to structure the intervention issues of all entities interested in the ongoing of such a programme, NGOs or governmental agencies. This is necessary because the premises for the development of a social houses construction programme, most denitely, change in relation to the traditional structure of such a programme.
Giancarlo De Carlo dened the development of most investment projects thus (Hatch 1984, 3):
 No. Action Responsible
3 Financing
7 Use Users
9 Recycling
10 Elimination and replacing
In relation with this “traditional” structure, in the case of social houses in extreme poverty construction programme, the participatory process implies both the user and the architect in establishing the function, selection of the site, actual construction etc. Therefore, De Carlo’s table changes accordingly:
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25
2 Selection of the site Owner + architect + user
3 Financing Owner +user
5 Form and structure Architect + user
6 Supervision of the con- struction
Architect + user
10 Elimination and replacing Owner + user
We see therefore, that the architect’s role, far from being diminished, becomes more important and covers more steps in the construction “life span” than in the traditional system, yet this depends a lot on the level of participation of the beneciaries that the architect (or the expert) would like to have and to trigger. The best representation of the level of participation is the “Participation scale” model stated for the rst time by Sherry Arnstein in 1969. (Arnstein 1969)
Participation scale, according to Sherry Arnstein
The scheme of participation scale, taken from the document consulted, shows the different levels of participation. From the bottom upwards, this can “climb” from non-participation to the power delegated to the citizen, crossing through manipulation, therapy, information, consulting, reconciliation, partnership,
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delegate power, civic control.1  Along with the birth and the theoretical outline of the participatory speech, starting with 1960s, this started to migrate from the public sphere of non- governmental organisations to that of public authorities, their ofcial speech becoming present, sometimes grounded, other times only to mask undemocratic decisions. For example, the recent case of shifting the gypsies from Baia Mare was instrumented by the local authority by appealing to a language in which the words “partnership”, “consulting”, “delegation” had a central role, while the actions behind these words were, in fact, pressure, summons, threats and inuence.
Real participation, in Dor Mrunt, Clrai County – UAUIM students, members of Arhipera.
21.09.2011
The border between the participation steps is vague and its achievement depends a lot on the intention and the skill of the social architect who implements the community building project. Sometimes, aiming at a certain result that he considers good for the community, he can reduce the real level of participation to tokenism. He consults the community, creates the appearance of integrating the feedback, but, in reality, he materialises his own predetermined ideas. This was what De Carlo was criticised for, justied or not, in the case of the project in Terni. One of the purposes of this methodology is to present the instruments through which a real participation can be reached in the framework of a participatory architecture project.
GENERATING A COMMUNITY BUILDING PROGRAMME. “A social programme is dened as a set of activities or projects
oriented towards an objective/group of objectives, in which the
human, material and nancial resources are coherently organised
to produce goods/servicies or environmental changes, as answer to
certain needs.” (Istrate 2004)
Any intervention on the dwelling, on this level, needs an implementation programme, which we shall dene next, through aim,
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27
 
objectives, principles and actions. This programme is both reactive and proactive. It is reactive as it tries to respond to a clear, identiable and quantiable need, namely the need to dwell. It is proactive as it suggests an approach starting from the positive characteristics identied in the community and from the abilities of the groups of users, it dwells on consolidating all these traits and, nally, it militates for an architecture of public interest in Romania.
The project for increasing the quality of the built environment, achieved by means of social participatory architecture, is a part of the community building programme which reunites and integrates many projects in synergy, according to the particularity of each programme. A participatory architecture project can be developed only in conjunction with a social economy project, which is capable to support the community in both the construction and the house maintenance effort; with a project of social assistance focused on community development, that includes education for children and adults, professional training, access to health support; with a project of networks extension in the site; with a project of clarifying the legal situation of the land and the houses.
images from the construction site at one of the houses in Dor Mrunt. Supervision of the
site by the members of Arhipera, who made a participatory design of the house. January and May 2012.
PURPOSE The purpose of the programme is to improve the living conditions in the communities affected by extreme poverty and to create a model of intervention nationally applicable, able to create an architecture of public interest in Romania. The integrated intervention on dwelling in the studied communities, namely that type of intervention which refers to dwelling as an entity indissolubly linked to both the urban space and the urban life, supported by actions which refer to the increase of self-supporting potential of social actors envolved (employment) and their access to basic services (health, education, culture), can involve fundamental changes at the level of the users’ way of life, on a long term. The
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projective change of the relations of production in the area (the users will self-support at the end of the strategy application) generated by the application of the intervention programmes, will allow the proper use of the material base created, namely of the initial capital represented by a house. These changes are necessary not only in view of the post-utilization of the house, but mainly with a view to reaching the social aim desired: social integration and elimination of segregation.
OBJECTIVES Initially, the programme’s objectives referred only to the changes foreseen at the dwelling level, but, as we consider more thoroughly the causes that generated the precariousness of the sheltering (since we cannot dene it as dwelling), I went the causative way backwards, passing through extreme poverty, unemployment, spatial and social segregation and arriving to social exclusion as primordial factor that generates the existing situation in the community. Thus, the programme’s objectives were “translated” in a way that architecture had to nd the correspondent and the equivalent in other elds of social life: access to a dwelling according to norms and legislation can be achieved only if the family has a proper level of employment and education; the correct location of the house depends on the negotiation with the local administration for good quality land within the built-up area; the dwelling expression and its spatial-volumetric conformation is generated by the dwelling tradition and the local cultural identity of the community.
Built environment in Sruleti and Dâlga (Dor Mrunt), Clrai county, 2011
The programme’s objectives became: -social inclusion -development of the communities capacity, autonomy -spatial justice, eradication of ghettos from the communities -creation of social infrastructure and of operational social services -creation of architecture of public interest in Romania
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING
29
 
THE PRINCIPLES OF COMMUNITY BUILDING Since the beginning, but mainly during the programme, some essential principles of intervention decanted themselves and inuenced the choice of the set of methods. These comprise the principles magistrally stated by Ctlin Berescu and Mariana Celac in the rst far-reaching work dedicated to dwelling and extreme poverty in Romania (Berescu and Celac 2006, 96-99), shifting the accent from norm to practical method. It is about democracy and human rights ruled principles, about social, economic and urbanistic principles, applied “on the spot”, that proved useful in reaching the aim of the programme. We will not present them in categories, since a principle, although belonging to urbanism, has repercussions on the social eld, and a democratic principle guarantees the urban action. We will focus next on listing them in a concise manner, mentioning that this enumeration is not exhaustive, as it is generated strictly by our theoretical experience and work on the site. The subsequent or similar experiences developed by other organisations cam complete this list. These principles integrate the corollaries of social participatory architecture stated in the chapter on the denition of paradigm, adapting them to the actual situation on the site.
 bottom-up intervention Generally, in Romania, the interventions at the level of the urban tissue are realised bottom-up. General Urbanistic Plans (GUP) and Zonal Urbanistic Plans (ZUP) are drawn by urbanism ofces, at the General board’s or local authority’ request. These are not submitted to the inhabitant’s analysis. It would not even be possible in the present form of drafting and codication of the information. For this reason, the whole process lacks in transparency at the level of the inhabitant, affected by the decisions made at “higher” level. Some top-to-bottom interventions, though animated by good intentions, ended up by becoming hateful and failed to reach their aim. Decisions to move the inhabitants in extreme poverty to collective houses, for example, made without consulting them, faced the inhabitant’s resistance as they wanted to continue living in old settlement, no matter how wretched or how justied the decision of moving. On the contrary, an action that starts from the bottom, from the citizen, involving him in making the decision from the rst steps of urban and architectural design will be seen as a positive action and its result will be appreciated by the beneciaries, who will recognise themselves in this result. Certainly, such approach will consume more resources, requesting actions of community consolidation, work with the community, yet this is far from being a drawback; on the contrary, a consolidated community will have a higher capacity to support the intervention and to continue its results through its own forces.
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Comparative scheme between the top-to-bottom model (left) and the bottom-up model (right). One can see the higher contribution of architecture and its proximity to the
decisional level in the case of the bottom-up model.
social participatory architecture The rst consequence of the principle of the bottom-up intervention is participatory design. The fundamental decisions referring to dwelling must belong to the community who participate in the programme on the highest step of the participation ladder, that is civil control. There are many denitions for design that operates with different decisions depending on the application (interior design, clothes design, industrial design). It is precisely because of this diversity that it is necessary to impose a denition for the present paperwork, namely the one of Herbert Simon “design represents the change of an existing reality into a desired reality ”. Thus conceptualised, the design starts from revealing both the existing and the desired reality, and this is not as handy as it seems at rst sight. First of all, we have to cope with a community, not with an individual. From the start, the procedure for collecting data are more complex and operate with other indicators. Then, as I stated in the introductory chapter, both the variables of existing reality and the variable of desired reality uctuate in an ample manner in short intervals of time, whereas such an intervention programme develops over a medium or long term. To this respect, the permanent up-dating of the programme’s elements, by monitoring and integrating the feed- back, is a sine qua non condition for adapting it to the reality. Otherwise we shall face blocking out for failing to be adequate.
intervention for social inclusion and spatial justice The concept of spacial justice, introduced in 1968 by Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville 1968), (Lefebvre, Espace et politique 1972), refers to space as a fundamental factor of social structure, in relation with social justice. Spatial justice is a democratic instrument that regulates, when applied, tha fair distribution of services, of production facilities, of utilities in the territory, so that there are no disparities at the level of
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING
31
 
individuals and groups of individuals that populates the respective territory. Generally, the settlements in extreme poverty are situated at the outskirts of a city or of a village, or else occupy determined enclaves situated inside the city or village. It will be taken into consideration building the new houses in areas of interference between the settlement and the city/village, in order to favour social exchanges and inclusion. During the programme, I have noticed that some representatives of the local authorities tend to allot sites for building new houses outside the cities, or in industrial or polluted areas, lacking infrastructure. Building a house represents an investment that must represent an initial capital for the beneciary. Or, if the site does not have real estate value, than the house, even if new and well built, will have an adequate low real estate value, the house will be “un-saleable” and the initial capital will be as inexistent, the only value of the house being that of shelter.
Left,spatial injustice by location, at Fakulteta, Soa. Right, spatial injustice by
limitating the fundamental right at free circulation. Milano, Italia.
A very difcult approach is questioning the current situation, when a vulnerable community is deprived of spatial justice, and the majority of people think that this is the right and necessary way, without taking into account that it was precisely the spatial injustice and social exclusion that led to community degradation.
Campo nomado Chiesa Rosa, Milano, for bosniac Romanis. 3 metres fence, electric
instalation for lighting as nocturne.
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“more for many” The intervention is intended to involve as many members of the community as possible, in different ways. An action focused only on a few beneciaries will not mobilize the community and will arouse animosity. That’s why the selection of the families to involve in the programme is very important, and this selection, as well as the needs to be satised for each family, must be done in a democratic manner by the entire community, through efcient delegation of decision to the community 2. Also, in order to involve a larger segment of beneciaries, it is desirable that along building new houses, rehabilitation work on the existing ones be done, too, rehabilitation requiring a lower budget than building anew. The works of rehabilitation can refer to emergency interventions on houses or constructive elements in danger of collapse (consolidation of walls, replacing ceilings made of earth), replacing covers or equipping the house with functions adequated for disabled users (bathrooms, access platforms). In this way, a signicant part of the community will take part in the change from the very beginning of the programme.
Arhipera members, working at the initial model of an evolutionary house.
The initial model of an evolutionary house, on the site. The budget of the programme  provided the building of 2 such houses, with 4 rooms, for each community in the programme.
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING
33
 
After the proposal of the communities to introduce 4 families into the programme, the
house was redesigned by reducing the building volume by means of a bay. Thus, 4 such houses could be built in every community. To the right, a house where the transformations done by the family during the site work can be seen.
the best balance between the necessary locative surface and the level of nishing-equipping (cf. Turner) This principle represent to a large extent a truism, as long as the architecture manifests itself in the “traditional” area. In the participatory area, the nishing and even the conformation of the house is the result of negotiation with a family that takes into account a possible enlargement of the family members number in the near future, who needs certain things more that others. Generally, we highlighted this optimum balance when the house is equipped with additional protection for bad weather (including an extended roof that can cope with an enlargement of the built area of the house) and with a minimum interior nishing that can be purchased/ manufactured by the family itself.
continuity of dwelling and evolutive dwelling
We will try to ensure the continuity of dwelling on the site. In the case of building new houses, the beneciary families prefer to remain in the community, where mutual help and social extended relationships work. Through practice, we reached at the same conclusion stated by Turner referring to the benets of a slum upgrade as opposed to moving to a new location, for example.
(Hamdi London, 121)
 
When consolidations are made, it is important that the family stays in the house during the intervention. This thing favours the implication of the family members in the building or rehabilitation work. Each stage of the building process is visible. The family is not exposed to the stress involved by moving, and this is a very important factor to be taken into consideration, with both psychological and economic repercussions on the family as long as we are talking about a house in the rural environment that represent the nucleus of the household. That is why moving the people and the goods will be avoided as much as possible. At the same time, the feedback received in real time from the families is capitalized in the different evolution of every architectural typology; each house becomes the expression of the transformations during the experience, in the way stated by Habraken, totally appropriating it to the use.
For rehabilitated houses, we found solutions for coating walls, for thermo-isolating the facades, for replacing the exterior carpentry, even for replacing the roof without the need for the residents to leave the house.
In the case of newly designed houses, they were placed on the same allotment (when there was already a house on the leased site) or on allotments leased by the mayoralty. During the 4 years of the programme, we encountered only one situation when the asigned family wanted to leave the community area and this was due to the fact that the mother wanted to raise her children in an environment protected against the juvenile crime that characterizes a community in extreme poverty.
Houses in Bleti (Prahova county) that had the roof replaced without moving the
family. 2010
The buildings designed starting with 2011 in the framework of the community building programme, whether houses or social centres, were designed to adapt to growing familial or communitary needs as, along with the modication of the family structure or the raise of the communitary usage level, they would not be abandoned in favour
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING
35
 
of some bigger ones. The houses were provided with an extension of the roof surface with one bay in respect to the compartmented space. The enlargement of the built area of the house can be made by the family itself starting from the existing structure that supports the roof. The effort as materials and labor is minimum and affordable for the family.
On the left, evolutive house in Sruleti. On the right, evolutive house in Dor Mrunt.
Design Arhipera 2011.
The social centres are built as pavilions, therefore new pavilions can be added in the growing matrix provided by the project. In this manner, both the investment and the building effort of the family/ community decrease, and the investment becomes sustainable.
On the left, social evolutive centre Sruleti. On the right, social evolutive centre
Dor Mrunt. Design Arhipera 2011.
the principle of sustainability The sustainability of the intervention can be reached through:   -usage of local and recycled materials. Thus, the repairs will not require investment.
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Generally, in the communities affected by extreme poverty, the buildings widely use reused materials. In Podenii Noi (Prahova), we discovered a local craft in using this
materiales, though. The two buildings above prove a well controlled craft and even an
aesthetic value of the facades.
-usage of local workforce and technologies. In some communities, though there is valuable raw material, it is neglected by the locals, and skill of processing it was lost. In this situation, the qualication of the locals is necessary so that they can have access to the resource, both for dwelling needs and for supporting activities of social economy able to provide a constant income to the community. -the minimum investment that ensures the maximum effect will be made. For this reason, every case will be considered separately.
the principle of the visibility of the intervention and the immediate result The programme’s debut in the community is one of the most difcult stages of implementation because of the people’s and the local authority’s inertia, of their tendency to indulge themselves in a bad situation(extreme poverty), a situation they know and for whom the necessary adjustments(the subsistence economy) developed in time. The greatest challenge, though it may seem bombastic, is creating hope. That is, according to the denition of Paulo Fiere, “a more and more critical perception of the concrete conditions of the reality. Society reveals itself as something unnished,
rather than something inexorable; in becomes challenge, instead of
resignation” (Fiere 2005). Often, the hope is mufed by informal leaders, usurers, pimps and sometimes, even mayors, who try by all means to maintain the status-quo, knowing that a change for the better, a community consolidation, can generate the change of the existing balance of power, in which a few people gain from the more emphasized poverty of the many. That is why the visibility of the intervention is one of the strongest engines of community consolidation. The delay of a programme usually implies its abandon by the community.
the principle of involving the locals into the production and post-production processes
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This principle is extremely important both in terms of the direct result of reducing the cost of the investment by using local workforce, and in terms of the long-term effect that it ensures taht: not only the utilities able to serve the dwelling, but also the qualied staff able to use them remain on the site.
This desideratum can be reached only through a coherent investment policy that must follow some necessary steps, as: - hiring the adult and unemployed locals as unqualied, for starters, workforce; - bringing to the site the engineers, the foremen, the technicians and the workers able to instruct and to qualify unqualied workers; - organizing training courses for qualifying the locals; - creating some structures of social economy for production of construction materials (quarry, gravel, sand, clay), brick kilns, carpentry workshops etc. whose staff will be ensured by the locals involved in the programme, under qualication; - as the programme develops, qualication level of the staff increases. Consequently, the remuneration and the capacity to support the newly built houses increases; - at the end of the programme, those productive functions will remain in the site, will serve the whole settlement and will facilitate changes between gypsies and the majority of the people of the settlement; - besides those functions, at the end of the programme, the area will be inhabited by a productive segment of population, able to provide qualied work both inside the settlement and in the adjacent areas and thus the premises of the user’s capacity to support their houses are created.
the principle of self-nancing During the development of the programme in Bleti, we noticed that along with the appearance of the new houses, the members of the community who hadn’t been involved in the project started to save money and consolidate/ arrange their houses, using qualied workforce and the know-how of the constructors brought for building. A similar phenomenon took place in Sruleti and Dor Mrunt, where, even if the project’s budget stipulated that the concrete oor of the rst level would be used only for 2 bays, all the beneciaries managed to supplement, on their own, the concrete oor for 3 bays, according to the designed area of the roof, increasing considerably their chances to partition and use the third bay as the third room of the house.
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Even if the contract with the entrepreneur provided pouring of only approx. 40sqm of the
concrete oor, the beneciaries of the houses counterbalanced the supplement of 20sqm
with labor for digging in limited areas for the foundations and for the preparation and the pouring of the concrete. Photos from Sruleti and Dor Mrunt, April and May 2012.
the principle of complementarity We will propose, after the analysis, to ll in the functional matrix of the settlement with functions placed in the studied area according to the following basic principles:
1. the principle of differentiation: the new functions will differ from the ones existing in the administrative territory of the settlement, capable of serving the area of intervention. The functions will complement the existing functions in the territory only when, after the analysis, the existing ones prove to be insufcient or poorly reported to the area; 2. the principle of relationship: the new functions must be necessary not only to the community, but to the whole settlement, so that they create the premises for productive trade between community and settlement. New functions should be attractive and competitive for the whole community.
New functions that are going to be brought will be adopted exclusively by members of the community, also involving a continuous process of formation and qualication (which will start with the development of the investment programmes) and a process of self-nancing.
In the images below one can see the proposal for the completion of the existing functional matrix in Bleti at the beginning of the programme. Thus, new functions appear in the area of intervention, such as Ursria, a social centre (represented by an orange ellipse), service areas (yellow rectangles), and also an area for worship, given the great distance from the rural church and the vicar’s strong disinterest in the fate of the Romani community.
AN INTRODUCTION TO PARTICIPATORY ARCHITECTURE
39
 
ACTIONS. The methodology of the intervention will focus on two axis starting from the objectives.
The rst axis contains the ve stages of constitution of economic capital: research, analysis, design, implementation, scaling the model. The second axis ( the order of enunciation does not reect the hierarchy for the two axis, these are of equivalent value and inseparable, it is only an effort of taxonomy) contains the ve stages of constitution of social capital, of community development through the project: preparating the community, community consolidation, implementation of the Community Action Plan (CAP), sustaining and development of the project, its extension in the territory. There is a horizontal sinergy and synchronisation between the ve stages of the rst axis and the second axis respectively. That is why we shall structure them according to the table on the right.
Structuring the methodology horizontally, by applying the criteria of differentiation of the objectives of the intervention (capital vs. social) and vertically (enumerating the compulsory steps for reaching the goals) gives the advantage of coordinating the actions.
The complexity of the integrated intervention model needs performance management programme, as well as organizing the internal processes in order to be able to correlate the activities on all the axis in the scheduled intervals. For this purpose, the department for Community building was created in the Soros Foundation Romania in 2012, and its role is to develop an integrated programme which runs according to the structure described above. This department coordinates the activities of social participatory architecture programme Arhipera, social economy programme Rures, education and culture programme A.C.T., as well as social assistance programme.
The model of community building department can be exported to possible County Ofces of community building, as these structures could be created by means of European funds under The Prefecture of every county.
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ACTIONS
2
lated issues Allotment
Local Initia- tive Group
Financ- ing
Social economy
Action Plan Transforming the LIG into an associa-
tion Decisions of action of the association in order to reach social and economic
goals
4
Produc- tion and sale
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING
41
 
EDUCATION. In this paperwork I have referred to the activity of participatory architecture group Arhipera, mainly consisting of students of UAUIM and architects that graduated this institute. The group’s activity is based on volunteering, and there’s a great and diversied demand for design. The group activates in the homonymous programme of Soros Foundation Romania, coordinated by the author of this paperwork.
I have founded this group in Soros Foundation Romania in 2011, trying to answer the following question: ”What if community
building programme really turns into public politics, then who will
 practice participatory architecture in communities? Will there be
architects aware of the enormous social value of architecture,
capable of working pro-bono in communities? And if there are, will
they know what methods to apply so that the result be positive and
sustainable?”
On March 2011 I invited four of my best students of UAUIM to found this group. That’s how Arhipera_architecture on edge_ was born, a group of architecture for vulnerable groups. Nowadays, the group consists of 17 members, is developing 8 big projects, at home and abroad (Uganda) and takes part in national and international conferences and symposiums.
Arhipera members during a class of housing design using only recycled/reused materials.
April 5th 2012.
 
The adopted educational model aims at sustaining the transformations of mainstream architecture (I named so the current architectural practice starting from the demand of a client or local authority) in order to be able to cover participatory architecture’s purpose, shown in the following scheme.
It may seem at rst sight that mainstream architecture loses a part of its means of expression gained especially by means of technological progress and investment budgets, but in fact it earns in extent, in practicability, in experiencing with reduced means and in direct dialogue with community members.
A similar educational model has been applied by the Faculty of Architecture of Auburn University in partnership with Rural Studio group, since 1992. Students make participatory design and then build houses, social centres, churches and sport facilities for vulnerable groups in the area. At the end of the activity, the construction is donated to the family or the community, by case, and the students gain practical experience, which is extremely important for their future profession.
ADVOCACY Community building Department of Soros Foundation Romania ghts for an architecture of public interest in Romania, many directions being involved:
1. introducing social architect qualications in COR system and creating operational standards for the profession; 2. equalization of volunteer practice of newly graduate social architects with internship, involving the modication of HCN nt. 746/ 2009 of Order of Architects of Romania;
THE METHODOLOGY OF COMMUNITY BUILDING
43
 
3. introducing social architecture projects in the university syllabus for universities of architecture and urbanism; 4. founding county ofces for Community building to take over the model of project management and internal organization developed in Soros Foundation Romania. Results of applying the model are veried in practice. 5. leading public politics in housing domain for vulnerable groups in the direction of participation and preventing the risk of actions that cause social exclusion, solving quantitatively the housing problem.
NOTES
1
Tokenism is referring to mimicry the participation, to maintaining it at a simply formal and committed level. (n.a.)
2
In 2009-2010, the community building programme of Soros Foundation Romania developed in partnership with Habitat for Humanity Romania (HfH). In the communities in Bleti (Prahova) and Vântori (Neam), the selection of the families to benet of dwelling was done by HfH according to the internal methodology. The selection decision is still disputed inside the communities because of the lack of transparency of the decisional process.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation.” JAIP , 35, no.4, 1969: 216-224.
Bell, Bryan and Katie Wakeford. Expanding Architecture. Design as
Activism. New York: Metropolil Books, 2008. Berescu, Ctlin and Mariana Celac. Housing and the Extreme Poverty. The
Case of Roma Communities. Bucharest: Ion Mincu University Press, 2006.
Fiere, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005.
Hamdi, Nabeel. The Placemaker’s Guide to Building Community. 2011: Earthscan, London.
Hatch, Richard C. The Scope of Social Architecture. New York: Van Nostrand, 1984.
Istrate, Ion. “Comuniti în Micare: Programe i intervenii sociale.” Fondul Naional pentru Dezvoltare Comunitar. 14 January 2004. http://www.fndc.ro/comunitate/evaluarea_programelor_sociale. html.
Lefebvre, Henri. Espace et Politique. Paris: Anthropos, 1972.  —. Le Droit à la Ville. Paris: Anthropos, 1968.
Lorin Niculae
45
architecture in Del and Helsinki, and literary wring
in Amsterdam. As an architect and cric, she has been
involved in a number of harbour redevelopment
projects in Amsterdam, The Hague, Helsinki and
Tallinn. Havik writes regularly for various magazines
in the Netherlands and Nordic countries and is editor
of the Dutch-Belgian peer reviewed architecture
 journal OASE . Her architectural and wrien work
combines an experienal reading of the city with
an academic and theorecal approach. At Del
University of Technology, she teaches the master
diploma’s studio Public Realm and Border Condions
alongside courses in architectural theory and
literature. She co-edited the anthology Architectural
Posions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public
Sphere, SUN Publishers 2009. Her PhD research Urban
Literacy. A Scripve Approach to the Experience,
Use and Imaginaon of Place (TU Del, 2012)
developed a literary approach to architecture and
urban regeneraon, proposing the three noons
descripon, transcripon and prescripon.
TRANSCRIPTIONS
 
This lecture addresses the social dimension of architecture and stresses the gap between the design of urban spaces and their use. It argues that the interactivity between writer and reader in literature, in the sense that the reader co-produces the text, also counts for the designer and the user (or perceiver) of architectural space. I propose the notion Transcription as an approach connecting this interactivity to the role of activities, movements and events in the experience and the making of urban space.
TRANSCRIPTION: THE SOCIAL AND EXPERIMENTAL IN LITERARY AND ARCHITECTURAL SPACES1
I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep- rooted; places that might be points of reference of departure, of origin [...] Such places don’t exist, and it’s because they don’t exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self-evident... Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it. (Perec 2008, 91)
As the French-Polish writer Georges Perec suggests, the relationship between architecture and the activities of the people who use and inhabit it is not neutral. This paper departs from the observation
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that architecture is inuenced by social practices and that even so, architecture, by giving shape to people’s environment, has its inuence on social behaviour. The dynamic relationship between people and places is the key focus of this text, and I introduce transcription as a conceptual tool to address this interactivity. The word Transcription implies a directional way of writing: “trans” is the Latin preposition “across” or “through”. The etymological dictionary notes: “to write across, i.e. to transfer in writing.” (Partridge 1983)2 The directional and experimental character that the word transcription implies, is crucial in that transcription can be understood as a dynamic notion.   First, aspects of movement and activity in literary writings are closely connected to the spaces in which they take place, and often point at social practices; offering information about the way people move through, use and appropriate space. In literary works, spatial metaphors often have to do with direction and movement. Indeed, in writing about spaces, the aspect of action implied by the space: a passage, a pathway, a threshold, a door, an opening to another space, can play a part in the narrative. Space can encourage characters to move, pass through, undertake action. In literary reections about changes in society, architectural and urban scenes not only serve as the decor against which narratives of activity can unfold, these scenes also play an important part in depicting social practices. As Marilyn Chandler argues, our built environment and the way we live in it “has a good deal to do with the way we tell our stories[...] both architecture and literature are simultaneously reective and formative social forces. In both, implicit issues of gender and class lie behind the politics of style” (Chandler 1991, 6). Indeed, literature both reects the social codes and the use of the city, while it may also take part in its process of change. Literary texts on how people behave in the city shine a light on power relations in society, showing how the social codes of different user groups relate to specic urban places. In their own ways, both architecture and literature represent, reect on and produce societal behaviour. Therefore, literary urban portraits are of interest for sociologists, cultural philosophers and others concerned with social and spatial practices. A second aspect of transcription has to do with its potential as an experimental practice: it searches the boundaries of the discipline by “writing through”. Literary examples are the experimental practices of the literary movement Oulipo, or the “spatial” literature of James Joyce. These authors experiment within the use of language, or within the production of text, but also experiment regarding the structure of the novel, and its content. They explore the possibility for confrontations and conicts, openings to include the unexpected. In these writings space, even the space of the novel itself, is constantly questioned, designated, marked or conquered. Here, issues of transgression and violation within the space of literature are at stake. Third, the
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commonly used meaning of transcription is “to write a version of something”, or “to write in a different medium; transliterate”.3  When looking for direct transcriptions into other media, the transcriptions of literary scenes in lm or theatre are probably most common. Writing another version of a text, however, can also happen within literature itself, namely through the reader, who can take on the role of an active participant. Indeed, one can speak of the interactivity between writer and reader as producers of the text. If transcribing indeed implies an active role of the reader as a producer, a maker of the text, architectural transcription might direct us to a similar role for the user of space.
NARRATIVES AND SOCIAL PRACTICE. Thus, in literature, space is never neutral: it is the stage for social activities. Therefore, literature has the capacity to offer precise accounts of social processes, not only as vivid portraits of urban life, but also as “symptomatology” of social illness, to speak with Deleuze4. Literature can provide a cure in the sense that it can offer alternatives, new directions for society. The eld of tension between the reader and writer (or the designer and user) of a work come to the fore as important issue: the reader, by his very act of reading, has a role in the production of the text. Likewise, the role of the user of architecture can be brought into play when addressing the social dimensions of architecture. In the continuation of this text, I will bring to the fore how these aspects of transcription can be “transcribed” to architecture. One of the key arguments that Henri Lefebvre made in his conceptualization of lived space was indeed that such space is by denition socially produced. Like the reader, who has a role in producing the (experience of) the text, it is the user, the inhabitant, the passer-by, who has a role in producing the lived experience of space. In other words, lived space exists precisely through the actions of its users, inhabitants and passers-by, it is dynamic and subject to change. It has ability to speak, as it were, to address the visitor, user or inhabitant: “Representational space [lived space] is alive: it speaks.” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space 1991, 42)
For Lefebvre, society produces its own space, through its own means of production. Social practices and structures of power thus play a role in this production of social space, and become visible in the streets and public spaces of everyday life. By analysing the behaviour of people in public urban spaces, social patterns can be found. In this way, Lefebvre argues, “[...] social space works as a tool for the analysis of society” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space 1991, 33-34), or even, “space is social morphology” (Lefebvre, The Production of Space 1991, 94). In his earlier book The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre focuses specically on urban society, claiming that the city is inextricably linked with social
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practices of everyday life (Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution 2003). His hypothesis is that society will become completely urbanized. He believes that the transformations he perceives in the society of Western Europe in the late 1960s will lead to an ultimately urban society: a dominance of the city over the country. This urban society will lead to a new practice: the urban practice (Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution 2003, 5). By this, he hints at a new mode of production: the citizen participating in the production of space. This production can also entail transgression of spatial and legal borders, as well as spatial violation, by means of which new rules, new spaces and new forms of social life are initiated. Here, Lefebvre foresees a change in power structures: it is not the institutions, the formal bodies of power, that write the laws and rules of society; rather, urban society is produced by people, in the streets. The street is seen by Lefebvre as the place where changes in society become apparent, society becomes produced and “inscribed” in the streets, and this has to do with the function of the street as a space for social interaction:
“Revolutionary events generally take place in the street[...] . The urban space of the street is a space for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and signs as it is for the exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place where speech becomes ‘savage’, and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribes itself on the walls.” (Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution 2003, 19)
Clearly, this interest in the streets as the place where societal changes are enforced by citizens, derived from the momentum in which Lefebvre’s argument should be placed: The Urban Revolution
was published in France two years after the social events in Paris of 1968, when indeed the streets were the locus for social and political change. The “Right to the City” that Lefebvre advocates (Lefebvre, Right to the City 2006) may be read as the right to the participant to transcribe – and thereby to produce new urban practices.
Similarly, Jane Jacobs referred to the power of the citizens in her critical comments on urban planning and economy in the 1960s and 1970s.5 She pointed out the importance of diversity in city life and stated that planners and politicians should pay more attention to everyday practices that give shape to public life in the city, because: “The bureaucratized, simplied cities so dear to our present-day city planners and urban designers[...] run counter to the processes of city growth and economic development.” (Jacobs, The Economy of Cities 1972, 97)
Even though their contributions to the urban debate date from a specic period, their insights are far from outdated. Referring to both Henri Lefebvre and Jane Jacobs, the contemporary urban
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theorist Edward Soja argues that they were right: the twenty-rst century has indeed become the era of urban society, and therefore it is necessary to acknowledge and study the productive capacity of users. (Soja 1999)
In this respect, a reection on the work of Michel de Certeau is appropriate. This French theorist in social sciences and literature has proposed a shift in thinking about everydayness: seeing everyday practices as valuable aspects of culture. Like Lefebvre, De Certeau is interested in the role of users, or consumers, the word De Certeau employs for the “dominated” groups (Certeau 1988, xi), in the production of culture. First, he makes a distinction between the “strategies” that those in power develop in order to organize and dominate society, and “tactics”, the ways of operating of the dominated groups. Such tactics can “use, manipulate, and divert” (Certeau 1988, 30) the spaces that are produced and imposed by means of strategies. Everyday practices such as talking, reading, cooking and walking are, in his view, tactical. De Certeau argues that such practices have a much larger role in the production of society than is generally accounted for. It is through walking in the city, through the repetition of routes and rituals, through daily meetings, chats with neighbours or shop owners, that inhabitants live and produce the urban life:
“The ordinary practitioners of the city[...] walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers[...] whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it[...] . The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indenitely other [...] a migrational or metaphorical city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.” (Certeau 1988, 93)
De Certeau sets this urban life, generated by the patterns of its praxis, against the conceptual city as seen from above. As a model for the rational ‘Concept-City’, imposed by the ones in power, visible from above, De Certeau uses the view of Manhattan seen from the top of the former towers of the World Trade Centre. In contrast to that bird’s-eye view, De Certeau points at the city as experienced from below: a complex and barely visible conglomeration of the patterns of its users, full of turns, rituals and narratives. He recognizes in this city a different kind of spatiality, which is not a geometrical, but an anthropological space in which poetic experience plays a part. Similar to the productive role of the reader in appropriating and ‘inhabiting’ a text, De Certeau argues that the consumer actually ‘produces’ through his everyday practices: “Spatial practices[...] secure the determining conditions of social life.” (Certeau 1988, 96) 
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In order to analyse this neglected aspect of