Wouldn’t it be great if users of a building have extensive influence on how it is designed? Marthijn Pool from architecture office Space and Matter from Amsterdam explores different possibilities to create user specific architecture, using the interactivity of social media.
Step 1: Connecting people. A group of more than 2,000 skaters in Munich organised themselves on Facebook to promote the building of an indoor skatehall. To realise their demands you have to connect this Facebook-group to the people and organisations who can realise them (e.g. municipality, real-estate developpers). Marthijn Pool explains how this led to the idea for Dwellwell.nl, a website that uses a marketplace mechanism to connect empty buildings to potential users who organise themselves in the online world. In other words: Dwellwell connects existing needs to specific buildings.
Step 2: Creating a database of demands. Social media and online tools can be used to generate a database of thousands of people and their housing demands. The bigger the database, the easier it becomes to expose niche markets that would otherwise stay in the dark. This evidence can convince project developpers and other market players to realise these niche projects, e.g. neighbourhoods for musicians who can make music without distrurbing their non-musician-neighbours.
Step 3: User specific architecture. Space and Matter proposes WeBuild, where users choose the design and location of their own house, have a say in the design of the public space and even the type of neighbours they want to have. In order to achieve this democratic form of architecture, the website is connecting buyers, designers and developpers. Users can state their individual preferences through a questionaire. Architects upload their housing designs to the same “WeBuild”-database, where they are subject to peer review.
Video below: talk by Space and Matter office at ‘Designing the Hybrid City’
Additional notes by Michiel de Lange:
The first session ‘designing the hybrid city’ kicked off with Dutch architecture office Space and Matter. Space and Matter talked about how architects can use social media platforms as market places to link architects and people’s niche demands. Their proposed project WeBuild aims to connect users, architects, and developers, and to establish a more “democratic” architecture. People with similar preferences may collectively commission a project and contribute to the design of their habitat. Architects may use this platform as a kind of ‘AppStore’ for urban design, by offering services from which prospective buyers can choose.
WeBuild is a plea against generic design for the majority and in favor of user-based specificity. It proposes an architecture that matches with people’s heterogeneous identities. Undoubtedly then, WeBuild will lead to a more varied architectural landscape. Nevertheless, this provocative talk raises several issues. If urban living indeed becomes tailored to people’s personal needs and preferences, and clustered in collectives based on similarity, what remains of the heterogeneity of urban life? In other words, promoting heterogeneity on the scale of the city may increase homogeneity on the scale of the building block. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long heterogeneity continues to exist at the level of the neighborhood. If not, new gated communities may arise (about this tension between homogeneity versus heterogeneity, see this discussion of ‘The Big Sort’ on this website). Further, an urban design that supports the physical clustering of new collectivities may appear to oppose that typical urban phenomenon: a life of anonymity among strangers. In a way, then, this proposal to reinforce place-based local collectivity by using social media stands in a long architectural tradition of trying to alleviate urban ‘alienation’ and ‘anomy’ (¹). Furthermore, researchers of mobile media communication have pointed to an apparent inversion of the classical sociological transition of Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society). Intimate social relations like friendships and family ties become increasingly tighter, thanks to ongoing mobile communication among small circles (²). Could the same happen with physical face-to-face interactions? Of course this can never be a return proper, but entails a shift from what some have called ‘communities of fate’ to ‘communities of interest’. Another issue is the changing role of the architect. Architects may no longer be the sole purveyors of fine housing when user-generated designs will pop up. How should they redefine their professional practice? Finally, WeBuild makes one wonder about the temporal dimensions of urban design. What seems desirable now may no longer be so for future dwellers. But development projects must always take into account future sales value. To what extent can this value still reside in its generics, its attractiveness to the greatest number of people? The ‘long tail’ logics of new media (a large amount of niche products will always be found by a specific audience) may not readily apply to immovables like housing, particularly so in Europe, where people are relatively immobile when it comes to changing residency (as compared to the US). Will an urban design aimed at specificity entail a shortening of the turnover cycle of its products, and increasingly come on par with the rapid innovation cycles of digital media?
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note 1: In his Cities of tomorrow: an intellectual history of urban planning and design in the twentieth century (1988), Peter Hall views the professionalization of 20th century urban planning as a reaction to “the evils of the nineteenth-century city” (p.7).
note 2: See for instance Rich Ling’s New tech, new ties: how mobile communication is reshaping social cohesion (2008)