The Architects Changing Role in City-Making: A Survey of Contemporary Danish Urban Design Practice

Conference Paper Agents of Change Symposium Nordic Association for Architectual Research 20-22 April 2006 Ryan Sullivan ryan@sparkssullivan.com Center for Public Space Research

Introduction Contemporary Danish architects engaged in urban design are pioneering new roles for themselves and offering new types of services. Their offices and practices reveal that these architects are less frequently drafting masterplans of new districts and more often leading or contributing to multi-disciplinary project processes that frequently blur the boundaries between urban research, policy making and form making. This change in working method represents a significant shift from the design of a static and idealized conditionthe masterplanto the design of a dynamic and active process. It also marks a shift from the traditional, isolated role of the architect to a multidisciplinary and collaborative working method. While similar trends can be found in the United States , their presence in Denmark is unique because of their focus on the human dimension of urban environments. A better understanding of this phenomenon may inspire new directions or opportunities for architectural practice and education. Three young Danish firmsGehl Architects, MUTOPIA and RACAare on the cutting edge of this new trend. A series of office visits and interviews with each firm formed the basis of an understanding of their unique working processes. This text describes their approaches and discusses common themes in their methodologies. Observation: Gehl Architects Growing out of the environmental psychology studies of urban and housing environments completed by architect Jan Gehl over the past four decades, Gehl Architects is an urban design consultancy that creates tools for developers, architects and city authorities, enabling them to nurture life between buildings. The 25-person architectural studio was founded in 2001 by architects Jan Gehl and Helle Sholt. Because Gehl Architects approach to urban design is grounded in a desire to encourage life and activity, they approach urban design by first, researching public life and behavior, second, studying the spaces between buildings and finally, analyzing the buildings themselves. Interviews and a variety of observational techniques are used to examine the human dimension of existing conditions including recording pedestrian counts, stationary types of activities and age and
1

Several American architects, most notably the New Urbanists, have invented or adapted tools such as form-based codes, design guidelines and charrettes (public design workshops for project stakeholders) in order to create or influence urban form.

gender of users. This data is documented and communicated using diagrams and drawings. Additionally, Gehl Architects studies formal and spatial conditions, such as building scale, facade character, building uses, climate, transportation and building typologies. This approach is unique in its unusually thorough analysis of human behavior and sincere effort to study the sites buildings and spaces within the context of human experience. These analytical studies lead to a detailed description of urban life and its relationship to urban space. The firm uses the studies to inform design guidelines and policy recommendations so that city officials can work towards improving their urban environments. Two recent examples include a public life survey for the City of Melbourne, Australia and an analysis of pedestrian environments for the City of London. Gehl Architects newest tool is the public space programming concept. This service begins with the same human-centered and formal research described previously, but concludes with a conceptual organization of public programs for the spaces between buildings. In this way, the firm can offer specific recommendations as to the character, use and organization of outdoor spaces. Subsequently the space program can be used by city authorities to encourage developers and architects to design and build the spaces between their buildings cohesively. It can also help to generate discussion among project stakeholders about the public life and space in their projects. When providing this service, Gehl Architects frequently serves as a public space consultant within a larger project team often consisting of building architects, engineers, landscape architects and developers working in some capacity with city authorities and planners. Unlike many urban design firms, Gehl Architects services are primarily research based rather than design based. Their project deliverables are handbooks that communicate the research results and make recommendations based on the urban research. These products are unique because they aid in the development and evolution of urban environments, rather than dictating idealized and static urban conditions. Their work can be further differentiated from formal approaches to urban design because it considers public life and human behavior to be the most important aspect of urban environments. Open spaces and buildings play supporting roles to the human life that takes place within them. Participation: MUTOPIA Although the majority of their final project deliverables are fairly traditionalphysical designs for public spaces, parks and buildingsMUTOPIAs unconventional working method incorporates user feedback and research directly into the design process. Serban Cornea and Kristina Jordt Adsersen founded the sevenperson office in 2002 in order to explore new strategies for involving users in the design process for urban spaces and buildings.

MUTOPIA uses a series of tools to create an active, two-way dialogue between architects and users throughout the design process. Workshops with project participants are one such tool, enabling users to express their needs and desires directly to the design team. Project websites allow users to participate in discussions, learn more about project specifics and even create their own project proposals with scenario games. Using these games, the architects can gain further knowledge about the users visions and reach individuals who are unwilling or unavailable to participate in the workshop format. MUTOPIAs most unusual tool, however, is the concept of developing full-scale temporary spaces, labeled TPS (Temporary Public Spaces). Using vacant building sites, the architects can quickly construct experimental spaces and then analyze them, applying this new knowledge to future projects. Their first temporary project is Mikado, a square in rested Nord featuring a star-shaped paved area, lawns, trees, seating, a grill and basketball hoop. Evaluation and evolution of the built work is achieved, in part, by a project website that invites users to montage images of activities, plants and built elements onto a photograph of the project site; several of the suggestions will be incorporated into the project in 2006. The knowledge and insights gained from the workshops, websites and temporary public spaces are used by MUTOPIA in the design studio to help inspire design concepts and proposals. These designs are shared with the users and their feedback is recorded once again. By repeating this back-and-forth process several times throughout the design of a project, a two-way dialogue begins to develop between the architects and users. While these tools and working methods are focused on the design process, MUTOPIA is exploring strategies for incorporating user participation into their projects after they are constructed through what they call democratic plans. This idea can be found in their Lifenerve open space plan, in which five specific spaces are intended to be changed by the local residents over the years, aided by local institutions and associations. These changes could include any number of adjustments, ranging from new plantings to the introduction of new types of activities. MUTOPIAs user-centered approach offers the firm several advantages: first, user participation is a consensus-building tool that encourages support and ownership among project stakeholders; second, the insights gained through this process tighten the focus of the projects, potentially adding value and meaning to the built work; and third, this working method provides the office with a unique identity and character. Although several architects, particularly in the 1960s and 70s, actively sought to incorporate user participation into the design process, MUTOPIAs approach is significant because of their desire to develop new tools to facilitate conversation and because they are more often designing at an urban scale rather than at the building scale.

Infiltration: RACA RACAs unusual approach to urban design strives to create a dialogue with the general public by challenging everyday conceptions about the nature and character of the public realm using installations and performances. Unlike traditional architectural practices, RACAs projects are commissioned by art and design galleries requesting a response to a specific site or theme. The twoperson firm consists of collaborators Pulsk Ravn and Johan Carlsson. Although RACA does not approach each project with a predetermined methodology, two common themes can be found in their work. The first is a desire to develop a dialogue with the everyday users of a particular place. In most of their work, this dialogue connects the inhabitants of an urban place with the local municipal authorities. This dialogue is usually initiated by inserting an unusual object or service into everyday conditions. The conversation continues when users begin to interact with the objects and services. RACA gains specific insights into the users behavior by interacting with them when executing the project, observing users and, in some projects, by providing opportunities for user feedback via letters and telephone service lines. The second theme involves infiltration and impersonation. By acting as if they are municipal employees carrying out the specific details of new city initiatives, Ravn and Carlsson are able to challenge perceptions about the character of the public realm, the responsibilities of the municipality and the roles of the users. RACA also uses infiltration before implementing their projects in the public realm. They study the decision-making processes and policies of relevant municipal organizations and mimic their project process when creating their own works. For example, in Direktoriatet, a project that involved inserting and maintaining 200 pillows on outdoor public benches along two Copenhagen streets, RACA held meetings and created reports and decision-making strategies based on working methods used by Street and Park, the Copenhagen department responsible for similar initiatives. Therefore, the strategy of infiltration enables Ravn and Carlsson to explore two aspects of the urban realm: the everyday lives of city inhabitants and the bureaucratic processes that influence and maintain the urban environment. By directly engaging the users through dialogue and infiltration, RACA is able to gain insights about human behavior that are different than those captured through observation. This knowledge can then be further explored in future RACA projects or used to inform urban design plans and proposals for new city services. RACAs desire to create projects in the public realm also means that unlike traditional architectural practice, ideas are generated in the city itself, rather than in a meeting or an office.
2 3

In their Alexanderplatz project, for example, RACA inserted 100 deck chairs for public use into the center of the square. Their Direktoriatet project involved inserting and maintaining 200 pillows on public benches along Snder Boulevard and Enghavevej in Copenhagen in order to challenge traditional notions of how public space is intended for use. 3 RACAs Surface Service project provided an urban cleaning service for Liverpools Lime Street Station.

Conclusion A critical link between the three offices is that their working methods challenge the architects and urban designers traditional design process. Rather than engaging in conventional services such as concept design, masterplanning, schematic design, construction documentation and construction administration, these architects have invented their own research tools for studying urban environments and users and then found strategies for incorporating their findings into design projects, recommendations and dialogues. In this sense, they are finding new ways to influence design decisions (such as human observation and user participation) and new ways to influence urban form (design guidelines, public space programs and public dialogues). This trend represents a notable shift from designing a specific and idealized condition to designing strategies that are capable of influencing urban form based on intense urbanoriented research. At a time when architects and urban designers are particularly mesmerized by the formal qualities of buildings and cities, it is exciting to find that Denmarks youngest urban design offices are concentrating on the human dimension of urban design and architecture. For the Gehl Architects team, the strategy is to observe, record and interpret human behavior and use this information to create physical conditions that facilitate active, public life. MUTOPIA is engaging directly with the projects future users during the design process using workshops, websites and other tools. RACAs infiltration strategy brings them into direct contact with the everyday inhabitants of the city and their daily activities. Although they are all related to the human dimension of the built environment, each of these methodsobservation, participation and infiltrationprovide very different types of insights into the needs, desires and actions of urban inhabitants. Cross pollination between these three methods could yield even more comprehensive strategies for investigating the human dimension of urban environments. Unfortunately, there was less evidence of multi-disciplinary collaboration than initially expected. The office staffs are primarily composed of architects and with a few exceptions, these firms provide their services with little consultant input from other disciplines. Given the focus on behavioral aspects and user participation, it could be particularly useful to actively consult with psychologists, ethnographers or sociologists for both the research studies themselves as well as the development of research tools. Applying theories or practices from outside disciplines could lend more rigor to the specific research strategies currently used by the firms. Several contemporary industrial design firms such as IDEO and Ziba are now including ethnographers and sociologists on their staffs to assist with human centered studies. Collaboration is also extremely important with respect to the project deliverables that are intended to influence urban form. Because these products, such as the guidelines and public space programs, are used to

influence form rather than explicitly define it, a special relationship is required between the urban designers who create them and the developers, planners and authorities who use the guidelines to make concrete decisions. While both the architectural avant-garde and neo-traditionalists continue to treat cities and urban districts as if they are simply enormous building projects requiring specific, formal design solutions, the next generation of Danish urban designers understands that cities are complex and evolving and that new tools are needed to shape urban environments. These Danish designers are also keenly aware that the human dimension of the city is of vital importance to the creation of successful places. As we move into the twenty-first century, perhaps these innovative offices will begin to influence traditional approaches and inspire the development of further methods for urban design practice.

Bibliography Carlsson, Johan. Interview by Ryan Sullivan. Handwritten notes. Copenhagen, DK, 30 March 2006. Cornea, Serban. Interview by Ryan Sullivan. Handwritten notes. Copenhagen, DK, 30 March 2006. Cornea, Serban. UserCentered Design. Body and Culture: Body Culture in Urban Space Course. Center for Sports and ArchitectureRoyal Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture. Copenhagen, DK. 30 March 2006. Schulze, Oliver. Interview by Ryan Sullivan. Handwritten notes. Copenhagen, DK, 27 March 2006. Sholt, Helle. Life, Space, Buildings. The Human Dimension in Architecture, Urban Design and City Planning: An Anniversary Course. Center for Public Space ResearchThe Royal Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture. Copenhagen, DK. 22 February 2006.