Utopian consciousness is in essence a critical consciousness, here oriented towards urbanisation and civilisation. In that respect this way of thinking seems particularly relevant when investigating the worldwide urbanisation process.
The challenges our physical environment faces cannot be handled by mere problem-solving or ‘curing symptoms’. As said earlier the process of urbanisation and all the effects it has on our living environment cannot be dealt with as a man-agement problem but should be considered as a cultural challenge and a ‘civilisation problem’. This implies that the emphasis should be put on the redefinition/redesign of problems appealing to creativity rather than pure rationality or (scientific) analy-sis, which is more oriented towards technical problem-solving.
Departing from this standpoint the role of design and designers should be re-assessed. The profound, multi-level and rapid changes that occur in our globalised world should urge urban planners and designers to look for renewed visions and more adequate models for sustainable, humane development of the physical envi-ronment. Moreover, the specific role and capacity of designerly thinking to enhance transformation should be critically assessed. Design or designerly thinking has the capacity to imagine and express what does not (yet) exist but could (should) be.
In that respect it is oriented towards change and has a transformative power. The way design is able to influence our world and our view of the world is not to be underestimated. Since design is not only or merely the expression of an idea but also the generator of organising ideas, designerly thinking engaged in research can develop a critical perspective on specific issues.
The two projects ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D are both concerned with cer-tain issues on the spatial level but also on the social, economic and ecological level.
They develop a critical perspective on these issues through designing.
For instance in ‘The Unadapted City’ two major themes are critically assessed.
Firstly the design(ers) state(s) that every act in space is not simply situated some-where on earth but that the area that is organised or designed is part of a greater all-embracing system. A good design, from that point of view does not, therefore, only search for coherence and dialogue with the local context but also for coherence and dialogue with the whole of the globe. In other words, the local urbanisation process has to relate itself to the global urbanisation process. This is one of the basis premises of ‘Orbanism’, an ethical-theoretical context of thinking and designing developed by T.O.P. office which underpins all their design work.
We can find an exercise in connecting the local to the global scale in ‘VIP City’ (Fig. 2), a part of ‘The Unadapted City’. At a certain point in the design process the question arose how to define the size of a suburban lot?
It could be done on the basis of the desired building typology, the intended pub-lic/buyers, the size of the allotment, the desired profit from sales, the ideal form. . .? In ‘The Unadapted City’ the idea arose that, from an orbanist approach, the size of a lot, initially, simply had to be determined by the amount of space available on earth for each inhabitant.
‘So the maximum size of a lot was fixed by the still globally available inhabitable space per human being or, in other words, it was fixed in an orbanist way. At first the total land surface, 149.664.000 km2, was divided by 6.093.888.813, the population on earth as found on the world-wide-web at that time. This gives the available land surface per capita of 2,456 ha.’ (Deleu 2002, pp. 72–73).
Apart from the undoubtedly multiple methodological objections and the relevance (de-pending on the specifics of the local context) of other criteria, this starting point is concep-tually quite clear in every way. The strength of the starting point is to be found in the way the size, in itself meaningless, of the globe, the abstract level of the whole, by means of
very rudimentary reasoning based on the principle of solidarity, suddenly appears very con-cretely as the size of the individual lot. Private living space in this way becomes embedded and integrated in universal living space and shows a feeling for scale and measurement, a feeling of connection with the whole.
The idea is interesting for relating the concrete local situation to the more abstract, global and indicates that appropriate importance has to be devoted to the link between local urbanisation and global urbanisation.
Secondly, ‘The Unadapted City’ develops spatial models that have a special focus on ‘public space’, because the key to a socially fair and more human urbanisation process lies in the opinion of the public character of space. Therefore, thinking of public space as bringing about a more social, human urbanisation process is a central concern in this project. So, important questions are: How to generate concepts for more socially shaped public spaces? How to cope with the pressure that private companies exert more and more on public space? How to create dif-ferentiated, multiple public space? ‘The Unadapted City’ searches for new dis-tinctions between diverse forms of public space and new ways of creating public places in the city by means of research by design. A design methodology is de-veloped that, starting from figures (calculations of the necessary infrastructures, facilities and living space in a city), tries to create an ensemble of spaces as di-versified as possible. The urban amenities, infrastructures, all ‘private’ spaces are spatially and formally arranged and connected to each other so that they give the public space maximal surplus value. We could say that in the most ideal case and with more socially fair urbanism in view, the research tends to place all ‘capi-tal’ at stake in the most optimal way to realise the one thing that is not on the agenda of the private investors, namely public space as a truly open and unrestricted space.
‘The Unadapted City’ tries to generate an urbanism that results in spatial and social overlapping and interweaving. To achieve this, a lot of attention is being paid to the arrangement, distribution, concentration, combination and clustering of urban amenities.
The design process that led to the conception of the FLC extended M.U.D project departed from the detection (or selection) of three phenomena that are evolving in contemporary society and that influence developments along the (Belgian) coastal area. These three phenomena were named ‘Flood’, ‘Capsular Society’ and ‘Hyper-economy’. They formed three different angles from which to look from the existing, omni-present reality to a possible, latent, present reality.
‘Flooding’ and the problem of the rising sea-level as a phenomenon was not interpreted as an issue of danger of flooding but was approached rather as the interaction between land and water and the redefinition of the border area between both. So this ‘flood problem’ was redefined as a matter of installing a ‘Future Conflict’ zone wherein the place and status of the borderline (ranging from hyper-defence to disaster management) between land and sea should be (continuously) re-negotiated.
‘Capsular Society’ refers to the phenomena in the network society where non-places are dominant and capsules are developed in an attempt to make ‘real’ places. These capsules simulate a dream, a hyper-reality where experiences are highly interiorised and efficiently organised. Capsules stand for protection, defence and control. They are a spatial translation
of exclusivity. In the ‘Future Conflict’ zone some cities develop as such worlds within worlds, capsules, tourist resorts as holiday dreams with ‘a sea view’, where one can stay for a while, safe, in an isolated, mono-functional, comfortable zone.
‘Hyper-economy’ stands for a fast-shifting, changing economy, such as, for example, currently the economy of experiences (as a further evolution of the economy based on resources), where the actual products are only of marginal importance. What is offered for consumption is the idea, the design, the experience. The product seems ever less tan-gible, ever less material, ever less tied to the land, ever more volatile. In hyper-economy the economic focus shifts from agricultural products to data-related products. Since it is no longer tied to the land, it can as well be placed on sea (unpublished text FLC extended 2005).
The ‘designerly’ inquiry into these phenomena resulted in a proposal for a deliber-ate rupture of the coastal membrane against the possibility of flooding, capsularity or hyper-economy and the inducement of a New Age, M.U.D. M.U.D displays an interactive coast with its inner loops, catastrophes and peculiarities.
A landscape is created where every place (spot) oscillates between damage con-trol, risk management and hyper-defence and where every point in space can be tuned or upgraded economically, culturally and socially. Based on these character-istics the designers defined M.U.D as the era of the hybrid.
M.U.D became, however, more than a name for a project, it developed – through design – into a frame that encompasses different phenomena and from where other proposals can be developed.
Through this design theoretical and conceptual stakes as well as ethical and methodological stakes are developed.
The two design projects ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D look upon problematic situations from a critical perspective and use ‘unconventional’ research methods. In doing so the design liberates imagination and enables the redefining/redesigning of the problem. This results in conceptual frames like M.U.D and ‘Orbanism’ that go beyond the particular, concrete design project and in that sense can be considered research output. The production of ‘conceptions’, ‘notions’ and ‘names & frames’
is the typical result of so-called ‘research by design’.
Research by design is nowadays increasingly acknowledged as an important mode of research, especially in design disciplines like architecture and urban design.
In architecture and urbanism ‘research by design’ has become a commonly used and misused term. In these disciplines, especially in urbanism, ‘research by design’
is predominantly presented as an almost physical instrument to explore a given situ-ation and develop scenarios for solving the problems at hand. Particularly in partic-ipation processes, such as occur in urban planning or regional (landscape) projects, this understanding and use of ‘research by design’ has become hype (‘work-shops by design’, ‘communication by design’, ‘negotiation by design’, ‘action by design’,. . .).
It goes without saying that design has an important role in participation and com-munication processes. But this is certainly not the only role design has to play and perhaps not even the most essential. All the more if, as stated earlier, we have to act and reflect beyond mere problem-solving regarding the present-day phenomena of worldwide urbanisation.
Design nowadays is too often reduced to its communicative, decision-facilitating, scenario-developing and program-tuning capacities. This focus on design as an instrument rather than a knowledge-producer neutralises design power. Design is mostly used ‘at the service of’ external agendas (clients) and does not seem to develop an agenda – and consequently, ethics – of its own. To quote Tony Fry:
‘[. . .], design is once more positioned as a handmaiden of uncritical instrumen-talism (design for. . .). The adoption of this service relationship (be it broadly or narrowly defined), [. . .], leaves design in a condition of dependence upon the ethics of that which it serves. Design leadership cannot occur without a rupture from this sensibility of subordination’ (Fry 2005, p. 1).
Design should not be reduced to the polishing of existing situations or to an uncritical instrument for problem-solving. Developing scenarios, for example, often becomes a kind of multiple choice problem-solving, a range of solutions for one problem or a collection of solutions for a collection of problems.
The more important and somewhat underestimated intrinsic capacity of de-signerly thinking is, however, to develop projections9 as a kind of prospective alternative10 (restructured or let us say ‘redesigned’ problem). That is to say, to consider and make explicit possibilities beyond what is known, possibilities that challenge the ruling principles of daily practice. It is about the reading and design of the implicit, of possibilities that are latently present but have not yet come to the foreground of reality. This way of designerly thinking is typical of the more
‘conceptual’ design practice and can be found, for example – as illustrated earlier – most significantly in Utopian thinking.
This capacity of design to redefine/redesign problems (instead of solving them) by reading the implicit possibilities and consequently creating true alternative projections that in a way surpass the given, explicit situation, often remains barely used and underestimated.
It is precisely this capacity that is needed if design wants to take up a role on a more critical level as the generator of renewed preconditions and more critical models for a sustainable and humane development of the physical environment.
Therefore, in an attempt to define a type of so-called ‘research by design’, that puts a focus on the ability of design to develop criticism by formulating alternatives, I wish to introduce ‘Critical Design’ here, as a tentative term.
‘Critical Design’ aims to develop the ability to investigate possibilities beyond what is known, the ability to question and reveal other possibilities, based on an en-hanced, liberated imagination. By doing so it generates knowledge on latent reality, a reality that is implicitly present but not explicitly acknowledged. The term ‘Critical Design’11in this context is chosen by assumed analogy and complementarity with the already existing term ‘Critical Theory’.