TO INHABIT IS TO DESIGN

TO INHABIT IS TO DESIGN Silvia Pericu

> University of Genoa

From resource to refuse “Wasting is a pervasive (if valiantly ignored) process in human society, just as it is elsewhere in the living system. It is a feature of the underlying flux that carries us along, the everlasting impermanence of things. There is a short-term wasting of objects, and a long-term wasting of place. Each has its own characteristics. The rate fluctuates, and the flow is cyclical or directed, depending on circumstances. It threatens our health, our comfort and our feelings. It interferes with the efficiency of our enterprises. Still, it has its own values. If we seek to preserve things, it is a ceaseless threat. If we look for continuity and not permanence, on the other hand, then wasting might be turned to account. […] Hidden behind the polite facade of living, its presence preoccupies us: it is an affair of the mind. Might there be pleasures in it, and practical opportunities? Could we be at ease with it?”1. Throughout its evolution global economy has hardly moved beyond one fundamental characteristic established in the early days of the industrial era: a linear model of resource consumption that follows a make, use, dispose pattern. The environmental crisis we are experiencing requires a double challenge: on one hand we must counteract the progressive

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impoverishment of resources, on the other the disproportionate accumulation of waste must be reduced. In the late 2000s it was estimated that the volume of world resources extracted were tantamount to 60 billion tons, while the volume of waste was equal to 12 billion tons, or about 20% of extraction2. If related to the individual inhabitants of the planet, despite the differences existing between the various parts of the world, this means that every year a person extracts almost 10 tons of raw materials to produce almost two tons of waste. If we direct our glaze to our main environment, the city, it represents “a massive logistical endeavour. It as an overwhelming input/output machine, a voracious beast guzzling in, defecating out. It stands at the apex of the global nexus of goods distribution. Like any living organism, the city consumes food and water, expends energy and produces waste. Cities require bricks, mortar, cement, lime, steel, glass and plastics to generate and renew their physical presence”3. In this balance the consumption of land for construction and the demand for new buildings play an important role, because the construction sector absorbs a significant amount of resources and generates an equally significant percentage of waste, including inert, perishable materials and hazardous waste. In this respect new tools have to be found to give a new meaning to what already exists in our territory, in our landscape, in our cities, to give new life to what is disposed of or abandoned, either by eliminating the processes generating waste as much as possible, or by finding a new use for those spaces, buildings and structures that have lost it, working on their new semantics. From refuse to resource Circular economy proposes an alternative to traditional linear economy, a way to keep resources in use as long as possible, and to recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each life cycle by reusing them. This circularity of the life cycle is the pattern of a new economic opportunity that can allow us to exit the current crisis. The practice of recycling is not a new phenomenon; it has always been part of the normal life cycle of things, often in a pragmatic way, without special care, simply following functional and economic grounds. In a

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project’ praxis recycling is not a common word yet: other expressions are more commonly used, such as transformation, recovery, re-use, or even reactivation. Using the term “recycle” means an innovative approach, challenging the original purpose of the building and its shape for reasons dictated by todays needs and not as progressive adaptation. In recycling the object, whether artefact, building or site, is not the central point of the project, but one of the elements that are concerned, along with expectations and perceptions of those involved in the recycling process. This complexity makes it difficult to establish a program for developing a new semantic of places without putting shared decisions in a central position with the plurality of the actors and the variety of visions involved. Intervention strategies often conflict with the citizens’ needs, with the memory of places and with an image of them that has settled in the collective imagination. It makes sense In some way we could assume that reality is shaped also by the meaning that people give to things, to the situations in which they find themselves or that they have created. The attribution of meaning helps building what is perceived, it represents the ways in which people create what they construe4. The individual perceives a specific aspect of reality, by interacting with it. This aspect is therefore activated, it exists, and can be

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modified by the individual’s actions, gaining various meanings continuously. In turn, the activated environment retroacts on other individuals who take on behaviours resulting from the newly modified reality. The subject, therefore, does not shape the environment; it is the environment that influences the actions of the subject, as it happens with neglected urban environments able to transmit signals of deterioration, of selflessness and insecurity5. Therefore to produce sense is especially to develop a good story, a vision, and to communicate it. In this respect design and architecture increasingly need to tell processes, creating opportunities and spaces for encounter and exchange, based on sustainable patterns, both ethically and energetically. In the era of complexity, design not only has the task to develop solutions starting from a briefing or specifications given, but it has to move in the systemic dimension of the project and to act following a vision with representation, interaction and conviction tools, to open a dialog with people. Communities and participation What emerges from the contemporary scene is a generic desire for citizens to act, to get into action, as a reaction to the paralysis brought on by a global crisis and by the urgency of a situation that in Italy counts over 11 millions of neglected areas and buildings. It represents a complex social process, able to involve different competences, through a social mobilization that must meet the ability of the institutions to make room for social innovation. Policy-makers and public managers should provide a strong relationship with their own communities through dialog, in a way to promote people’s participation in elaborating strategies at different levels: starting from simple information, providing citizens with communication tools, to end with the consultation of stakeholders in decision-making and active engagement of all relevant parties. With regard to individuals’ will to participate in the improvement of the environmental life quality innovation must be carried out through processes that are oriented to an open system. In the field of waste and recycle of products and materials, quite similar to the topic of abandoned and disused spaces, a case-study that could develop a design driven innovation process successfully is represented by

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the LIFE+ project LOWaste, carried out in 2013 in Ferrara experiencing a pattern of circular economy based on prevention, reuse and recycling of waste in a logic of public-private partnership. The project was set up with the aim to foster the emergency of a genuine local district of green circular economy through the development of a market for recovery and recycling of specific waste streams. The local district allowed to put together the supply side with the demand one: it intercepts and exploits the materials that can be reused and it promotes green shopping by citizens, cooperatives and companies. The form in which it has been developed is the one of a sustainable market of products in their second life, but the process was also orientated to spread information on the prevention, reuse and recycling, increasing the awareness of consumers, retailers, manufacturers and local authorities about the possibility of reducing waste by reusing or buying green products. LOWaste represents a project of community engagement with a design driven approach to enhance innovation and to create partnership to place developed recycled products into a market fostered by green public procurement. In this event design-driven innovation is generally meant for a user-driven approach in the ideal phase in relation to the development of new products, where innovation is pursued by investigating users’ lives, practice or needs, latent or expressed. In the same way spaces, as objects and products, can find new life through a process that starts from the users’ needs to identify functions and to visualize what we can hardly imagine at present.

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The process is also characterised by the use of design competence from the initial phase of the project, to ensure user focus and the ability to transform and translate information into new opportunities via conceptual descriptions and visualisations. In this case the designer has the ability to translate user insights into entirely new solutions that can inspire him and other stakeholders, disseminating ideas, good practices and stimulating participation. From product to spaces and places: people use products and people live in places. Citizens can recycle abandoned spaces taking care of them in an open process that enables inhabitants to control and shape their personal environment. As Habraken6 pointed out, “to Inhabit is to Design”. To share recycle issues, both related to products and to spaces, needs an open source logic, an unusual field for architecture, even if it represents a well established paradigm that describes new procedures for the design based on standards of collaboration and its facilitation. “This aspect is enhanced by today’s fully sentient networked spaces, constantly communicating their various properties, states and attributes – often through decentralised and devolved systems”7. The role of design performs in transforming physical space, so far opposed to the digital one, into a relational active space, where users take advantage of continuously changing technologies, convergent through various platforms, belonging to everyday global world, that allow an active participation of temporary tactical communities able to join just for a specific purpose and to split as soon as it is achieved8.

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