Design of Co-creation in Rotterdam Central Station (1996-2007): Architecture and urban design roles in the multi-stakeholder collaboration

This article explores the pivotal role of design as a decision-making tool within multi-stakeholder collaborations, focusing on the early phases of the Rotterdam Central Railway Station and its surroundings project. Spanning from 1996, when it gained National Key Project status, to 2007, when construction commenced, this period precedes the preliminary design, during which the design process becomes the primary method of collaboration among multiple stakeholders, including designers and clients involved in the station area’s development. After introducing the post-war reconstruction of the station area and the ‘Platform Zero’ experiment, this article defines three key stages of design in the initial phase, each of which left a distinct mark on the station project. These stages are: - From 1996 to 2001: Design for political communication. - From 2002 to 2004: Parallel design. - From 2004 to 2007: Design co-creation and integration. To provide a comprehensive view of the design’s development, this article includes insights from conversations with architects and planners engaged in the process. In a dynamic exchange between various stakeholders and designers, the evolution of Rotterdam Central Station’s design reveals how political decisions have been informed by thorough design studies, offering a platform for robust discourse on critical issues

Collective data-based drawings: A common ground for adaptive contributive design

The laboratory ALICE (Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) advances a comprehensive approach to data-based drawing oriented towards architectural and urban co-design processes. This drawing methodology has been key in the contributive design process they have applied over the last seven years, covering a range of scales and contexts, both within the public and private spheres.  Contribution has become a relational strategy that unites a diverse range of participants, each hailing from various backgrounds and carrying unique needs, which come together around the drawing. For this reason, the cultivation of a robust drawing culture, from their teaching to their research and design activities, has become a cornerstone of ALICE’s philosophy, where drawing is embraced not merely as a representational tool but as a constructive means for design work. Their methodology has now evolved to include data-based drawing techniques, skillfully merging precise surveying with qualitative data analysis, thereby bridging the gap between quantitative and qualitative facets of design. This article explains this data-based approach to drawing through a series of projects developed in the Greater Geneva region. Throughout them, they explain how ALICE’s situated data-based drawings facilitate intricate coordination among students, leading to real-scale interventions; explore the potential of transforming main roads into landscape infrastructures that promote sustainable mobility and urban development; or offer an innovative lens to comprehend the affective connections between citizens and their urban surroundings, transcending traditional cartographic representations. Finally, these efforts are summarised through the analysis of a single drawing showcased at the 2021 Venice Biennale, illustrating the potential of this methodology to harmonize the collective efforts of various stakeholders

Design against Extinction at New York University

This article reviews the eco-social design work of students at the Gallatin School of Individualized Studies at New York University over the last decade. Environmental justice movements and the effects of global warming pose significant challenges to the architecture of dwellings, landscapes, and urban design communities. In response, students have placed socially and ecologically sensitive projects at the center of their design education. The justifiable moral outrage of our students has prompted us and them to rethink the methods by which we teach and imagine social environmentalism from the perspective of equity, inclusion, and the biosphere

On File and As Files: Tracing Communicative Processes in the Byker Archive

In this paper, we piece together threads of communicative processes between residents, architects, and other parties, as found in the lists and letters of the archive of the Byker Redevelopment in Newcastle Upon Tyne (1968-83). Documents that are usually discarded or neglected by architectural researchers - from a stack of various papers documenting residents’ lists of complaints, evaluative papers such as an audit report, and architects’ memos, to a resident’s letter of complaint - enable us to reconstruct, first, how a mainstream practice collected and filed residents’ experiences and understanding of their homes, and second, how, through the circulation of those papers in action as files, residents’ notes were also embedded in the design process

Reimagining Humanity

‘Faced with inevitable collapse, leading scientists used some of the industrial world’s last remaining technological and energy resources to design and provide an AI bot for selected people on the planet.’’ The following short fiction story explores the next version of human settlement after the collapse of this one, as predicted by Bendell’s research into ‘Deep Adaptation’ (Bendell, 2020). Dr. Bendell warns us that, unless we find ways to radically change our lifestyle, ‘human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.’ Through this story, we illustrate the idea that a societal collapse may actually be what humanity, and most certainly what the earth, needs

Drawing Time

This issue of Spool – ‘Drawing Time’ – departs from the observation that the metropolitan landscape is subject to time, in many ways. The metropolitan landscape, as it has been studied in Spool over the years, is conceived as the interrelation between urban, infrastructural, rural and natural formations: a dynamic, intertwined and layered urban-landscape structure. The urban condition is viewed from the perspective of the landscape as a permanent underlying substructure and as physical open space with its own spatial, compositional and perceptual characteristics. Time aspects of the metropolitan landscape can be found in processes of growth and decay, seasonal manifestations, disruptive forces of wind and water and also in the ways in which humans inhabit and use space or in which urban development processes take place. Designing for the metropolitan landscape means dealing with a wide range of dynamic phenomena, unstable systems and variable conditions. It implies the exploration of future situations, bridging time spans from seasons to decades and design tasks from small-scale interventions to large-scale strategies. It connects landscape operations that build upon the garden, the park and the forest to complex, layered design strategies for transformation, migration and climate change. This Spool issue discusses the importance of time in such design processes, and its reciprocal relation to representation

Deep Adaptation - The Spatial Dimension

The future, which we thought we had maybe another decade to prepare for, is now suddenly here. In all likelihood, we can expect further crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic or of similar severity, especially in the context of climate change. They will render the 21st century radically different from the 20th: conventions, techniques, and social practices we are familiar with will disappear. Our responsibilities and roles as architects and urban planners will also change fundamentally in this process. We will work in increasingly volatile and vulnerable contexts and constellations. Until now, many actors in politics, but also in academia and research, have played down or denied the vulnerability of our urban structures to the risks that are the direct effects of our current way of life. In the search for alternative and, in a sense, more realistic perspectives, Jem Bendell’s concept of “Deep Adaptation”, which has been widely and controversially discussed since its first publication in 2018, calls for a shift: he urges us to prepare for the collapse of certain systems that currently govern our lives – and to see this as an opportunity for positive change. This change and the resulting challenges we are facing are primarily not technological, but above all social, economic, and organisational in nature. Moreover, they are highly interdependent and all-encompassing; they require systemic change, profound transformations, and adaptations of action. It is therefore not a question of developing technical solutions in isolation, but rather of fundamentally rethinking the way we live, operate, work, travel, and interact. This issue of SPOOL seeks to explore the spatial dimension of the Deep Adaptation concept and how it can be put to use in the spatial disciplines such as urban planning, landscape planning, urban design, and architecture

Time Thinking and Drawing in Designing Dynamic River Landscapes

This visual essay explores the use of time thinking and drawing in the design process of the Ooijen- Wanssum floodplain widening project. Through a series of project sketches, final drawings and photos of the constructed project, the authors reveal the way in which time drawing has (often implicitly) given direction to the design process. The water calendar is introduced as a design tool that integrates time- dependent river dynamics into the design process and thereby informs spatial design choices that are considered in several design sketches. These design choices include interactions with dynamic processes such as erosion, vegetation dynamics and recreational use of the river landscape

Data-driven Urban Design: Conceptual and Methodological Interpretations of Negroponte’s ‘Architecture Machine’

Nicholas Negroponte and MIT’s Architecture Machine Group speculated in the 1970s about computational processes that were open to participation, incorporating end-user preferences and democratizing urban design. Today’s ‘smart city’ technologies, using the monitoring of people’s movement and activity patterns to offer more effective and responsive services, might seem like contemporary interpretations of Negroponte’s vision, yet many of the collectors of user information are disconnected from urban policy making. This article presents a series of theoretical and procedural experiments conducted through academic research and teaching, developing user-driven generative design processes in the spirit of ‘The Architecture Machine’. It explores how new computational tools for site analysis and monitoring can enable datadriven urban place studies, and how these can be connected to generative strategies for public spaces and environments at various scales. By breaking down these processes into separate components of gathering, analysing, translating and implementing data, and conceptualizing them in relation to urban theory, it is shown how data-driven urban design processes can be conceived as an open-ended toolkit to achieve various types of user-driven outcomes. It is argued that architects and urban designers are uniquely situated to reflect on the benefits and value systems that control data-driven processes, and should deploy these to deliver more resilient, liveable and participatory urban spaces

Urban Space and Everyday Adaptations: Rethinking commons, co-living, and activism for the Anthropocene City

This paper addresses Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” in the Anthropocene through the lens of everyday urban practices in contemporary Northern Europe. It proposes that this “deep adaptation” should be defined less in relation to a socio-ecological “collapse” and more through everyday occurrences in presentday urban environments. Entering into a critical conversation with Bendell’s conceptual “4 Rs” framework, the paper draws on primary data from several cities in Sweden and Germany to show how, in practice, resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure gardeners; how ingrained notions of restricted land use may be relinquished through “commoning” urban space; how novel constellations of co-living restores old ideas of intragenerational urban cohabitation; and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away from an anthropocentric urban planning, towards one that recognises other-thanhuman beings as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape. Accounting for urbanities of enmeshed societal, ecological, and spatial trajectories, the paper reveals an inhibiting anthropocentrism in Bendell’s framework and ultimately points to how his “creatively constructed hope” for the future may be found, not in an impending global collapse, but in everyday adaptations and embodied acts that stretch far beyond the human