When Le Corbusier made his famous Plan Voisin proposal in 1925, he was basically designing, not just a city, but an ideal life for the users who were going to live there. That’s how the concept of “towers in a park” came about, and it parceled the urban planning programs all over the world in the post-war period. It still continues to do so in some countries (including Turkey). It was a design that required the users to be “designed” as well, according to the vision of the planner. A plan can hardly ever get more top-down than that.
However, the times are changing, not just in architecture, but in every aspect of our lives. Internet has brought a new way of social lifestyle, in which we have fully customizable spaces, and we can share anything we want and as fast as we wish. Given this context, can we find a way to incorporate this rapid exchange between people into how we design our cities? This requires a serious shift in conception on how we look at planning, including asking the following direct question to ourselves:
Are slums bad or can they be a part of the solution?
There are some projects that have been attempting to involve the public in the planning process, arguably the most successful of them being the Favela-Bairro Project in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The fairly new term “crowdsourcing” might be a promising solution in adjusting our cities; taking advantage of the participatory power of the internet.
In Dharavi, India, a group called URBZ, believes in the power of “the practice of ‘urbanology,’ which relies on understanding and documenting urban ecosystems through direct engagement with people and places – charting homegrown practices in the fields of housing, artisanship and trade, and the physical and theoretical spaces where these fields converge.” This is the inevitable change that needs to happen in urban planning.
In short, crowdsourcing, the simple solution of going out and talking to people, or using the web in more well-off areas, can be a great way of collecting much needed data, just like URBZ is doing, because usually what we assume people would need doesn’t necessarily correlate with what they actually want. Firms and agencies in the designing and planning sector should start tuning their expertise towards this area, because new methodologies that were unimaginable in data analysis 10 years ago is now possible, and they open up great potentials, especially in spatial terms.
What kind of possibilities can crowdsourcing open up in terms of spatial development that was not possible with the conventional methods of planning?
Credits: Image and data linked to sources.