Discourses of Identity and Representation in the Regeneration

Re-imagining a new town: the architecture of empowerment and segregation in a Dutch post- war neighbourhood LEEKE REINDERS Introduction Architects meet a practical need for places to dwell, work, rest or play, but they tend to operate on the premises of an artist. There is, however, something irrevocable behind architecture. Architects put an ineradicable stamp on the environment. In contrast with a painting or a play, one cannot alter an architectonic work of art other than by blowing it up or pulling it down. Streets, squares, buildings and parks form the physical structure within which social life takes place. Yet the hard city as it is designed, built and managed, is not only guided by aesthetic or artistic ideas. Architects, designers and town planners also play a crucial role in translating conflicting claims on urban space. The urban landscape in this sense has been understood as materialized discourse, be it an expression, reflection or reproduction of political ideals and ideologies. This paper explores this social production of space through an examination of two design projects in Hoogvliet, a post-war neighbourhood in southwest Rotterdam, undergoing radical restructuring. This paper argues that questions of symbolism, discourse, imagery and representation, which have come to the foreground of urban studies, are tied up with the political and economic processes of social and spatial transformation. Striking a middle ground between culturalist and political economic approach to urban space (Eade & Mele 2002), this paper shows how architectural designs in hoogvliet are linked to shifts in the ideological foundations of urban renewal policy and the emergence of an entrepreneurial discourse in public sector planning. Our focus here is thus not so much on the design itself or its materialization into physical space, but on the discursive framing of 1 place by architects, designers and branding strategists, involved in the regeneration of Hoogvliet. This paper, which is a first step to detailed discourse analysis, is based on an ongoing ethnographic study on identity strategies and the social production and construction of space in a Dutch post-war neighbourhood. Hoogvliet revisited: community, space, ideology and representation In the 1950s and 1960s a new town rose up on the southwest edge of the Rotterdam. Hoogvliet was built for the new post-war age and was intended to make a radical break with history. Standardized production methods ensured rapid and cheap construction, necessary to fulfil an acute housing shortage. The city had wide open spaces and straight streets, by which a strict separation of functions was achieved. The buildings that rose up were made from modern materials such as steel and concrete, and designed according to the principles of modernistic architecture. And the rational design of the neighbourhoods was meant to mould the residents into a community. Although originally planned as a satellite town for sixty thousand people, mainly workers in the nearby petrochemical industry, the Hoogvliet plan was never finished. At the end of the 1960s building construction hampered as a consequence of an automation of the industrial sector. Six thousand people left and the northern part of the city developed into an area of concentrated social problems, ripe with criminality, poverty, social isolation, unemployment and xenophobia. Since that time Hoogvliet had to contend with a territorial stigma. The popular imagination of the city has been dominated by two discourses. On the one hand popular conceptions are guided by the image of a cheerless, anonymous and peripheral location. Hoogvliet, located in a landscape of highways, industrial complexes, dockland and polders, for many outsiders is known as a dead-end place, geographically and mentally far removed from its mother town. The discourse on environmental monotony coexists with a discourse on the loss of community. From the 1970s onwards, with the exodus of middle-class families and the influx of different ethnic groups, post-war neighborhoods are marked as places where different and sometimes conflicting life worlds live side by side. Post-war neighbourhoods like Hoogvliet are thus generally seen as monotonous or ‘decontextualised’ urban places, and a source of dissociation and social disintegration (Jacobs 1994, Blake 1974, Boomkens 1993). In an effort to counteract these collective representations, Hoogvliet is entering a phase of radical and large-scale reconstruction, in which one third of the housing stock is replaced by new construction. This restructuring forms a drastic intervention into the physical and social texture of the neighborhood. By breaking out of the monotony of the environment through demolition and new construction an effort is made to transform a low- income and ethnically diverse neighborhood into an area attractive to the tastes of middle class segments of society. “Differences make for quality”, as a national advisory board 2 prescribed on the eve of the restructuring. Or, as a housing corporation described it in a brochure: “choices make a difference”. These mottos fit into the rhetoric on diversity, which has recently been called a new doctrine in urban planning (Fainstein 2005). One of the key themes emerging within the restructuring of post-war neighborhoods, and Dutch urban and spatial policy in general, is that of place identity. Within Hoogvliet, for example, a range of strategies is employed for the re-profiling and repositioning of the place in a regional housing market. This search for identity marks a heightened consciousness of the meaning of the neighborhood and community as a social and mental entity. In several ways the identity strategies, as they are currently used as a tool of urban regeneration, turn against the ‘narrative of loss’ (Arefi 1999) mentioned above. They make up an attempt to redefine a specific location by searching for its distinguishing features. For example, the methods of branding and historical research, to be discussed below, are explicitly focused on tracing and digging up the core features or genius loci of a specific place. Such spatial identity strategies are not only an attempt to redefine the spatial identity of a particular neighborhood but also try to accommodate the social and cultural diversity of contemporary urban society in space (Mommaas 2001). The design strategies used in the urban renewal of post-war housing thus touch upon changing conceptions of the community as a social and spatial entity. But how do contemporary conceptions of community take shape in a physical and spatial sense? The two design projects described below show how the question of the designed community is closely related to the above mentioned shift in the ideological foundations of urban renewal policy. Housing corporations hereby increasingly turn away from supplying standard environments and towards a customer-oriented policy, in which individual or group specific housing preferences are attended to. The current discourse on identity in this sense has a hard material base, closely related to political and economic processes of socio-spatial transformation. From the start the concept of community has played a central role in urban renewal policies with regard to the management of post-war neighborhoods. The concept of the ‘wijkgedachte’ (neighborhood idea), for example, already provided a framework for the building up of society. During the urban renewal period in the 1970s and 1980s, the emancipation of low-income groups was a central goal of social policy. In the 1990s, however, a setting of tasks took place, in which housing corporations, the leading party in urban renewal, were converted from non-profit organizations and providers of social housing into commercial enterprises. The increased market-oriented approach of both local governments and corporations signals a transition from managerialism to entrepreneurialism, in which government control gives way to market oriented approaches (Young & Lever 1997, Haworth & Manzi 1999). Exemplary for this transition is the introduction of ‘brand managers’ (Greenberg 2000) or ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ (Hannigan 2003), who are discussed in section 5 of this paper. During this shift towards a 3 ‘managerialist discourse’ (Jacobs & Manzi 1996) notions of community are given new meaning and interpretation. Welcome into my back yard: the design of empowerment and emancipation The regeneration of the post-war housing stock is a large scale process of physical destruction and reconstruction. In translating esthetics and ideologies into sketches or concrete forms, architects, planners and designers therefore play a crucial role in the transformation and reordering of public space. Within current urban renewal programs, however, contemporary architects and designers are confronted with a fundamental dilemma (Kaliski 1999). In contrast with the post-war construction period, during which different parties were brought under supervision by the state, urban designers nowadays are situated in complex field of political and economic interests (Hereijgers & Van Velzen 2001). Moreover, the architectural task in the current restructuring program is largely focused on an intervention into and adjustment of the existing physical structure. An illuminating example of the changing position and role of urban design in urban renewal processes is provided by WiMBY!, a recently formed collective of designers, artists and architectural historians in Hoogvliet. The group results

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