Rob Roggema Editor The Design Charrette Ways to Envision Sustainable Futures The Design Charrette Rob Roggema Editor The Design Charrette Ways to Envision Sustainable Futures Editor Rob Roggema Department of Landscape Architecture Van Hall Larenstein, Wageningen University The Netherlands The Swinburne Institute for Social Research Swinburne University of Technology Hawthorn, Australia ISBN 978-94-007-7030-0 ISBN 978-94-007-7031-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7031-7 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London Library of Congress Control Number: 2013947776 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover illustration: Plasticine modelling in the Bendigo Charrette © Rob Roggema Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Foreword A plethora of design professionals, planners, landscape and other architects, and even lawyers, have all struggled to cut through the planning morass to make urban design more participatory and the outcomes meaningful, useful, practical, elegant, beautiful and enjoyable. We have watched, silently and noisily, as great ideas fl ounder in a sea of failed hopes. Unloved, dreary proposals, lacking vision and stifl ing humanity’s best selves, continue to inexorably fi nd their way through the pack. They keep deliver- ing ‘own goals’. People who are expected to live in sites, precincts, houses and developments for years, and sometimes for their whole lives, continue to be little more than ancillary to the places which they will inhabit. Their choices are constrained, their interests ignored and their imaginative suggestions, if ever proffered or heard, are sidelined or spurned. The challenges of designing and developing elegant, simple, realisable, solutions to planning and housing and community problems are exacerbated over time. Isolated pockets of innovation are celebrated as unique and we all complain about our inability to grasp such outcomes in wider settings. Beauty, functionality and comfort appear to be unattainable and unimaginable for the wider community. As I pondered these issues and conducted a wide round of public consultation in my role as Victoria’s environmental sustainability reporter I found myself exploring the work of Rob Roggema. Rob’s discussion of charrettes as a participa- tory planning process interrogated the same litany of questions and the charrette methodology seemed to provide some practical ground-truthing and theoretical focal points. I recall warming to Rob’s enthusiasm for this inclusive and potentially liberat- ing methodology. My work over time and terrain with Aboriginal people predis- posed me to a belief in the highly effective role people can have in addressing their own concerns. Rob’s work spoke to my own understandings – across continents, oceans, cultures. v vi Foreword In intensely practical ways I was delighted to be able to assist Rob in populating some of the charrettes he and the public conducted. Physically, it was pleasing to see maps rolled out, smoothed, placed on tables: landscapes brought to people in fresh, real and evocative ways. My own views of people’s unique understandings of the places in which they live were reinforced as I watched adults and youths, men and women, pouring over these maps. I witnessed them re-drawing and designing historical places in their minds-eye, populating the roads and the surveyed sites with known icons, with histories of families, with contours and crop regimes, with livestock and disused stock routes, water tanks and school yards, with fl ood and drought stories. Their understandings of the physicality of sites, of the needs of the places they cared about, and the needs of the communities who lived in these places were historical, cultural and contem- porary and they were given voice. In particular I am pleased to see Rob has written about the Sea Lake charrette. Sea Lake is a small town (population no more than a couple of hundred people at the most) in the Mallee region of Victoria. It is a dry place which will become drier as we enter into climate change realities. It is ostensibly a lonely place on a thin strip of blue tarmac which is driven-through rather than lingered-in. It is an outlier town where the community cares passionately about the continuation of their place, about the return of their children from university in the metropolis, about the education of their primary school children in the town, about their cen- tres, their stores, their cricket matches, women’s associations, and book clubs. This little town is big in its will to survive the population and skills drain which we see taking place. We attended the charrette and watched children fi ll pages of butcher’s paper with ideas, proposals and issues which concerned them. We listened as they talked about their group response to the question of sustaining the town. Their commen- tary was intelligent, enthusiastic, inclusive, refl ective and purposeful. They had views and proposals. They had an interest in planning for and about the places in which they lived. Townspeople then talked of the procedural and governmental issues, of process and practicalities, of failed efforts and aspirations. Intriguingly the physical presence of the maps kept drawing people back to understandings of the landscape – out of the council chambers and the organisational obstructions. The draw of the land/map was ‘true north’, much as it always is (even if differently so) for Aboriginal people. The Sea Lake charrette, conducted relatively quickly for us, over a couple of days, provided a unique insight into the manner in which people can be drawn away from the road blocks and out into the landscape, generating the skeletal framework for useful and potentially highly productive outcomes. I witnessed a charrette process which is more than just useful. It can free up tongues, lighten loads, and shuffl e and share responsibilities around. It can be conducive to simple, elegant, lived-in planning and organisational solutions. It can promote rupture with past ways of doing things and by this means open up new routes. No other planning process appears to promise this in quite the same Foreword vii highly localised and realistic way. When people are invited to explore meaning in this way that meaning comes from deeper reaches, is more carefully articulated and it promises both stability and fl exibility, fundamental human needs in any planning process. This collection holds a mirror up to us and our practices. It provides an intel- ligent counterpoise to the way we do things now and reminds us we can do better if we take the time and always return, quizzically, to places and the people who populate them. Melbourne Katy Auty Pref ace When you study to become a designer you think, and you’ll be taught that the design will change the world. It is very easy to mix this up with an idea that this design, once it’s been designed well, is the end of the story, which from then on provides the desired change automatically. This occurs to be not true. Only in specifi c cases in history designs had immediate effects on the spatial city appear- ance. The work of Albert Speer was such a case, in many of the former Soviet states it happened and rebuilding after World War II it occurred in the Netherlands. The hand of the designer was not always very successful when we take a look at how these examples are currently valued. Off course, there are more positive examples, such as Haussmann’s boulevards in Paris, the canals in Amsterdam or the Cerda grid in Barcelona, which at the time of realisation encountered protests, but these strong views on city development led eventually to a highly valued environment. These cities were lucky! This book has been written to support community involvement in the design process in order to prevent negative outcomes from a top-down design approach. The combination of community involvement and design is, at least in literature, not very extensive. Despite there is much written about stakeholder involvement, this is often not directly related to design processes and, even more important not allowing community members to design their desired future themselves.