Radical participation and collaborative design

The expert is being questioned across society. In Zurich, planners are addressing this with argumentative design

- Christian Salewski and Simon Kretz

Can you place a tree-house in a dense, inner-city quarter? Or even in a public park? The middle-aged man who built the delicate 1:200 scale model of the tree house argues that you can. He’s making his point to the student, the architect, and the retired teacher, who are not so sure that you can. As participating designers and moderators, we are standing with them in a huge, disused train shed in Zurich. It is cold, but discussions among the 80 to 100 people gathered around four large tables with models are intense. The workshop in March 2017 was the third in a process of radical participation in the urban design of the Neugasse area, a central plot in Zurich’s Industry Quarter. The state-owned real estate company SBB Immobilien, a division of the public Federal Swiss railway, aims to develop a dense, mixed-use quarter in this slice of land between the Josefwiese park and the main railway lines.

SBB Immobilien have started, and not ended, the design process by asking the people what they envisioned. Over the course of six months and five scenario-based workshops, the initial question of “How would you like to live here in the future?” to a mixed group of about 200 people — anyone could sign up for four mid-week evenings and one day on a weekend — unfolds into an iterative design process that results in a masterplan for 60, 000 square metres of housing, offices, a park, a school, and light industry. For everybody involved, this is a new experience of how urban development is done. But how did we get there?