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Design and Politics: The Next Phase

Design and Politics: The Next Phase was a collaboration between ANCB The Metropolitan Laboratory and Henk Ovink, Director for Spatial Planning, Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment of the Netherlands. Running from January 2011 to January 2013, Design and Politics took the form of nine very well-received public debates – eight at ANCB in Berlin and one debate at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam - and a design studio with the TU Delft.

The subjects of Design and Politics: The Next Phase were twofold: the future city, and a re-thought and re-energised relationship between political spatial planning and the design disciplines of architecture and urban design. The key argument was that a political agenda in design has the potential to address the complex challenges facing cities in a more effective manner than is currently being achieved. More than 80 participants – mainly from The Netherlands and Germany and in the fields of urban design, architecture, urban planning and politics - raised significant insights, ideas and positions about the intentions and scope of the processes, professions and politics of making the urban environment.

A number of ideas developed in the course of the first eight debates were investigated in a follow up project entitled 'Resilience and Democracy: Urban Regions Under Stress' comprising a design studio with the TU Delft and a public debate. These ideas, set out below, demonstrate clear potential to influence a shift in planning and urban paradigms, not only in The Netherlands and Germany, but throughout Europe and internationally.

Resilience, as an ideology and approach, can generate the measures, benchmarks and stress tests for projecting the sustainable city into the future.
The wellbeing of future urban communities and societies must be grounded in a fairer reconfiguration of public realm.
City and cityness occur at the scale of the region. Urban does not just refer to the traditional compact city.
The German concept ‘Baukultur’ - a political discourse on ‘building’ the physical environment – can play a lead role in making a new paradigm for the human relationship with the built environment.

Design and Politics. The Reader
PDF (4MB) download here.

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