Speaker
Description
The paper digs deep into a case, from the perspective of the project-director of actual developments on the former mine-site in Beringen, a medium-sized city in Flanders (Belgium). Description and evaluation of a work-in-progress serve critical reflection and a proposal for an enriched approach.
Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ captures the inevitable drive of progress, looking into the past, turning his back to the future. While producing huge piles of trash, a strong wind from paradise blows him into the unknown. A similar situation is intrinsic to spatial planning. Planners cannot ‘see’ the future behind their back, but have to deal with that while doing their best to correct misfits and to meet demands for a better environment. The knowledge needed to do so is built up from past experiences and a critical attitude towards the present trash. And yet, changing the actual world with the future in mind urges for ‘futuring’: investigating potential futures, seeing with the eye of imagination. This eye-magination is envisioning alternative situations, by projecting innovative ideas into the future, while testing those together with participating actors, and sending the fruits of this confrontation back into potential futures. Planners move forth and back between the known present and an uncertain future while scanning, assessing and testing a spectrum of qualities.
However, spatial planners and designers never work alone. Many diverse stakeholders need to be informed, mobilized and activated until they are motivated to invest their knowledge, creativity, time, money, and other valuable resources. Collaboration is a major prerequisite within a planning situation which includes, besides analysis, research and design, also operational aspects such as action programs, communication, and implementation. Thus, co-producing a ‘common future’ implies imagination to be shared.
In the case of Beringen, coherence and coordination were crucial aspects of the common future pursued for an old mining site. To envision those aims, multiple generative metaphors were mobilized by a ‘quality platform’ set up by the local government. Seeing ‘mine-landscape as beacon’, ‘projects as ships’, and ‘designing as wayfaring’ tried to collectively coin a common point on the horizon, the need for coordinated ‘turns’ of each ship’s orientation, and their complicated trajectories to be explored. ‘Ecology’, ‘meshwork’, and ‘correspondence’ served as tacit metaphors for the ‘quality platform’ during its endeavour to direct the common imagination. Together, these metaphors helped to modulate and grasp the ‘planning ecology’ at work.
After four years of practice, an evaluation is made. The wayfaring-ambition of the involved quadruple helix (public-private-partnership, city government, social actors, external experts) lost track. Maybe partly due to the metaphorical flou artistique, the beacon loomed up as a rather foggy silhouette. Probably the ‘content’ of the pursued mine-landscape was not addressed in a sufficiently tangible way. The motivation to hark ‘back to the future’ is growing. Implied questions are: What kind of ‘imaginary’ (an imagined representation of the future) can help to make the beacon stand out of the fog? How to construct a performative shared perspective on the world, that spurs a commonly supported goal-orientation and enables common practices? According to the ‘quality platform’, the future might be backed up by a ‘thought-image’, based on an elaboration of the concept ‘mine-landscape’. Gradually such thought-image is being developed by enriching ‘mine-landscape’ in a threefold way: a logo (mijn|land|schap), a perspective (being, seeing, caring), and a figure (eidetic map).
| Keywords | futuring; co-production; metaphor; thought-image |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
