Coordination: Cătălina Frâncu, Ilinca Pop

Intro

City, The Land Of Promise

Text: Cătălina Frâncu

The city has existed from the beginning as a progressive economic centre, always in contrast to the frozen, ”regressive” and traditional countryside. After the Industrial Revolution, the city became the nucleus of economic growth, turning into a platform for development for all who left the countryside behind in the hope of a job (in a factory) and modern housing (in a tenement). But the city has always ”welcomed” its immigrants in well-prepared places, far from its “rightful” inhabitants, often transforming itself from the land of promise into the land of need. In the illusion that the possibilities are infinite, the city shapes its continuous need for growth and manufactures new obstacles in the journey of overcoming its own condition. [Cătălin Berescu, „Ghetoul și zona de locuire defavorizată (ZLD) Aleea Livezilor”, in Comunități Ascunse. Ferentari (Bucharest: Expert Publishing house, 2011).]

In rural communities, roles have always been very well defined. In rural settlements with small populations and a lot of work to be done before winter came, men and women specialised in different jobs with too little overlap, and non-conforming people also ended up in certain social roles in which they remained for the rest of their lives (madmen became jesters, unmarried and unruly women became witch-doctors, etc.) [George Sand, La Petite Fadette, Le livre de poche Classiques de poche 3550 (Paris: Libr. Gén. Française, 1999).]

The City for a Small Group of People

With the decision to sterilize the city: to ”cleanse” it of the inadequacy of the medieval space heritage on which poverty was increasingly spreading, modern theories of urbanism emerged. Zoning, large housing estates and giant car transport infrastructure, implemented in varying amounts across Europe, have led to the same result in different measures: like Le Corbusier’s Modulor, the modern European city is built to fit the life of a person with a fixed route, working in one place, mobile enough, healthy enough, with a personal car, with a support system for cleaning, nutrition and child-rearing.

The Others and the City

Although diversity is a reality, the environment has not yet been adapted to the needs of others.

Despite itself, the city still remains the land of freedom for women, misfits, people with disabilities, etc. In the early 19th century women (mostly Caucasian) could live in boarding houses, and the secretarial/support professions drew the female population to the urban space, pressuring the creation of special living spaces for women.

Thus, as early as the 19th century, women develop the need for transit space and safe housing. Among the pioneers in creating such space were activists Jane Adams and Ellen Gates Starr, who opened the doors of the Hull House mansion to women and immigrants in Chicago. Hull House is part of the settlement movement, a movement designed to bring distinct social classes together that began in the 1880s with the goal of narrowing economic and educational gaps. Settlement houses provided access to housing, education, health and culture through middle classes volunteers who lived there, along with people in need of shelter (victims of domestic violence, young women looking for work, etc.) [„Settlement Movement”, in Wikipedia, 22 august 2022]

Thus, women had access to an emancipation device by acquiring male-like skills to navigate urban life without depending on a male bond. Although important steps have been made towards catching up with women’s needs, cities remain built for cars and monoline routes of people uninvolved in the dimension of unpaid domestic labour.

Leslie Kern adds, in Feminist Cities, that another important factor that shapes the female experience in cities is fear. Generated by unlit alleyways but also by being in a space unfriendly to their needs, women often avoid exercising their right to space at night. To alleviate fear, Vienna has been developing urban gender mainstreaming strategies for more than thirty years.

The Public Space as Place for Exercising Citizenship

Liberal democracy, developed in the West, used the public space throughout its evolution as an instrument for reiterating liberal and democratic principles.

The public space is a fundamental instrument in exercising the democratic right:

• since ancient times, access to the Agora guaranteed the possibility of expression for citizens (free, adult men, who represented around 20% of the population of Athens)

And liberal:

• with women’s access to public space, facilitated especially by their access to jobs involving travel, hence use of public transport etc., the street struggle for the right to vote became possible. Feminism and women’s rights, like the rights of black people (through movements such as Black Lives Matter) have expressed and achieved their goals through large-scale demonstrations in urban spaces. The same tactics are now being used to draw attention to current issues of violence against women, ethnicity, social inequality, etc.

In the liberal democracies that emerged in Europe and the United States, the public space played a decisive role, becoming the stage for demonstrations demanding human rights: from the French Revolution to the suffrage marches in Ireland and Great Britain, the anti-Vietnam War marches, the Silk Revolution, etc.
Similarly, the very morphology of space, generally inaccessible to people with locomotor disabilities, creates behaviours designed to make life easier for them. Many of them involve avoiding certain areas, which leads to these spaces being erased from their mental map. If we were to compare the mental map of the city of a flâneur, motorist, cyclist, and a person with locomotor impairments, etc., we would most likely observe that, while in the former there are clearly some areas that are more pronounced, and the others exist as a permanent possibility, in the mental map of the latter there are missing areas (where they never think they could go).

The Ideal City

is inclusive, circular and non-intrusive, walkable, restored, reused, clean, natural, bikeable, green, full of ecosystems, wide sidewalks, strollers on the streets and in the parks, elderly people on walks, grandparents, mothers, fathers, children, comfortable furniture, toilets, playgrounds and housing for everyone.

And for it to happen, we all need to contribute to it.

About the Selection

Text: Ilinca Pop

The theme of this dossier urged a process-oriented look rather than a focus on ‘objects’ that remain after a project is finished, because the inclusive city relies on the relationships between all the actors of urban life, the temporalities and dynamics of these relationships and the ways of looking at and working with them – factors that can lead to the iteration of very different solutions, but which share common principles and values.

This is also reflected in the diversity of the projects in the dossier: a school and a residential complex in Mozambique on the banks of the Benga River, an intervention that redefines the ‘limits’ of dwelling, two houses from 1925 and 1926 and a furniture collection. Each illustrates ways of understanding ‘difference’ and working with it in an inclusive way: building a community infrastructure attentive to its natural context, negotiating between temporary and permanent, the adaptability of domestic space, the valorisation of crafts.

In addition to these five projects, the dossier includes two interviews, a report, two theoretical texts and a review. The coherence in which all of these have finally come together demonstrates – as Daniela Calciu says in conversation with us – that there is “a professional habitus being formulated around the ethics of responsibility and care,” which encompasses complementary practices and discourses.

Starting from the fact that difference “can only bring richness to your field”, an idea that Doina Petrescu stresses, these practices and discourses are also reflections of the diversity of professional references today.

Last but not least, we wished to underline the need to overcome the dichotomous thinking that Teodor Călinoiu identifies as the cause of reticence towards difference, by revisiting professional histories that have only recently made their way into collective memory. They show that, when in the position of strengthening collective resistance, we can build more democratic and therefore more inclusive professional realities – a lesson that is important to remember as often as necessary.

Finally, the current dossier actually builds hope that architecture can become more engaged and relevant to each of us. And this hope comes not from a predisposition towards a kind of heroic optimism (which we hope past mistakes will keep us from), but precisely from a series of existing anchors that are becoming increasingly present.

Perhaps because you can’t build something 100% inclusive (a reality that Iris Popescu reminds us of in the extended material that follows), inevitably, the dossier is missing things that we would have liked the limited space to encompass. But we hoped, rather than covering everything (which would have been impossible anyway), to inventorize a series of tools and perspectives that would bring us closer to being ‘available for difference’. This is where the road to better cities for all begins.

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