Urban interfaces in participatory city planning

Abstract

In the discourse on participation in urban design and city planning, urban interfaces are often referred to as ways to initiate citizen participation on issues related to the city in the spatial context itself. In the current city landscape we often encounter urban interfaces that display data on the city, such as speed of cars, and allow some basic input from the citizens, such as pushing a smiley button to express appreciation about a service. In this article, we will discuss a case in which several urban interfaces were developed to engage in participatory ways with citizens, policy makers and private and public organisations on the future development of a partly unused railway track in Genk. In this case the researchers wanted to do more than to pass on data or allow citizens to express consent. They wanted to give form to environments that allow for a critical exchange of qualitative data on the city. To discuss how the interfaces that were developed in this project, allowed for a critical exchange on qualitative data, we build on Drucker who defines an interface as “not so much a ‘between’ space as it is the mediating environment that makes the experience, a ‘critical zone that constitutes a user experience (Drucker, 2011, p. 10)’”. She sees the interface as a field of discourse, allowing interpretative activities within spatial dimensions of a landscape, instead of a flat map. She also defines navigation within this space as way-finding: the one who navigates does not try to grasp the whole, but responds to cues that meet on their path. In this navigational experience two realities meet, namely the perspective of arts and humanities where ambiguity and uncertainty are important and the engineering perspective in which efficiency of the navigational experience is priority. Because the researchers in the described project in this article, aimed to give form to urban interfaces that mediate participatory engagements in city planning, we confronted Drucker’s definition with how Bishop defines the role of participatory art. Inspired by Rancière (2007, p. 278), Bishop (2012) sees the role of participatory art as ‘mediation’ between maker and public as the common production of objects, words, images and situations that connect and activate people, but also divide them, leaving room for observation, experiment, openness and pluralism. To summarise both definitions, urban interfaces can allow a critical and qualitative exchange in participatory city planning as mediating environments between designers and diverse individuals and groups in the city that allow them to navigate and produce common objects, words, images and situations that connect, activate and divide them. This article critically discusses this definition in relation to one of the urban interfaces that was designed in the case study, a low-tech urban interface that was exhibited during one year in a shopfront in the city.