12/3/07 Work

While previous days were about touring, learning and listening, today thoughts had to be put into action. I was not sure when I was invited if this truly was the first public design charrette in Israel but I was assured by many people today that it was – and this simple fact of being first made the day more exciting and more challenging.

While I have participated in many design charrettes, my colleague Neal has by his account done more than 100, none of our Israeli architect, planner, transportation engineer, economist, geographer and landscape friends and none of the citizens who came for the summaries had ever done anything quite like this before. As a result this was a great opportunity to see if the charrette is culturally delimited by a different national experience, or even useful once borders are crossed.

In the United States there is a 35-year history of organizing and planning public design workshops of every type. Truth be known, I rarely see the public design charrette as a useful tool unless the parameters of the problem are very specific and already defined in public (this is the AIA formula and for good reason; trying to define specific issues to discuss can be debilitating if not vetted and agreed to before hand). In Kiryat Shmona we are fortunate – or I suppose unfortunate – to be faced with something that is specific, a deteriorating downtown where decision after decision has made things worse. Yet the public and the professionals are starting with abstractions, there is no mandate to solve a specific problem we are seeking to define both the specific problem we can address in the downtown as well as solutions in one intensive session.

Our organizers, the Movement for Israeli Urbanism, adhered fairly rigorously to a conventional form of charrette which first engages in listening exercises (with the public on 12/2/07), then utilizes the skills of a wide range of experts to generate alternative proposals, then through an public and intensive discursive and iterative process winnows down the proposals, and finally through more public input arrives at a consensus approach. Our work on this first day was to generate many ideas very fast and for the most part we were very successful.

Still, during the course of the day it was interesting to watch people alternatively get excited, bored, frustrated and even angry as ideas and consequential ideologies were tested. What I find in this type of situation is that the best approach is to settle the mind and ego down and let ideas percolate and just draw as fast as you can. In essence the act of drawing allows images to speak to issues of policy and ideology. In a charrette people do not need to agree with you, you do not need to agree with other people, you just need to get the idea on paper, use visuality as a means of getting to the esssence.

It works. At our table four people came together who had never met each other before this workshop – a town planner from a kibbutz, a town planner from a rural community, an architect and urban designer born in Russia and working in Jerusalem, and me. Though at first there was some tension, we never had to disagree as long as we just kept putting the ideas down on paper until they got clearer and clearer. The plan could emerge on its own through drawing and visualization. As the day wore on I found that there was nothing particularly culture-bound about this process – it translates to a different place and society with ease.

In the evening again close to a hundred people gathered to review the concepts. Each person was given the opportunity to comment on each of six concepts. The discussions were rich and even heated at times. While I would say that Israelis as a whole themselves more vivaciously and intensely then others I have worked with in the United States and Germany, overall the spirit of give and take, with the assistance of good facilitation, allowed for a rich exchange of ideas and the ability to more clearly understand the community’s point of view, allowing for further sharpening of ideas tomorrow.

Out team proposal veered towards the everyday. We tried hard to work with present concerns and needs and to draw an incremental scheme that was as much careful manipulation of the existing townscape to make it more connected to its surrounds, as it was larger idea to nurture and expand existing situations. When I draw cities I seek to draw a field of activities where open spaces and buildings weave together to create urban encounters that are the opposite of grand. I cannot help myself, I always draw the small moments. In Kiryat Shmona I drew this schema again. Mostly I tried to make strong both visual and physical links east and west across the divide of the newly minted Highway 90, the former Tel Hai Boulevard main street. We called our scheme a “zipper” as it was meant to tie back together what highway engineering had torn asunder. The scheme was a mix of the small-scale moment and the moderate gesture.

Was it good work? In the evening thee public came and looked at all the schemes. I do not see what our team produced as good or bad. It simply contributed to a better understanding on the part of the charrette team and the public as to what might make sense in this situation. For sure some of our ideas will find their way to the final scheme, just as many will not, and this is the way of charrettes. Leave your ego at the door. Public wisdom in democratic conversations is almost always wiser then private passions.

Are there peculiar aspects of doing a charrette in Israel? People from my experience were much quicker to become vociferous but in the end there was no more or less drama then in any other situation of this type I have participated in. The experience seems to translate across borders, seems to have a certain universality. So in the end, the act of work, the act of drawing and making the invisible visible makes the act of thinking and doing so much easier. The charrette brings design intelligence to the public and we as designers once again acted as a medium for other’s ideas and dreams. These can become our dreams too.