The project takes its basis in a concern for the future liveability of European cities in regard to public space, public buildings, and public life, looking specifically at the capital city of Budapest in Hungary. Studying internal migration patterns within Hungary, it is clear that while the Budapest conglomerate region have grown in population over the last 30 years, there has been a negative net migration to the Budapest inner city. The urban population is choosing to a larger degree to move to village suburbs in the conglomerate region, mainly due to the access to nature and recreational space that these places offer, suggesting that the city is failing to supply an attractive alternative for the local living environment of the inner city. Though large efforts and funds are already dedicated to address this, my research and design questions the impact current developments in the city have on the perceived recreational value of the living environment within the local city block. The project investigates the core concept of “publicness” and the separation of public and private realms, aiming to challenge the ways public space and public buildings are configured and realized. The investigation resulted in a design for a multifunctional building and an urban green strategy which aims at addressing the “everyday” aspects of public space and public lives. The focus lies on ways in which public buildings to a larger degree can offer spaces for everyday activities rather than curated experiences and ways which these spaces can become appropriable for users to utilise as they please and in the ways they see fit. The specific mixite of functions and the configuration of program around loosely programmed “in-between” spaces has been crucial to achieve a degree of ambiguity in terms of use and purpose of space, something which becomes a driver for appropriability and the perception of public space as an extension of the private living sphere.

This paper aims to analyse the participatory processes involved in the creation and running of community centre ‘t Karregat in Eindhoven using tools and theoretical models on participatory design from the time of the centre’s creation as well as off today. The goal is to understand the limits and shortcomings of the user involvement processes implemented to evaluate and discuss the reasons for why the experiment in participation, community and multifunctionality carried out by architect Frank van Klingeren together with Eindhoven Municipality and Amro/Westland-Utrecht received extensive criticism and was ultimately viewed as a failure. This paper finds that the participation efforts were extensive and that a lot of effort was taken to ensure the successful implementation of ideas, needs and wills of the neighbourhood inhabitants to make the multifunctional centre theirs. Shortcomings can be understood as a combination of the nature of the experiment, the key stakeholders and their role, the extent of participation and the expectations contra the implementation. It is evident that there was a certain degree of dissonance between expectations on the participation processes and the results where key stakeholders asserted inertia in the further development of the centre. The participation was also demanding on all interest groups, causing long discussions as hundreds of participants were expressing their views on how the centre should be redeveloped. These factors ultimately dragged out the process, leaving the centre in a prolonged state of disarray where certain aspects stayed in an undesirable state. The paper aims at closing the gap in the evaluation of participatory processes and investigations into real life case studies to better understand the limits and basis of user involvement in design processes. This is done through looking at archival material and first hand accounts of the intentions and actions of key stakeholders given at the time of the experiment together with second hand sources giving a theoretical background through which an evaluation can be made.