Constructing Civic Spaces
M.P. Barth (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
J.P.M. van Lierop – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
A.M.R. van der Meij – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Contemporary public space is increasingly shaped by the twin pressures of under- and over-management, both of which erode its publicness and its capacity to host the collective practices through which communities sustain themselves. This thesis asks how architecture might instead construct civic space: a form of public space genuinely open to appropriation, in which people hold direct influence over the environment they share.
The argument is grounded in Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, read through Christian Schmid. It sets the fractured logic of abstract space, where plans and rationality dominate, against differential space, where lived experience is returned to the dialectic through autogestion, or self-management. El Campo de Cebada in Madrid serves as a case study, and grounds a critique of the architect’s tendency to author complete, fixed environments that predetermine their own use.
These ideas are tested in a design for the forgotten centre of Gran San Blas, a peripheral social-housing neighbourhood in Madrid: a deliberately incomplete civic centre, an open square, flexible workshops, and a convertible forum, built in rammed earth from the site and finished over time by its users. The thesis closes by reflecting on the architect’s enduring position of power.