How can we plan and manage together our cities as a commons? Civic Art, Applied Anthropology and collaborative planning

Abstract

Our daily territories are built by traditional planning that not only use sophisticated methods of decision top-down, but is also influenced by strong economic interests. Therefore, this kind of process imposes technocratic and political important changes in the ecosystem and living space of people without their awareness about what is happening around. This article presents a growing alternative in territorial planning that has drawn from various disciplines as well as social and historical circumstances constantly changing over the last forty years.

Since the 70s and 80s several social and academic movements begin to question the logic of rational and authoritarian planning as well as experiment methods and techniques that involve people participation to bring processes into the sphere of everyday life needs. From this emerging point of view, Urban or Regional Planning was seen as an opportunity, a tool to recognize the resources of territories and reposition the capabilities and role of local communities in the protection and management of their commons (Alexander, 1977).

In the 90s social sciences that started to work with planning processes, particularly anthropology, indicated that this view was not complete because the lack of attention to cultural issues and local identity, underlining the need to add this fundamental dimension to planning(Althabe and Selim, 2000). In the early 2000s, the revolution in multimedia languages ​​and consolidation of Civic Art end to form a transdisciplinary scenario that we call collaborative planning. That means hundreds of experiences of emerging democracy in the world with the collaboration of artists, planners, universities, local governments and communities, reinforcing the practice of Do it Yourself, against total democratic delegate. In that sense, there has been a great work in the last years in order to find better methodologies to safeguard natural and social commons (Ostrom, 2005) as well as understand how to make a collective management of them.