THE TRANSFORMATION OF CITY CENTRE ‘INDUSTRIAL ZONES’: THINKERS AND MAKERS
A number of years ago already,9 UN Habitat, a program of the United Nations, made the “Productive City” one of its central campaigns. The aim was the inclusion of that segment of the population that either came to be excluded from urban economic cycles in the process of the transformation of the city into a knowledge society, or else — as migrants — were never integrated into them in the first place. With the “reappropriation of industrial zones” in European cities, it is a question of who remains inside, and who outside. It was for this reason that in the course of the reactivation of inner-city industrial terrain, Kristiaan Borret, the Bouwmeester of Brussels Capital Region, coloured a large map with blue and red, which corresponded to the categories “makers” and “thinkers” (fig.18). With this distinction, he highlighted their shared significance for the future restructuring of the city centre canal zone. The distinction was also decisive for public debates because it put out of play the notion, virulent for a number of years already, that the “creative class” was the decisive tip of the spear when it came to the reactivation of urban spatial reserves. A series of competition participants employed the categories thinkers and makers, for example the special mention in Bègles, Toolkit City (fig.19). For the architects and planners of Europan 14, this perspective 18 — THINKERS VERSUS MAKERS — BRUSSELS © ARCHITECTURE WORKROOM BRUSSELS, 2016
of thinkers and makers meant regarding the “industrial zones”, with their total inventory of components and
responses were correspondingly tentative in nature.
forms, as spatial resources, and avoiding their selective
How can digitalization be deployed both effectively
compartmentalization. To define the productive city for
and critically in the transformation of such peripheral
the coming years means to comprehend the city, with
urban environments? To be sure, the firms behind smart
all of its components, on behalf of the population as
digital city technologies promise more effective forms
a whole, of all user groups. The productive city — the
of management when it comes to energy provision and
space that looks at us.
mobile connections — two themes of great importance for the opening up of “industrial zones”. For the most part, however, smart city firms are only interested in local systems designed to improve municipal communication between residents and temporally coordinated utilizations of public spaces to the extent that such optimization can be further commercialized. Meanwhile, the schisms that exist between improvements in the utilized area, the marketing of interests, and the screening of users remains unresolved. Among the few examples which consciously instrumentalize digitalization as the basis of the design concept is the municipal revitalization of building structures by the runner-up in Grigny & Ris-Orangis, Terres Vives, les nouveaux communaux (fig.17). Apart from the somewhat disconcerting proximity to the Chinese system of rewards for exemplary behaviour, this case demonstrates how, under the motto of the productive city, and taking advantage of the resources offered by digitalization, questions of social cooperation, with corresponding value creation for all, can be thought through further.
Ghirri, Luigi <1985> (2017), The Complete Essays 1973 – 1977, London: Mack, p. 91. 2 The photograph illustrated here, from the series “Il profilo delle nuvole” (The profile of the clouds) shows the crossing of Via Berenini and Via Carducci in Fidenza with the city centre industrial area to the rest of the train station. 3 Moore, Rowan (2015) London, “The City that Ate Itself”, in The Guardian, May 28, 2015. 4 Läpple, Dieter (2016), “Produktion zurück in die Stadt. Ein Plädoyer”, in Stadtbauwelt 211, p.22. 5 Geipel, Kaye (2016), “Stadt = Wohnen und Gewerbe. Stimmt die Formel?”, in Stadtbauwelt 211, p.20. 6 Interboro (2017), The Arsenal of Exclusion, Madrid: Actar Publishers. 7 The French Europan President during a discussion that took place on October 21, 2017 at the Europan Forum in Helsinki (FI) 8 Sassen, Saskia (2006), “Urban Manufacturing: Economy, Space and Politics in Today’s Cities”, in Erfolgreiche Innenstädte. Handeln - Koordinieren Integrieren. 9 http://mirror.unhabitat.org/categories.asp?catid=683 1
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