It Is All About Openness

BB: BASTA is five years old now, and we started at school. Kenny and I met in the Netherlands, where we both studied landscape architecture. And that was really necessary to understand landscape and to see it as the ‘big picture’. Many schools consider landscape to be very local and narrow, but it always starts with good education – you should always think about the landscape as a whole. That’s a good starting point. Then, let’s say, we drank beer together, worked on projects at school, and discovered ELASA – the European Landscape Architecture Student Association.

We went to one of their meetings, and at the time, we didn’t know what it was. We met a lot of colleagues from across Europe. For us, rooted in the Western European context, knowing countries like France, Belgium, England, and Spain very well, it was a great experience to meet people from Central and Eastern European countries – Hungary, Serbia, Poland, and a whole bunch of others. It was really eye-opening, mind-opening. And for us, it all started there, at ELASA.

Then we met Le Balto there. They gave a lecture on temporary installations in urban spaces – what they do, how they interact with people. It was something very fresh for us: that landscape architecture doesn’t always have to be about big projects with stone and huge budgets in the traditional way. What they showed us was something completely different, something that touches your senses.

So, education in the Netherlands and then meeting at ELASA and Le Balto were very much our starting points – the beginning of a broader view. And then, yes, we met Wagon, and we worked together. All the things we saw, we brought back home and started some projects here. So, the first project was a hospital, where we began with the idea of urban wastelands, rebuilding them through small-scale interventions with a small budget and an open-minded approach to working. We were also interested in participation, yes. But participation has become such a buzzword now.

BB: [laughs] We are not experts, we’re definitely not participatory design experts.

BB: Voilà. We do it from the gut.

BB: Yes, exactly. We were quite young in our career. So, there was a neighborhood in Ghent that was very wealthy back in the day, but now it’s a rather poor district. A lot of people moving in – it’s a transit zone for many immigrants, many foreigners arriving in Belgium. They go to live in Rabot; some of them stay there, while others move on very quickly. So, you have new inhabitants and Ghent residents who have lived in the area for a long time. And they’ve seen their neighborhood decline. Urban spaces were developed in a negative way. Benches were taken out, playgrounds were removed – all for reasons of “social security,” let’s say. And so Dimitri, who works for the city’s social services, came to us with the project.

In Ghent, all the city services work closely together. The workers from different city departments collaborate a lot. Dimitri had a very small budget and a project to rebuild the urban space, and he really wanted to change the environment of Rabot in a positive way. To put benches back in, to bring back the playgrounds. So he came to us, and that’s how we started. And all of this was supposed to happen in a participatory way – both in the design phase, the construction phase, and the maintenance phase. And that was the beginning.

BB: Yes, it was a small budget to start with, just one intervention, one thing to do. But there was also the City of Ghent’s master plan for this part of the city. So they were focused on large-scale thinking; they had a lot of analyses about this neighborhood and its surroundings. In the beginning, we felt like we were doing double work. All these analyses we had, all these top-down ideas – “big structures” – that thinking was already done. We said we would begin at the bottom, rethink small spaces. In this way, we created 1:1 models to try things directly in the urban space, to make new temporary designs, temporary interventions.

So, when the designers who are thinking about the neighborhood’s future on a large scale, in 10 years, come to implement their design, they should see what we have already tried. We tested several things, and then they could be inspired to create more durable projects, learning from what we did. What we did was temporary – low-cost materials, interventions planned for 5-10 years at most. So that’s what I meant when I said we started from the bottom. The master plan – they’re thinking on a large scale, and over time, we were supposed to meet at some point with our bottom-up project. So that was the main idea behind the project. The neighborhood was quite large, and we had the idea of doing it piece by piece every year. We had a general plan for the neighborhood, and we could move step by step with the interventions.

BB: No, not anymore. I think it’s done, more or less. We “did” a lot of spots in this neighborhood. I think it was a good start, good work, and now the job is to maintain it well. Then we can build on.

BB: Voilà. And I also think spatial tests like this one shouldn’t be just about building. It’s not always about building in order to have things grow or move on. Maintenance, use, and all these little things are great signs that a project is moving forward. If we build again, and the residents don’t use it, and it’s not maintained, then we should stop.

BB: Well, we don’t see it a lot, as we’re not based in Ghent and don’t live there. So, we can’t say we see what’s happening on a daily basis. But sometimes, when we were there, we had the feeling there wasn’t enough attention to maintenance. I think it was due to complications. But I saw that they started again with maintenance, and I think it’s going well over there. I can’t imagine this project would be considered a bad idea. Just small-scale things – if they maintain it and use it, I think it can’t be wrong.

BB: Yes, we did. There was this dog space design that we changed two days before construction.

BB: Well, there was a big block of flats under construction, and the garden was just around this block. Nobody had said anything during the consultation, because there were no residents yet. I remember, I went there two days before the intervention was planned to happen, just to check everything on site, to see if we could start. Then, there was a lady on the first floor of this brand-new building, moving in. Her boxes were in the apartment. So we started talking, and she asked what we were doing. I explained, and then she said she really liked the project, but didn’t want dogs to be there, just in front of her windows.

BB: Yes, actually, the dog space was moved to the other side of the area.

BB: No, it went as planned. And we had to do it this way. Her point was clear, and she was right – it was a bad idea. And yes, if you do a lot of analysis of the space and you have all this data, you have all the pieces of the puzzle. Sometimes, you just need to put them in another way than you thought you would. So, you just have to keep your mind open and be reactive because situations like this happen. And if you react, then everything – all the pieces of the puzzle – fall into place. Some time later, this lady had another complaint about something else, but we didn’t agree, so it stayed as it was supposed to. We didn’t do it the way she wanted. And I think that’s also participation: reacting to what happens, in a positive or negative way. If you don’t react, then there’s nothing participatory about it.

BB: Well, I understand the idea, but I don’t like thinking of our work there in those terms. If you say “animator” or “cultural animator,” I understand it as someone who keeps kids or adults busy. And this is a concept we do not support at BASTA. It’s a waste of time and money. It’s this kind of thinking – keep them busy so they won’t complain. What we do isn’t animation – we want to change things. There are some studios that do cultural animation, as I understand it. They go with some plants and tools, dig, plant, take pictures, and then leave. It’s a short-term thing for them.

BB: Let’s say a carnival is animation, a party is animation, and yes, we did some animation in Ghent. But we’d rather disagree, discuss, and debate, than just please and entertain the residents.

BB: Challenging? Yes. But it’s just part of the job. You’re paid for it, you know how much, and you know there are other people involved. So yes, it’s challenging. And Rabot, yes, it was challenging because we hadn’t done it this way before.

BB: Yes, but the way we do projects is step by step. We took some of the methods for running and doing interventions from Le Balto, but I think we’ve incorporated more and more participative approaches in our work at BASTA. We’re growing step by step. Every new project is a new step and a new challenge. And when it comes to participatory projects, there’s always a challenge. The question is what participation means in a particular project.

Our first project – the Rainbow Garden – was just a spontaneous action, and the biggest challenge was figuring out how to make a spontaneous interaction happen. Very different now, there’s a new project – the Textile Museum. It’s really the one where the fashionable word “participation” was used from the beginning. It’s a new government here in Kortrijk, and they wanted a participatory process. We didn’t really see how to make this project participatory design. For us, the challenge was to make it useful. There was no way we could build it together with the investors; they could maybe help a bit with the construction.

We came up with the idea that they could tell their stories about the textile industry – both the museum and the local residents – and we would incorporate those stories into the garden. People from the neighborhood can find their stories in the garden, and that way, it becomes their garden too. And for me, that was useful “participation”. This is the main question for us always: what is this “participation” useful for? Why do we do it? If you can answer that question, then you have a good participatory project.

BB: I can’t imagine why. You’re always searching for interaction. If you don’t do it, then there’s a risk that the project will come to the point where it’s too late to react, and then you’ll have problems.

BB: It comes from both sides. There’s always a question, and we react to it while keeping our minds open. We create a dossier that shows who we want to reach with the project, how we’ll do it, and what the goal is. It’s a process scheme we have for the project. And in all phases, we show how we imagine people will be involved. Then it’s really clear for everyone. Some of our earlier projects were done more ad-hoc, but now we always plan it this way and inform the investor about how we imagine the process. And for us as designers, it’s also a way of organizing our work and the amount of hours we spend. This way, you can also easily convince the investor that the participatory design tasks, workshops, and talking to people are a necessary part of your work, just like drawing and designing. If you present it well, they’ll understand. Then, they take you seriously, and people come back to you with new projects.