Outlining the background: Crisis and/or opportunity?

1The essay investigates the process of professionalization (Hughes, 1963) of urban and architectural designers in the context of some major regeneration programs of deprived and peripheral neighborhoods developed between the 1990s and 2000s in different European countries. In doing so, the aim is to contribute through an in-depth and situated case study to a broader debate on design practices (Doucet, Frichot, 2018). Indeed, this contingency is particularly significant for investigating the construction and transmission of professional competencies and represents a paradigmatic case which allows to address broader questions (Flyvbjerg, 2006). On the one hand, the history of peripheral and marginalized urban areas bears evidence of a failure of urban planning and design in the public opinion. On the other hand, neighborhoods “in crisis” (Jacquier, 1991) gained public recognition in Europe in the last decade of the 20th century, creating the conditions for funding large-scale integrated projects that became a privileged testing ground for the revision of professional practice. From this season of renewal of public and professional action, a new approach to urban regeneration – often defined as area-based – emerged as a dominant paradigm in many Community and national initiatives in Europe (Tissot, 2007; Atkinson, 2008; Briata et al., 2009).

2For practitioners “the change […] occurs at many levels and attacks the dimensions of rules, actors and tools” (Pasqui, 2001: 11, translated by the author). In particular, architects engaged in this collective and integrated process of professionalization covering different professional roles: from those working within public offices; to those who benefited from a special relationship with the administrations (Cohen, Grossman, 2015); to internationally renowned figures who contributed to drawing public attention to the issue of urban peripheries (Urban Task Force, 1999; Guillot, 2009). Over the years, design experts – and the same could be said of many other categories of professionals – have thus worked to legitimize what has begun to be described as a specific professionalism that challenged traditional disciplinary categorizations. But while the history of area-based initiatives outlines the contours of an actual process of professional specialization progressively formalized in a repertoire of best practices (Bonetti et al., 1991; GHK, 2003), it also highlights its limits in terms of transferability and institutional renewal in the long-term.

Research methodology

5The text therefore combines the point of view – and words – of the protagonists of three area-based regeneration programs as they emerged from the analysis of direct sources, and the results of a rereading that, today, allows to grasp some critical aspects visible only in the long run. Indeed, the historical perspective adopted in the research provides a new angle to “change the focus and questions” (Fourcaut, 1999: 116), addressing the issue of how the actions of designers affect (or not) different contexts in a perspective that is both chronologically, geographically and disciplinarily extended. The aim is to make visible connections and logics that often remain implicit in the practice (Stengers, 2005; Doucet, Frichot, 2018) and, in doing so, to contribute to a broader disciplinary and academic debate.

6To this end, the results of the empirical research are combined with the pragmatist interpretative tools of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005; Felt et al., 2017). The work, therefore, looks at the contexts of professional action both in terms of physical places – neighborhoods, professional and public offices, etc. – and as collectives, or “procedure[s] for collecting associations of humans and nonhumans” (Latour, 2004: 238) around a common “matter of concern” (ivi: 244).

7The text is structured according to two levels of observation, corresponding to different contexts and moments – not necessarily successive, but often simultaneous in the programs – in the process of professionalization of urban regeneration practitioners. The operational field is the first level analyzed; the focus then shifts to the professional career on the one hand, and the institutional framework on the other, in order to question the way in which the competencies acquired in action are transferred and obtain public recognition and legitimacy. Consequently, throughout the text, architects are portrayed by means of the different roles they perform, moving from the figure of the “expert” (Dawson et al., 1993) to the “reflective practitioner” (Schön, 1983; Amendola, 2009), to the “reform conspirator” (Laino et al., 1994; Jacquier, 2015).

Construction: The implementation of competencies in and from action

8The first level of the process of professionalization discussed in this essay relates to the implementation of competencies in action as a result, directly, of the elaboration and reinterpretation of practices in a negotiating and relational dynamic and, indirectly, of the circulation of ideas and examples at the national and international scale. In this phase, practitioners act in a dual context: on the one hand in the neighborhoods targeted by the regeneration programs and on the other hand in the interdisciplinary working groups set up to pilot the projects.

9Although the empirical analysis was developed across different countries and temporalities, it is possible to identify a number of recurrences in the way professional action takes place throughout the programs. In particular, the practices implemented locally have been traced back to four macro-operations that characterize the regeneration programs under study: assembling, setting a perimeter, transformaing, achoring. Each of them involves a wide range of actants (Latour, 2005: 54) – including designers, politicians, residents, but also regulations, money, instruments, etc. – which determine the way these general operations are implemented in context-specific practices. After providing a quick description of each macro-operation, the focus will turn to discussing the role played by architects and the way it affected both the design process and their professional practice.

10The first group of practices refers to the assembly of the conditions defining the operational framework of regeneration initiatives. In the programs analyzed the assembly took the form of contractually formalized temporary working structures – Geddes (2000) defines the 1990s as the years of the “new orthodoxy” of local partnership. This is mainly due to exogenous and extraordinary resources employed for the activation of area-based programs in the 1990s. If on the one hand this allowed the development of exceptionally ambitious projects in a limited period of time, on the other it subjected the design action to a condition of temporariness. Consequently, the position assumed in the assembly phase determines the boundaries of designers’ action in the development of the program, their role and, eventually, the competencies they are called upon to mobilize. In both the cases of Turin and Edinburgh, the extraordinary structures set up to accompany the regeneration projects were absorbed into the ordinary administrative apparatuses at the end of the official programs, thus radically changing their role and scope for action. In Orly, instead, both the limited size of the municipality and the continuity of funding guaranteed by the French politique de la ville ensured greater consistency to the regeneration process of the grand ensemble.

12Accordingly, the agreement on perimeters is followed by the implementation of an integrated project aimed at the transformation of the targeted areas. In the area-based initiatives of 1990’s, urban transformation typically took shape in a broad spectrum of interventions – architectural, but also social and economic –, ranging from those aimed at restoring a state of recognized original or potential quality (e.g. Faure, 1996; Ferrante, 2013); to the fragmentation of what is described as a homogeneous and problematic area into smaller units (e.g. Castro, Denissof, 2005); to projects intended to generate a comprehensive transfiguration of the targeted areas (Lelévrier, Noyé, 2012). The Grand Ensemble of Orly, for example, has been the subject at different times of all these modes of intervention. If the 1980s are characterized by projects aimed at the rehabilitation of the existing neighborhoods of the Grand Ensemble, during the 1990s, practices of demolition and residentialization (Oddos, Geoffroy, 2007) aimed at structurally altering its physical and social fabric gained political and professional legitimacy.

13The fourth and last macro-operation involves all the measures implemented in the course of the programs which are explicitly aimed at anchoring (Agger et al., 2016) their results at the end of the initiatives − hence also at the end of extraordinary funding and the extraordinary presence of practitioners in the neighborhood. As a matter of fact, the exceptional nature of the initiatives implies, from an operation point of view, that the presence of professionals in the neighborhoods shall be “biodegradable” (Avedano, 2003). In other words, the goal of anchoring strategies is to ensure that when the extraordinary structures and measures are dismantled, both the territories and the institutions have acquired the necessary tools for ordinary management (Agger, Jensen, 2015). The case of the Turin Programma di Recupero Urbano is particularly exemplary in this regard. At the end of the program, an ad hoc Community Foundation was established with the explicit goal of “stabilizing the results of the urban regeneration process initiated by the city of Turin [...] through the valorization of private resources and their reinvestment in processes of common interest for the territory” (Fondazione della Comunità di Mirafiori ONLUS, 2017: 5, translated by the author).

14This reconstruction allows to put forward some specificities and criticalities that characterize the professional practice of architects in urban regeneration programs. First of all, professionals act in complex relational contexts, not only putting their technical knowledge at the service of a multidisciplinary collective, but also working for the capacitation of that collective. Moreover, they need to become familiar, on the one hand, with a context that presents exceptional and temporary structures and hierarchies and, on the other, with a long and stratified practice of inhabiting the neighborhoods (Amendola, 2009) – precisely what regeneration programs have often been accused of neglecting or oversimplifying (Allen, Bonetti, 2018). Uses, management and maintenance of spaces influence, therefore, the outcomes of a project as much as the design of the space, so that priority must be given to empowering processes. Ultimately, the role of the designers expands and calls into question meta-projectual competencies that can be summarized in the ability to “contextualize the action” (Laino, 2012: 183) by grasping and systematizing resources and processes characterized by a high level of unpredictability in a sustainable way with respect to a specific place.

15These considerations, which overall can be synthetized in a widespread demand of renewal in the professional practice, have been progressively brought into focus by the literature that has analyzed regeneration programs from within, i.e., from a contemporary or immediately subsequent perspective. A long-term observation allows not only to better systematize and conceptualize these reasoning, but also to highlight some critical steps.

16What emerges is the picture of a “reflective practice” based on both situated, adaptive and critical knowledge (Haraway, 1988) that relies on different forms of “tacit knowing-in-action” (Schön, 1983: 49-50), in the continuous and osmotic interaction with places, tools and actors. However, unlike Schön’s practitioner, who remains in a position of centrality in the cognitive process, the critical reflexivity of regeneration designers is an attitude dependent on external phenomena and on other professionalisms (Amendola, 2009). We deal with a “cross-fertilization” (Jacquier, 2015: 61) in which the advancement of a collective and complex process depends on the strengthening of individual competencies, that is, on “a work on the ‘cognitive’ ground from which new frames take shape that redefine both the situation and the actors.” (Bifulco, de Leonardis, 2006: 41, translated by the author). The reflective practice therefore represents for the professionals involved in the programs a specific form of “empowerment-in-practice” (Adams, 1996: 38), which becomes manifest in an extension of both their skills and their social capital, understood here as “the norms and networks that enable people to act collectively” (Woolcock, Narayan, 2000: 226).

17Many of the problems encountered in the case studies (see the next paragraph) are related to a non-strategic formulation of the professional mandate, which tends to put architects in a weak position within the process, limiting their perspective and scope for action to a marginal and technical portion of the problem. When they had a more pronounced influence on the long-term impacts of regeneration, architects instead held direct roles in the administration or partnerships. In other words, the technical skills of the designers have become relevant only if they were expressed within the collective at the appropriate time and in the appropriate form, i.e. during the construction of the context/collective itself.

Contamination: Individual careers and ex-post transferability

18As a further step, the research investigates the relationship between the acquisition of competencies on an individual level and their possible transfer through and beyond the “careers” of professionals (Goffman, 1959). How can this tacit knowledge based on direct experience be generalized and transferred to a collective dimension at the end of the programs? In order to answer this question, the competencies implemented in the area-based initiatives have been investigated in relation to their journey across longer professional and personal trajectories, questioning the impacts that they have produced on other collectives.

19To this end, from a methodological point of view the research work shifted from consultation of direct and archival sources to the assemblage of academic interpretations concerning the evolution of architects’ professional practice and nonacademic narratives related to the long-term impacts of the three regeneration projects object of the empirical study. Special attention was paid to the reconstruction of the working biography of the protagonists of the projects with the aim of interrogating the transferability of practices and skills along their career path.

22A further level of contamination concerns the institutional-regulatory sphere. The reform of the institutional context was, in fact, a priority objective for the proponents of area-based initiatives, explicitly oriented towards “an in-depth transformation of the ways of doing things, of behaviors and of the logic of action of public and private actors” (Jacquier, 1991: 30, translated by the author).

23To address the issue of institutional innovation, a metaphor widely used in the public debate of the 1990s was the binomial network/framework. According to this interpretation, the network would represent an alternative and a complement to an institutional framework structurally destined to leave behind some gray areas – in this case, the neighborhoods in crisis.

These network and framework models are not mutually incompatible. To the contrary they can form a symbiosis, even if it is occasionally conflictual. Partnership organizations, these latter-day Trojan horses, seek to foster this co-existence in order to regenerate, at the margins, the traditional institutions. (Dawson et al., 1993: 46).

24For those reform conspirators (Laino et al., 1994; Jacquier, 2015) who patiently guided the emergence of the area-based approach across different contexts, the ultimate target was, therefore, the very institutional architecture in the backdrop of the programs. This meant, however, going beyond the goals and scope of a single regeneration program and using it as a trigger for a wider reform of the overall institutional and professional context.

26The proliferation of handbooks and reports bears witness of a season of political success of area-based initiatives in Europe – and, accordingly, of the progressive legitimation of urban regeneration experts. However, in the history of area-based initiatives, the structural innovation of the very tools and rules that define the context for professional actions turned out to be a much more controversial goal. In retrospect, many sources recognized in the exceptionality of the conditions characterizing the area-based initiatives of the 1990’s the cause of their difficult reproducibility and the main symptom of their limitations as benchmark urban policy (Carpenter, 2006; Tosi, 2004; specific to the case of Turin see: Fioretti, 2008).

27Outside the perimeters of the programs, the renewal of the professional and institutional framework has collided with a sectoral working practice extremely entrenched in both the bureaucracies and the habits of public offices. The progressive accreditation of new working methods and professional figures, while undeniable, is therefore to be read as the partial outcome of an unfulfilled process of innovation. Following the path through which practices and tools have been deposited and evolved in the working routines of administrations and professional offices, the traces of innovation are rather found in the single device or episode. “The concept of ‘bricolage’ is pertinent, where ‘bits and pieces of the existing ideational and institutional legacy are put together in new forms’” (Mendez, 2013: 641).

28If bottom-up contamination does not trigger innovations in the structural framework, the risk is, therefore, that the capital of knowledge and skills acquired in the programs will remain bound to the volubility of individual trajectories and/or frustrations. The conditions for an effective public capitalization of this legacy would therefore reside both in the acknowledgement and in the overcoming of the scale of the proximity of neighborhoods as “local laboratories” (Bacqué et al., 2005) and of individuals as conspirators of innovation.

Final Remarks: The Value of Indefiniteness

29The history of area-based regeneration programs of the 1980s and 1990s is usually recounted as a successful parable that pioneered highly innovative models of work or, on the contrary, as a season of policies which failed to tackle structural problems. This article offers new insights to overcome this success-failure binomial and question (I) what is the legacy of this experience in terms of knowledge and competencies acquired by professionals in the short and long time and (II) how it contributed to the professionalization process of the urban and architectural designers who took part in it.

30Regeneration programs have actually proven to be extremely productive places for professional innovation, architectural and otherwise, which initiated a long process of legitimation and accreditation of the figure of the urban regeneration expert. Places where “public choices and collective behaviors interact strongly with the real life of institutions – changing them, consuming them, renewing them, confronting them.” (Donolo, 1997: 8). But also places – or rather collectives – that have shown their limits in the very conditions of exceptionalism within which they operated. Even among the protagonists of the programs of the 1990s, what prevails is, indeed, the depiction of a season of exceptional but unaccomplished experimentation.

31While accepting the impossibility to generalize a universally valid working model – or even one that can be transmitted through a “mute” repertoire of best practices –, what this experiences can help to outline is “a ‘theory of action’ to which [actors] have recourse in a rhapsodic, commingled, cross-cutting, and diverse manner depending on occasion and conjuncture.” (Crosta, 1998: 8). In the history of area-based initiatives, this very indeterminateness has proven to be of great practical use in the implementation of programs, an essential condition for individual and collective learning and innovation. For innovation to occur, the collectives responsible for regeneration must therefore function as adaptive systems capable of responding to evolving and unforeseen circumstances. They must, consequently, rely on a high level of interpretability and/or ambiguity. But, as March (1991: 71) points out:

Adaptive systems that engage in exploration to the exclusion of exploitation are likely to find that they suffer the costs of experimentation without gaining many of its benefits. They exhibit too many undeveloped new ideas and too little distinctive competence.

32In the programs, this risk became manifest in a widespread propensity to work in a restricted – and, as such, effective – field of action, bypassing the most bureaucratized and cumbersome procedures. However, renouncing the contamination of institutions and ordinary bureaucracies also means circumscribing the professional role to a restricted sphere, to a nucleus of experts who, at the end of the programs, do not dispose of the frameworks necessary to transmit or fully legitimize the experiences gained in action.

33The professionalization of urban regeneration experts is, therefore, not a linear trajectory. It is, rather, a path that can be reconstructed only by delving into the “interstices of ‘innovative’ actions of urban regeneration” (Tedesco, 2011), in the most hidden legacies left in the places, people and institutions. As a consequence, a particularly critical node resides in the transferability of this kind of legacy, which highlights a discrepancy between careers and best practices. That is, between competencies based on the reflective ability of architects to interpret their role in a social context (Hughes, 1963), and a crystallized repertoire of practices circulated independently of the rhythms and the contexts on which they depend. In order to contribute to an actual professional legitimation of architects as urban regeneration practitioners, the challenge, inaugurated but not concluded by the programs of the 1990s, lies therefore in an overhaul of institutional systems of power capable of opening some cracks to new forms of effective empowerment (Taylor, 2000: 1033).

34Towards this end – which transcends the scope of this work –, the capitalization of relevant experiences is a key step for increasing scientific understanding of the interaction between architectural practice and urban development processes – and vice versa – and for raising questions that require further investigation. Two issues emerged from the history of area-based regeneration programs, in particular, are considered critical to current professional practice and teaching: how to transfer those soft competencies, which enable architects to put their technical expertise to work in complex decision-making contexts? And how design processes can be intentionally used as a means to promote not just contingent outcomes, but structural professional and institutional innovation?