Today we are experiencing, in the fields of architecture and design but also in the context of emergence of a social and solidarity economy, a renewed interest for “making” and for a revival of the tradition of Do It Yourself (DIY). These issues concern the professionals of culture as much as the representatives of the civil society. We are rediscovering craftsmanship, but in the current context characterized by the power of the new digital tools, so that numerous observers can speak of a new “digital” or “industrial” craftsmanship.
Especially in urban areas, “third places” appear, creating intermediate spaces between the private and public domain, relational spaces where the meetings which occur have more importance than the things produced, places which build themselves around new links, so that “making” becomes again a way to act in common.
This issue of CPCL aims at building a typology of these places and their functions in contemporary spaces. It is very difficult to propose a mapping of these new places, because they appear, are transformed and disappear at high speed and because they associate physical places with virtual spaces. What are the commonalities, but also the differences and the specificities of places as diverse as cafés, business incubators, spaces of manufacturing, spaces for meetings or work, which nevertheless recognize themselves every under the still very vague label of “third places”?
In 1958, in The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt explored the opposition between “making” and “acting” as two different modalities of the vita activa, an opposition established on the division between public and private spaces. Labor locks the workers in the private space of their activity and excludes them from the common, while action (in particular in its political shape) produces a shared space and establishes the network of human relations. How can “third places” contribute to redefine these traditional boundaries between “making” and “acting,” between labor, work and action (to resume the three Arendt’s fundamental categories)?
The discussions on the ways to “make in common” are an essential component of “third places” and makerspaces: within them, creators and users think collectively about the way in which “making” can produce new definitions of the common. What is the nature of these debates which spread around “making”?
The issue opens with a contribution by the anthropologist Tim Ingold, whose thinking has contributed to a deep change in the way we think about “making,” in its relationship with the environment (human and non-human). Ingold starts with an analysis of savoir-faire (know-how) as a fruit of a habitus. This term does not refer in this article to Bourdieu’s theories, but rather to the way Marcel Mauss used it in his essays on “Techniques of the Body” in 1934. In this sense, the habit of craftsmen, artisans, designers but also scholars or musicians is a form of embodied knowledge. Ingold shows—thus overcoming the classic dichotomy between work and words, action and language—that this knowledge is never silent and mute, but is accompanied by words, by the ability to say it and tell it. According to him, therefore, “craft is a way of telling,” and “making” is a processual and haptic narrative (open to others and open to the world).
The article by the philosopher Ivano Gorzanelli crosses Richard Sennett’s theories on the “open city,” Tim Ingold’s on “making” and Bruno Latour’s critique of modernity and its false dichotomies between the respective fields of “Nature” and “Culture.” These three contemporary thinkers draw, each from their own point of view, a moving, processual reality in which the nature of the project (landscape, architecture, design, etc.) must be radically rethought, particularly in the context of a new “modesty” on the part of the designer, called upon to create connections between humans and non-humans (materials, natural resources, technical artefacts) instead of playing the role of a demiurge free of all constraints.
These three perspectives call, each in their own way, for new thoughts and practices of what Ingold calls the “in-between”: porous borders, interstices, membranes (Sennett). The question that guides the article is therefore the following: “what remains of the project?” in a context of global redefinition of our links to the world, to nature, of the impact of our techniques on our environment, of the meaning of “making” (inseparable from that of “thinking” and “feeling”). A question that obviously remains open, but which pertinently identifies the problems that today's designers (creators of artefacts, networks, relationships, buildings or spaces) are confronted with.
The Maker Movement has contributed in recent years, at the international level, to this reflection on the evolution of “making,” by creating new spaces with hybrid functions where artisans of a new kind operate and meet. The article by Massimo Menichelli and Alessandra Gerson Saltiel Schmidt proposes a cartography of this galaxy with shifting contours, which brings together a vast typology of spaces and practices (FabLabs, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces, etc.) that share the desire to closely associate new ways of making with the political ambition to create democratic spaces for sharing and pooling knowledge.
The following article by Bastian Lange, Steve Harding and Tom Cahill-Jones restricts the focus to the European models of the movement and the emergence of a policy making practice that is gradually developing in various cities. It thus shows the multiplicity of actors (local administrations, universities, educational institutions) involved in these processes at the European level and the importance of the role of universities, which implement in their relations with third spaces their “third mission” (after the two missions of teaching and research). Third mission includes cooperation projects with partners outside the higher education landscape and creates new forms of collaboration between education, research and civil society. Andrea Cattabriga then analyses these transformations in one of the Italian regions more open to innovation, Emilia-Romagna. The regional makerspace network in Emilia-Romagna is aimed at connecting local makerspaces, Fab Labs and hackerspaces, in the context of innovation.
The last paper, authored by Donna Cohen, Charlie Hailey and DK Osseo-Assare, presents a project which rethinks architectural work in the context of waste (the Repurpose Project). Located in a university town in Florida's north region, the Repurpose Project promotes reuse of materials and presents itself as a “spatial common” that questions architectural practices, in order to make them evolve towards an approach that consumes fewer resources and materials, focused on co-creation experiences.
All of these texts (supplemented by the “Miscellanea” and “Practices” sections and the case study analyses they contain) show how closely the new spaces of commons associate spatial models, models of making and political ambitions. They thus become an opportunity for the emergence of new porosities in urban spaces—where they are currently concentrated—for combining local dynamics with global dynamics, and actively contribute to the emergence of new paradigms of production and consumption, as well as to contribute to the political debate on the nature and scope of the common and commons goods.
In conclusion, the whole issue can be seen as an attempt to answer collectively the question posed at the beginning by Ivano Gorzanelli: “what remains of the project?” We must understand the full polysemic scope of the word “project,” which extends from design practices to political ecology. This work has been prepared in advance by a collective debate in two phases: an Italian-French research workshop which took place in Paris, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris Val de Seine on May 13 and 14, 2019 and a seminar with Tim Ingold at the University of Bologna on October 8, 2019 on his book Making. Anthropology, archaelogy, art and architecture.
Special thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers who made this issue possible with their comments and insights: Lucia Baima, Alice Borchi, Saveria Boulanger, Amanda Brandellero, Nancy Couling, Ioanni Delsante, Valentina Gianfrate, Vincent Jacques, Viviana Lorenzo, Victor Muñoz Sanz, Valentina Porcellana, Jörg Schröder, Emanuele Sommariva, Antonella Tufano.