Travail artisanal et production de l'espace bruxellois. Prototype d'atlas lisuel

In Brussels today we can observe a proliferation of initiatives that reject the utilitarian framework which society, since industrialisation, has imposed upon the notion of work. Architects of their own lives, their adherents approach work as an existential value. They shift the classical boundaries between the time of labour and domestic reproduction, the time of imagination and creation of an irreplaceable and unique existence, and the time of public activity. They occupy new spaces and networks, transforming labour's relationship to the city and to inhabiting the city.The author has taken this phenomenon as the basis for an investigation conducted at the intersection where the cultures of town planning, of art history, and of anthropology meet. Bypassing classic definitions that reduce labour and employment to the functions of growth and the accumulation of capital, it tests the perception that this proliferation of initiatives is part of the tradition of urban craftsmanship. She will seek theoretical reference points in the work of authors such as F. Braudel, K. Polanyi, H. Arendt, W. Morris, I. Ilitch, K. Lynch, C. Alexander, and A. Corboz. Her question becomes: how do artisans and artisanal work spaces contribute to the production of the city as a place for living?Answering this question requires staking a position on writing the history carried by maps and city plans, which generally overlook the role of subordinates. This is what led the author to experiment with a lisuel method a cartographic reading allowing identification of the traces artisanal lives leave imprinted in maps' negative space. The experiment uses three maps drawn at key moments in the city's economic history: the noble city (c.1770), the new industrial Brussels (1910), and productive Brussels (2018). The method consists of reading in reverse the story the three maps convey by relying on a hypertextual corpus which makes it possible to adjust our perception of the scene and to spotlight a sample of the artisanal lives embedded in the maps' negative space.This investigation, which makes no claim to being exhaustive, reveals profiles of itinerant craftspeople open to cooperation and interculturality of different kinds and at different scales. It testifies to the complexity of the links between craft, industry, and art, revealing the lives of craftsmen dedicated to the enhancement and transformation of non-relocatable public goods such as territorial knowledge, public space, and the landscapes of movement.We see revealed an art of composing a singular spatiality, articulating the first location of the home, the second location of labour, and the third places of the exercise of public life. Materially, this produces the buildings that accommodate the activities and public spaces which they take part in structuring.The imprint of artisanal lifestyles in the fabrics of the city contributes incrementally to the production of space as well as to a collective process of structuring a singular urban sociability, which the author calls communality. The result of this experimental exercise is a prototype atlas showing the pattern language mobilised by artisans to write, in a vernacular mode, the space of this commonality.

Re-imagining the collective space

Valentin Daniel Maurice Bourdon

Reproduction can be perceived in two opposite ways from the urban planning point of view, both as a driving force and as a braking weight. Driving force because urban phenomena are precisely produced by re-producing, and especially by reproducing the fundamental relation between public space and private volumes. Strength and longevity of traditional cities usually come from continuities, and peculiarly from this elementary one. The renunciation of this substantial quality is undoubtedly one of the main criticisms addressed to the modern movement. Rediscovered at the end of the 20th century, it could again be underestimated at the dawn of this new century, characterized by reinvention, rupture and search for alternatives. Nowadays, reproduction is widely associated to a deep negative connotation: as an obstacle to personal overtaking, or a resistance to collective innovation. But according to sustainability perspectives, there are probably still lessons to be learned from the urban capacity to cross time with the same intensity. Even to support alternatives, part of continuity can be useful, by imputing historical thickness in vulnerable innovations. While keeping a critical attention, it may be appropriate, even today, to consider reproduction as an urban potentiality. As Bernardo Secchi noted in La ville des riches et la ville des pauvres, urban planning - but also architecture in the largest sense - should take advantage of the capacity of space to oppose the resistance of its own inertia to social change (SECCHI, 2013). He also attributes to space the capacity of proposing an oriented trajectory, linked to this pre-existing form. In this context, the ambiguous trajectory given by the powerful relationship between public and private space deserves to be attentively studied. A careful reading of the evolution of this central dualism reveals the relatively silent presence of a third entity: the collective space. In comparison with the importance of a third way in economic and political fields (OSTROM, 1990), architecture seems to suffer from a significant gap. This transdisciplinary approach brings to light, in the architectural domain, the theoretical discontinuity that has long been given to intermediate space, between public space and private property. The architectural challenge around its own third way has long been reduced to the gradual register, without asserting itself as a status, necessary and complementary to the other two components of urbanity. As a very ancient urban element, and relatively recurrent in the formation of cities, collective space presents both all the transcendent abilities of reproduction, but also a precious flexibility mainly linked to its absence of theoretical formulation. Let's give a new emancipated orientation to this underestimated component, overshadowed by a rooted binary reading of the city.

2018

Re-imagining the collective space

Valentin Daniel Maurice Bourdon

2018