'“The Hole of the World”: Designing Possibility through Topography in Congo's Urban Settings'

Design appears increasingly to be presented as a way of overcoming the limits of planning (Cowley, this issue). But what about the limits of design? Tkacz (this issue) reminds us that the distributed agency implied by design thinking should not be equated with the state or other powerful actors ‘taking no action or letting things be’. But what might design – or resilience – mean in a context where the state has become but one actor amongst many others, where the provision of formal infrastructure has become rare and insufficient, and where urban master plans never seem to materialize in any predictable way, if at all? Here I draw on my long field research experiences in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) to problematise the norm of living with uncertainty. I observe that local residents do ‘cope’ by investing the ‘hole’ of everyday life with their own meanings; but my tale, I hope, allegorically preempts an understanding of design as having replaced planning, or the desire that it should.

Jaar van publicatie:2017