Practical Ambivalence
“Practical Ambivalence: A Dialogical Approach to Design and Public Space”. In Writingplace. K. Havik et al. (dir.). Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers.
How should we approach the task of designing for the public realm once we recognise the paradoxes that mark our conceptions of publics and public space? The difficulty, for critical practice, rests on reconciling the act of significantly affecting the social and built environment of others, while opening up the same process to their agency. In addressing this question, this chapter develops a framework for design and public space based on the dialogical theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. It suggests that the range of concepts Bakhtin develops from literature, linguistics and creative acts like writing, concepts related under the broad notion of dialogue (Holloway and Kneale 83), are particularly relevant when it comes to understanding design and public space as open, collective and ultimately unfinalisable processes. In this sense, dialogism offers critical insights into critical spatial practices that treat contemporary public space as an agonistic and continuing negotiation (as supported by the respective work of Chantal Mouffe and Doreen Massey). With regards to design, the chapter suggests that the paradoxes and incongruences inherent to designing public space—that neither publics nor public spaces are ever well-defined—can be reconciled under the notion of practical ambivalence. This notion recognises that if design is treated as a narrative, then its degree of ambivalence is the extent to which the narrative remains open in a dialogical sense. […]
