Neighbourhood resilience in mass housing: Co-production via research-by-design

In the debate on neighbourhood resilience, there is a demand for co-production involving inhabitants in adaptation processes. Neighbourhood resilience is discussed in terms of economic, ecological and socio-political capacities, making place-people relations a key factor. Academia-led research-by-design projects are engaging in resilience-building, but professional roles are still unclear. Architects, planners and urban designers often have limited knowledge about the specific community and the socio-economic impacts of their projects. This especially occurs in modernist mass-housing settlements within current conditions of neo-liberalization. Here, inhabitants and designers have only limited access to decision-making power and resources. More significantly, the spatial improvements might endanger major resources: the social cohesion and affordability of the neighbourhood. Using the concepts of collaboration (versus cooperation) and resourcefulness (versus resilience), this paper discusses the advantages and limits of academic design projects using two cases from the Academy of a New Gropiusstadt (AnG) in Berlin, Germany. Based on a process of community-based research-by-design, these projects activate spatial facilities and employ full-scale interventions to improve local resilience. Resourceful collaboration at the neighbourhood level demands new intermediary actors and designers as advocates with multi-scalar and transdisciplinary knowledge and abilities to assess and engage with the impacts of their co-produced design work.;  In the debate on neighbourhood resilience, there is a demand for co-production involving inhabitants in adaptation processes. Neighbourhood resilience is discussed in terms of economic, ecological and socio-political capacities, making place-people relations a key factor. Academia-led research-by-design projects are engaging in resilience-building, but professional roles are still unclear. Architects, planners and urban designers often have limited knowledge about the specific community and the socio-economic impacts of their projects. This especially occurs in modernist mass-housing settlements within current conditions of neo-liberalization. Here, inhabitants and designers have only limited access to decision-making power and resources. More significantly, the spatial improvements might endanger major resources: the social cohesion and affordability of the neighbourhood. Using the concepts of collaboration (versus cooperation) and resourcefulness (versus resilience), this paper discusses the advantages and limits of academic design projects using two cases from the Academy of a New Gropiusstadt (AnG) in Berlin, Germany. Based on a process of community-based research-by-design, these projects activate spatial facilities and employ full-scale interventions to improve local resilience. Resourceful collaboration at the neighbourhood level demands new intermediary actors and designers as advocates with multi-scalar and transdisciplinary knowledge and abilities to assess and engage with the impacts of their co-produced design work.;In the debate on neighbourhood resilience, there is a demand for co-production involving inhabitants in adaptation processes. Neighbourhood resilience is discussed in terms of economic, ecological and socio-political capacities, making place-people relations a key factor. Academia-led research-by-design projects are engaging in resilience-building, but professional roles are still unclear. Architects, planners and urban designers often have limited knowledge about the specific community and the socio-economic impacts of their projects. This especially occurs in modernist mass-housing settlements within current conditions of neo-liberalization. Here, inhabitants and designers have only limited access to decision-making power and resources. More significantly, the spatial improvements might endanger major resources: the social cohesion and affordability of the neighbourhood. Using the concepts of collaboration (versus cooperation) and resourcefulness (versus resilien e), this paper discusses the advantages and limits of academic design projects using two cases from the Academy of a New Gropiusstadt (AnG) in Berlin, Germany. Based on a process of community-based research-by-design, these projects activate spatial facilities and employ full-scale interventions to improve local resilience. Resourceful collaboration at the neighbourhood level demands new intermediary actors and designers as advocates with multi-scalar and transdisciplinary knowledge and abilities to assess and engage with the impacts of their co-produced design work.;