p-lab

The question

What does participation actually mean? p-lab, in full “Identifying and amplifying new forms of urban participation”, set out to open up and enrich that word. It took the Brussels pedestrian area, the piétonnier, as its laboratory. That site suited the question twice over: it is the object of countless uses, initiatives, appropriations and citizen demonstrations that can be called participatory in the broadest sense, and it was heavily criticised for the participation deficits that accompanied its construction.

What we made

The starting point was an ethnography of the ways Brussels inhabitants, human or not, contribute to the public life of the city. Those contributions are often barely visible, precisely because they are anchored in everyday activities. The same ethnography looked the other way too: at how public authorities in turn try to make citizens participate, by anchoring their devices in that same ordinary flow.

Those observations fed a design and prototyping process. Existing devices, objects, spaces or situations were amplified, attenuated, disseminated, hybridised, hacked or re-created, to test their potential in terms of participation. The installations in the piétonnier applied the products and principles of SUCIB, down to the same modular tubular system. That produced, among other things, the Bureau de la participation sauvage, a mobile installation at the Bourse where passers-by used photographs to say what did and did not have to do with the elections, and Les im/possibles futurs de Bordet: three viewing devices in the street, set up like tourist telescopes, through which passers-by could look at speculative scenarios for the area around Bordet station and add their own wishes to them.

The ambition reached beyond local impact: it was about better understanding the arts of participating and of making people participate, and from there formulating situated, eco-responsible ways of transferring experiences. “Learning from the piétonnier”, as a lesson for other places and other questions.

What came of it

A publicly accessible database of observed forms of participation in the piétonnier, a series of interventions and installations, and several publications. The project closed in February 2022 with the work session Copy Paste Participation, on whether participation methods, toolkits and “good practices” are transferable at all.

The same work produced MA/PA, an open-source machine for generating participatory processes: a set of posters and cards for mapping out a trajectory alone or in a group, on paper or online. In Dutch, French and English, and free in hard copy for Brussels non-profits and public authorities.

Like SUCIB, p-lab ran within Innoviris’ Anticipate programme.