Making
the Invisibility of the Urban Collective Memories Visible: Participatory
Design Process as a Form of Making Urban Landscape and the positioning
of the Participatory Designer |
| In an urban development project in Taipei where a new shopping mall is to be developed on the old paper mills factory, yet the residue of the unresolved labor/capitalist conflict have continued and the design of the park became a symbolic battle for meanings —who has the right to interpret the workers’ past; can collective memories of individual group become a Taipei urban landscape? Collaborating with design studio, series of participatory workshop are formed so that a version of worker’s park can be produced. While paper mills workers have stories, even written text of the autobiography, the task of transforming the text into visual text which is pertinent to the urban design process, the park plan and model would be “compete” with the landscape designer hired by the developer in the planning meeting. The unplanned, unfunded, pressured by time, labor workers and students went through few definite process: listening, sharing, return to the site, mock-up, making the model in which workshop became a form of exchange, and production of idea, and finally transforming voices of wound/trauma into landscape of empowerment, representing in video, model and drawings. The paper would end with the discussion on the collaborative spirit with the NGO labor union in which the relationship between the design group and the confederation has grown from suspicion to collaboration. The paper would end with series of question on the role and positioning of design in the social movement and urban landscape. Is participatory design a form of strategic tactic or final concretization of collective memory? Ultimately, as professional, who we serve change the vision/design of our landscape. |