The dividing line of privacy and the social project: the urban critique in Borneo-Sporenburg

Abstract

The relevance of an urban project, from a critical point of view, lies in its capacity to pose questions about the city and its future, as well as about current and past practices of the discipline. The strength of a critical argument might initiate productive discussions within and outside the circle of practioners, and therefore a pedagogical role can always be assigned to it. West8’s masterplan for the redevelopment of Borneo-Sporenbug islands in the old industrial district of Amsterdam prompted important questions about urbanism, the contemporary city and the city dweller. The project raises so many of the issues that have been frequently posed by architects, generation after generation: how can many individual worlds be tied together into one greater and inspiring whole? How are individuals expected to live within a collectivity of other subjects? How can that be translated into spatial terms? What are the potentials and constraints of these different discourses? If the “home is a prime unexcavated site for an archaeology of sociability” , can we find a direct relationship between idealised ways of socialising in the home and outside it? How does the idea of home relate directly to an idea of urban? Those questions, in turn, imply a rethinking of ongoing problems through drawing and the cross over between multiple scales. Housing can be understood to be a major element articulating the individual and society, the neighbourhood and the block. The spatial arrangement as a whole has a social content and therefore stands as an object of reflection.