Intermezzo #2: CivicWise
In the spring of 2017 on Facebook, I saw the announcement of the book Civic Practices by an architecture collective, called CivicWise. Available for free download as an open-source material, the book was bringing together bottom-up initiatives of spaces or (digital) projects, tools and research. Self-organisation and community were the main focus of civic practice. Also, the collective gathered around CivicWise seemed interesting to explore, most of whom were young architects from Spain and Italy. So I started to follow their work and learned that they would soon be gathering in L’Hospitalet, a municipality in Barcelona for their Glocal Camp, which was open to anyone. From 8 to 15 July 2017, they organised workshops, or so I had thought. When I arrived at the meeting of the Glocal Camp on the first day into a room of around 40 people, I realised I was the only one who was an outsider, the only one who was not a member of CivicWise. Also soon enough I realised that the workshops were not yet organised, that the first day was to decide on the content of the workshops, their moderators and timetable. It was one week of intense discussions, eating and drinking together and learning. Members of CivicWise had various skill sets, ranging from running participatory design processes, coding, self-organisation, teaching, and so on. When 40 people of these different skill sets came together, it was a boost of collective intelligence, thanks to the horizontal structure of the network. Some workshops were directly about and together with the municipality of L’Hospitalet, which was also providing us with meeting spaces. Some others were about civic media, the governance structure of CivicWise and projects done inside the network, open-source digital tools, methodology of online courses. During these days I learned a lot about self-organisation, collective intelligence, open-source software and precarity. I joined some of the ongoing projects, such as the renewal of the CivicWise website, and I had just become a member of CivicWise.
In the following years, I participated in and initiated a few projects, joined the Glocal Camps in Canarias in 2018 and Modena in 2019. With the covid-19 pandemic, the network seems to have lost some momentum. I think there are a series of reasons for this. Firstly, the shock of the 2008 financial crisis is long gone and the austerity politics applied after the crisis has become the new norm. The movements in the following years of the crisis have also lost momentum due to the failure to trigger change. The same is true for CivicWise, to use the crisis as an opportunity to alter the way architecture has been practiced did not come along. Secondly, horizontality needs a lot of care work, and remuneration for this work is almost possible within CivicWise since there are no such financial means. Maintaining the servers of the website, updating social media, making sure of inclusion and horizontality… These are almost invisible workloads some members took on. When we could afford to pay some money to the CivicWise Italy team for their work in organising the Glocal Camp Modena, all the participants were proud, yet this was not happening often enough. Lastly, most of the active members, who were initiating projects and setting up teams for competitions, have matured in their careers. CivicWise is a network, not an architectural office in itself, so almost all members had their own practices and would come together under the umbrella of CivicWise for certain projects. The more experienced the architects got the less they could afford to initiate projects in CivicWise and fresh people were not replacing them to move the flag on. While some focused more on their own architectural practices, some others found more active roles in other projects, which were more defined and thus, financially more viable.
Learning from CivicWise
The goals of CivicWise align with the practices of the commons, both in content and in form. It aims to redefine architectural practice towards a more socially engaged, participative and inclusive direction and while doing that the network itself is governed very similarly to a commons. The distributed network structure enables collective intelligence and open knowledge sharing. However, maintaining this structure requires substantial unpaid immaterial labour, exacerbating precarity. This reveals tensions in sustaining the network as a commons within the neoliberal system we are surrounded with. CivicWise operated with an intentional lack of rigid definitions in membership and activities. This fluidity supports adaptability but sustaining the network in the long term becomes harder.
CivicWise explores the architecture of the commons through participatory urban projects centred around "civic innovation." However, having an impact at scale remains challenging. Even though the idea of learning from the local experiences and sharing them globally sounds promising, it is hard to say that the network could achieve a change at scale, reminding us of the limits of small-scale "folk politics" interventions. Refusing traditional architect roles and promoting mutual learning between architects and citizens support the commons approach. Yet, as a result of the austerity politics, their work could be realised mostly with under-resourced public authorities and this also affected the limited impact of CivicWise projects.
In summary, from CivicWise I learned about the potential and everyday challenges of practicing the architecture of the commons from the “bottom-up” as a networked counter-hegemonic practice. More importantly, I learned how a network can be governed horizontally, similar to the commons way. The emphasis on collective intelligence, non-hierarchy and open-source knowledge taught me a lot about other ways of organising. I discovered how governance itself also plays a role in questioning and challenging the conventional way of thinking and doing architecture.
+Counter-domains of architectural practice: The case of CivicWise