ArchDaily and Copenhagen Architecture Festival (CAFx) interviewed project partner Michael Alexander Ulfstjerne from Emergency Architecture & Human Rights (EAHR) on film, architecture and inclusive design.
Paulin Panetta (PP): Can you give us an introduction to EAHR and to your approach to architecture: what does inclusivity mean for EAHR?
Michael Ulfstjerne (MU): First of all, I guess we work in the cheap end of architecture, meaning we work primarily with different kinds of vulnerability. That could be working with displaced populations, homeless people, migrants, kids in social housing areas. We also work in a cross-disciplinary way, combining insights from anthropology, sociology, geography, social sciences with architectural design and building competences. We sometimes collaborate with artists or people that work in film and sound as well, resulting in a broad palette of methodologies. The end goal for using this broad palette is also to ask the question: How do we involve people in the processes of designing architecture?
This sounds like a simple question. People have their post-its and do ‘stuff’, then tick the box of having done a sort of ‘user involvement’. But this is actually a really difficult question, particularly when it comes to vulnerable populations. In Denmark and Scandinavia we often claim that we are very good at participatory design, inclusive architecture…but when it comes to homeless populations in Copenhagen, just to give one example–I mean, we've all seen this–there's just a lack of this. When it comes to social housing areas, often the same: there's a very, very low level of inclusion, and the way it’s conventionally done is just not very ambitious, it's not very innovative. So, this is the space we want to be in. How do we innovate the way in which we bring people into these [design] processes?
One metaphor explaining our work emerged from a conversation I had with one of my colleagues. She said: ‘So we're trying to get these young people to be part of the process, to sit at the table’. I was like: ’No, actually, what we're trying to do is do away with the table.’ We start the conversation from a different perspective; if you sit down young Ahmed and Matilda with two planners, architects and engineers, that conversation is not going to be particularly productive. How do we get to know people's neighborhoods, the values they attribute to the built environment? I guess this is what we do, or what we try to do at least.
PP: I like the image of a palette of methodologies. How does film work as a medium in this process of including people in your projects?
MU: One recent experience was a series of workshops we did with groups of youth and children in [social] housing areas, who were given a simple introduction to documentary film and then sent out to document their own neighborhoods. What dawned on me, first of all, was that this is just really intuitive and fun for them, working with their phone and technologies–they're just way ahead of me! The products that came out were not that important, but it was an interesting way to start a conversation: How do you document changes in your environment, what are the places you feel most at home, or the people you feel at home with? They also did the same with sound recordings. What's the sound of a place that you really like or the sound of a place that's changing?
This focused their attention differently from their everyday experience. When you listen to pure sound, the world comes to you in a different way, even the places you already know. If you sit and focus on listening to sound for two minutes, you will start having a different view of the environment–same as when you have a photograph, you see through a lens, you see different details. Film and sound were good kick-starters to get thoughts going and to get to know our young participants' perspectives, giving them some kind of voice. These are some of the ways film becomes useful in our practice.
PP: Let’s talk about the workshops you organized together with CAFx.
MU: These were a bit different from other film & architecture workshops arranged by CAFx. We had to organize remote workshops on the theme of inclusive design, discrimination in the built environment, within the topics of the UN’s Leave No One Behind (LNOB) agenda. The idea was to reach populations or groups that were not prone to do their own filming or submit their film to the Film Mosaic [competition]. That would just not happen, meaning that we had to reach out to local partners that we've been working well with and that we knew had a stake in these kinds of issues. We got a hold of two NGOs, one working in Jordan and one working in Nepal, two very different contexts. We worked with a great film documentarist, Felipe Roa Pilar, who was responsible for facilitating the workshops, but the NGOs were actually the ones who mobilized the community and found people that would be interested in taking part in the workshops.
Overall it worked well, but it also exposed the limitations of this approach. I'm always very skeptical when these grand agendas or ‘policy concepts’ travel. Mostly because concepts travel badly. Usually, we create conceptual schemes in the West, then we send them out into the world. When something like ‘Leave No One Behind’ or ‘inclusive design’ reaches places like Nepal or Jordan, we must ask ourselves: What does this mean? Are we just forcing them into our rhetoric or lingo or set of values? How do we actually start the conversation again?
PP: This was exactly one of my questions. How do we deploy the concept of inclusive design in different geographical contexts, and how does the LNOB agenda speak differently to people living in different corners of the world?
MU: I see at least two potential ways to think about that question. One, perhaps more negative, is related to the variety, the diversity of films in the Film Mosaic. It’s mad, right? It’s really, really broad, from how it feels to be a sexual minority in a Western capital, to the need for basic infrastructure. ‘Can I get a roof over my head, please?’ Given these really different representations, then, does the concept make sense at all? It's two different worlds that we are talking about. Maybe these two worlds don't really speak well to each other, or maybe the concept is so fluffy that it doesn't make any sense anyway.But there's also a positive story, because this variety shows something radical. We have a very, very different idea of what ‘inclusive design’ means in a city like Copenhagen compared to a post-earthquake context, where it's basic infrastructure, it's clean water, it's community space, it's access to medical services, it's shelter, it’s a roof over your head, as we see in the films from Nepal.
First I thought: ‘Oh man, that's very different from what we expected!’ But it was basically the theme [LNOB]! It was different in Jordan, where we were working in the context of the massive displacement that followed the war in Syria. Here the main themes were migration, refugee camps. It was about growing up, trying to find your own space in that setting, it was about access to education, access to–struggle with resources, bad soil, degradation. There was a long way from these to the ones shot in elsewhere. In this sense, you can actually see the broad representation of themes as a success criteria.
PP: Talking about geographical differences, how was it to engage film in Jordan and Nepal?
MU: We had this strange clash of aesthetics, a clash in the way of telling a story. Film is a methodology, it's a way of framing a narrative, creating a sentiment, creating an affective response among those watching it. How do we respond to imagery, sounds, events, how do we tell a story? That changes a lot from Nepal to Azerbaijan to Copenhagen. It was a fun process, because the first edits of the films we received were just insanely dramatical. You had piano and violins playing in the background and an old lady reenacting the earthquake in Nepal who she was running–they had her running in slow motion towards the end of it. And she was crying and crying. She was acting, she was crying, and the music was so dramatic. We were like: ‘Whoa, that's not gonna fly with a Western audience. You need to tone down the music!’ It was a really interesting clash I wasn't sure how to read.
’That’s what they want, we're gonna give them the drama’. I wondered if that actually showed their sentiments towards what happened and what's happening. It seemed like a recognition of the immense value of the help they received: creating, building, getting a house; but dramatically overdone. The way of playing out a drama, a scene, or telling a story, a narrative, changes from place to place. How do people tell stories: are they trying to fit into some imaginary idea? ‘But what about the people that are going to curate the films at CAFx, what would they like?’ Do they like the violence and the dramatic acting, the slow motion, or how do we edit it? Probably everybody has these thoughts the moment they produce films.
PP: Indeed. What about the workshops’ key concepts, how do you think they were received?
MU: Terminology is another thing. When you go to a refugee camp and talk about design or architecture, they're going to say: ‘Well, that's not for us. We live in tents’. There is an elitist connotation to it: Scandinavia, cool, minimalism, architecture. ‘That's rich people. This is a tent, it’s not architecture.’
Another danger, and that's also why I become skeptical about these grand concepts. We are called Emergency Architecture and Human Rights, but I usually only say ‘Emergency Architecture’, because I know that in the places that we go to and work with–displaced populations in a camp, for example–they don't feel like rights bearers, they don't see entitlements, and many have been growing up or lived there for generations.
If you go out with that mantra ‘leave no one behind’, and people are f*cking left behind, they are behind, they're not on the same boat as the rest of us, we risk going out with this utopian flag, intending to document inclusive spaces, although that's not always how people see their own lives. They feel left behind. They feel discriminated against, transgressed. How do we actually not further discriminate against people by coming with these concepts that we think are inclusive, but don’t represent what people feel?
PP: How is it then for EAHR to work with the notion of ‘human rights’?
MU: Strategically, we try to work with the mantra ‘architecture is a human right’. We're taking architecture from something often associated with an elite to something that everybody should have access to, because it's about quality [of life], feeling at home, these kinds of issues. But when we work on a day-to-day basis, the end question is: What did we leave people with?
We cannot, at the end of a project, state that we left them with a human right. That’s just very abstract. No, we left them with a structure they feel safe in. We left them with a sense of security. We left them with a feeling that they can cross a street or a camp and feel more safe. These small things that make sense on a day-to-day level–but it's not ‘Now you have human rights’–that's maybe a bit over ambitious. We need to be humble about what it is we do. We're not policy makers, but we can maybe find ways to work together across disciplines that create change or change policies. We need to recognize, architects and anthropologists–that is my own background–, that we are two disciplines that think very highly of ourselves, maybe a bit too highly sometimes.
This interview was made in the context of the film competition The Film Mosaic: Leave No One Behind. Which Open call looks for films addressing inclusive architectural or design solutions found in the built, planned and/or grown environment
- max 3 min. long
- deadline: 1st of March 2023
- prize: 1st: 2500€; 2nd 1500€; 3rd: 1000€
Films are received on a daily basis and published ongoingly on the Film Mosaic platform.
With the aim of facilitating the production of short films, since Summer 2021 Copenhagen Architecture Festival has been conducting film & architecture workshops with a focus on inclusivity and filmmaking in close collaboration with local partner institutions around the world.
