Thinging with the past: co-designing a slow road network by mediating between the historical landscape and the design space

ABSTRACT

In this article, we put forward the importance of engaging with the past in co-design projects. We argue that such an engagement helps situate and contextualise design projects, especially by tackling pre-existing assumptions and previous design legacies. In doing so, we reflect on the experience of setting up a project to explore and reactivate a neglected infrastructure of slow roads as a network of potential in sustainable mobility transition. We start by considering slow roads in relation to two design perspectives on thinging. First, by understanding thinging in the historical landscape as an agency of things to ‘design over time’, we explore how road infrastructures enact previous design models. Second, by looking at thinging as an approach of gathering and confronting heterogeneous perspectives in a design project, we engage with slow roads as socio-material assemblies that evolve in the design space over time. By revisiting the case study, we connect these two perspectives to propose thinging as a design approach that mediates between the historical landscape and the design space. In the discussion, we reflect on the methodology of the case to outline co-design strategies that aim to operationalise this approach of ‘thinging with the past’.

KEYWORDS:

• Participatory design
• thinging
• design space
• slow roads

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Department of Environment (of the Flemish government), initiated the Vlaanderen breekt uit! (Flanders breaks out!) program to explore depaving as ‘the physical removal of pavement on the site (…) so that the soil is permeable again and allows various other natural functions.’ Read more at: https://omgeving.vlaanderen.be/vlaanderen-breekt-uit-homepagina

2. Trage Wegen vzw brings together more than 40 associations and groups that share the same concern: slow mobility. Since its founding in 2002, this organisation works on the revaluation of neighbourhood roads, field roads, church paths and towpaths in Flanders.

3. E.g. through the nomination of the Hoge Kempen Rural-Industrial Transition Landscape for UNESCO World Heritage Site: https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5623/

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by funding from the European Union, through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network ‘CHEurope: Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe’ H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions 722416.This study was supported by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Hasselt University.