IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Over the past decades, urban regeneration strategies have increasingly relied on the paradigm of “activation”: the programmed revitalisation of public space through design interventions, curated uses, and managed participation. This paper argues that such approaches rest on a persistent misrecognition of the spatial conditions through which urban life is actually sustained. Focusing on post-industrial urban contexts, the paper proposes a shift from programmed activation towards a more open-ended understanding of the built environment. It suggests that reduced programming can, paradoxically, enable more intensive forms of use, as it allows for appropriation, improvisation, and the emergence of unplanned social practices. In this sense, buildings and their associated spaces operate less as designed objects than as frameworks for indeterminacy, organising movement, access, and everyday practices of care and coexistence without prescribing them. Drawing on empirical observations from Duisburg-Hochfeld (post-industrial neighbourhood in Germany’s Ruhr region, currently undergoing redevelopment), the paper examines the discrepancy between designed spaces of “activation” and the informal spatial practices that structure everyday urban life. While curated public spaces often remain underused or overly scripted, streets, thresholds, and building-related spaces emerge as key sites of interaction, appropriation, and social exchange. These observations resonate with Ignasi de Solà-Morales’s notion of indeterminate urban space and Rem Koolhaas’s understanding of architecture as an operational system rather than a fixed form. Rather than advocating for the absence of planning, the paper calls for a repositioning of its role: from programming and control towards the design of conditions that accommodate uncertainty. If urban transformation continues to be framed through the imperative of activation, it risks suppressing the very forms of collective life it seeks to produce.