In the past two decades society has changed dramatically as a result of influences from within and without. Due to globalisation and individualisation the city is no longer synonymous with the spatial manifestation of one community with a – preferably hierarchical – structure. A number of smaller and larger communities take their place next to and intertwined with each other. All these communities are part of the urban culture and must be taken seriously. Therefore it’s necessary to gain access to the desires and potentialities present in urban culture. These must (literally) be charted. The traditional bastions of the disciplines should be abandoned to sound the everyday, or popular, culture. New ways must be explored to determine how culture could manifest itself in urban situations. The Art of Settling shows how these urban phenomena can be identified.
As our urban society grows increasingly complex, town planning has developed a high degree of specialization. Here a town council like that of Gouda plays more than an administrative role; its objective should also be to turn (town–planning) ambitions into commissions within one or more of the associated disciplines. But because these processes are often slow and fraught with consequences, not least financial, commissions generally only ever materialize when the need for them has been convincingly presented. Commissions come about in various ways. These vary from simply waiting until the need for action becomes paramount, to setting up an investigation.
The Art of Settling examines one way in which recommendations can be implemented. It is a method that bridges the gap between (latent) ambitions and a commission for a design. The project enables the urban phenomenon identified in preliminary research to be examined in a real situation, without any actual building programme being involved. It is often extraordinarily difficult for a project relating to these phenomena in today’s cities to acquire the status of design commission. The objective here is to examine the inherent qualities of the phenomenon. By loosely setting out the para-meters, taking the main preconditions into consideration, it is possible to determine how best to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves and how to avoid pitfalls. By linking the research results to a number of actual phenomena in a town–planning environment, three projects were generated that would play a meaningful role in the development of the city. For each of these projects a team was brought together comprising at least one artist, and architecttown–planner and a theorist/publicist. These teams started by investigating and compiling an inventory of what had already been devised and designed within the particular theme and the specific context of Gouda had to offer. The themes were then developed separately and subsequently applied to Gouda.
In the fourth part, the photo competition, Gouda’s residents became involved. Not simply because everyone in the city is automatically interested in developments affecting their urban environment; but by involving the public in observing the city’s qualities, and by publishing those observations and showcasing them in an exhibition.