Summary of JOIE article ( 2 March 2021) by John B. Horowitz, Department of Economics, Ball State University, Muncie, USA. The full article is available on the JOIE website.
From the 1960s through the 1990s, architect John Habraken and a few like-minded architects developed the Open-Building framework because they were concerned about centralized control of the built environment and wanted to return autonomy to individual inhabitants while letting them cooperate in producing public goods. At the same time, Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and researchers from various fields started the Bloomington School of Political Economy. They were also concerned about centralized control of the political and physical environments and wanted to increase self-governance. Habraken and the Bloomington school worked without being aware of one another’s work. This article compares Habraken’s Open-Building framework to Ostrom’s design principles.
Design for Change and Share Common Understanding and Themes
Habraken focused on designing for change so users can more easily change their built environments, while Ostrom’s design principles encourage long-lasting commons governance. Both focus on giving users autonomy. Balancing permanence and change is essential to the built environment, as change during the building process is costly. Changing an element of the built environment is possible because part of the environment does not change. City blocks last centuries, while the buildings and spaces within the blocks change much more frequently. One reason the city block changes much less frequently than an interior wall within the block is that it takes more people to agree to change the city block than to change an interior wall.
One way of firmly fixing a few things while allowing for long-term change is to separate requirement planning and building design into long-, medium-, and short-term perspectives. The long-term perspective focuses on the base building level, the medium-term perspective focuses on the infill level, and the short-term perspective focuses on the furniture/equipment level. The infill level includes the items within an agent’s unit, such as non-load-bearing walls and the rooms.
Habraken views the built environment as a self-organizing emergent system, and an essential part of self-organization is appropriately applying themes, patterns, types, and systems. Sharing themes creates a coherent structure and unifying idea or image. Agents’ independently deciding to share themes is why old cities and towns have a coherent structure. For example, cities such as Amsterdam, London, Kyoto, Paris, Tunis, and Venice are distinguishable because their tissue levels create recognizable main themes. Their recognizable tissue levels come from the similarity and variation in the houses, streets, squares, canals, and geographic features, such as rivers and hills. Recognizable main themes also come from the similarity and variety of materials, color, detailing, ornamentation, and proportions.
Work within the Hierarchical Structure of the Built Environment
The Open-Building design principle of working within the hierarchical structure of the built environment is similar to Ostrom’s principle of polycentricity and hierarchically nested levels. In contrast to Ostrom, Habraken views public and private spaces as relative and nested. They are relative in that a space is private to those who are not allowed to enter but public to those who do have the right to enter. For example, in a condominium, a condo owner’s unit is a private space, and condominium amenities are public spaces. However, condominium amenities are private spaces for nonmembers of the condominium. Private and public spaces are nested in the sense that, for example, moving downward in a hierarchy, people need permission to enter other people’s houses and additional permission to enter their bedrooms or use their desks. Creating new private spaces also creates a shared public space above it.
Utilities that move through various territories create technical entanglements. For example, sewer and water pipes that pass through neighboring territories create rigidity in decision-making during design and legal and social conflict during maintenance. Pipes in multi-tenant housing can be disentangled from neighboring units by requiring unit owners to put utilities under a raised floor or above the ceiling. Supply configurations can also be disentangled by moving away from the building level to the infill and furniture levels since they are easier to change. For example, standard power outlets enable electrical equipment to be disentangled from the electrical system, achieve autonomy, and increase innovation.
Separate Design Tasks but Conform to Social Structure
Habraken’s principle of separating design tasks but conforming to the social structure is similar to Ostrom’s subsidiarity principle, in which higher governance levels recognize the governance rights of lower levels. The infill level allows the tenant space to be more independent from the base building and can reduce costs for users in installing infill and modifying their housing units. Deciding what belongs to the base building and the infill is both a technical and a political question. The separation of design tasks needs to correspond to the social structure based on what is common and what is decided independently by each decision-maker.
Separating levels allows for different types of construction. The most resilient buildings allow for partitioning, high load bearing, high floor heights, and vertical and horizontal expansion to facilitate long-term infrastructure investment. In comparison, the infill level is a shorter-term investment with user-related design, lightweight components, and short-term financing.
Separating design tasks reduces maintenance and repair costs in apartment buildings where utilities are in public spaces accessible from the corridors. Avoiding horizontal boundaries may be more effective when agents perceive buildings as three-dimensional neighborhoods containing independent dwellings. When people can repair and maintain their utilities and houses without needing to access their neighbors’ territories, repair and maintenance decisions change from collective to private choices.
Have Territorial Clarity
Habraken’s principle of territorial clarity and control of space is similar to Ostrom’s principle of excludability. Both Ostrom and Habraken write that clear membership, territorial boundaries, and the ability to control entry and exclude nonmembers are essential to territorial control. Habraken’s focus on control is similar to Ostrom’s focus on property rights.