Co-creation and inclusive architecture in East Slovakia

Amongst historic streets and concrete towers, in the summer of 2023, the feminist urban collective Spolka organised a week-long project in Košice, East Slovakia. The Never Never School brought together a multidisciplinary group of architects, sociologists, students, urban designers, organisers, teachers, writers, artists, and people passionate about housing - we explored the city, engaged with the area, and imagined future possibilities for an inclusive housing. This interview with one of their members, Lýdia Grešáková, explores the unique territorial and cultural aspects that influence their work, like the exclusion of the segregated Roma minority, Lunik IX - the Roma settlement at the edge of the city - and a socio-political environment unfriendly to change.

In a society without large public demand for reform, it can appear impossible to include the public in urban planning, but Spolka, initially a group of friends that developed into a unique actor in the Slovakian and Eastern European urbanism field, proves that change is always possible. Spolka originated when its members, returning home during university holidays, decided to apply their studies meaningfully in Košice. Since one of the members had a mother working at a school, this became their first project. PĽAC (“space” in Košice dialect), was a project to connect and open up an old school garden to the wider neighbourhood, making it more accessible to the (mostly Roma) children, the neighbours, and anyone that wanted to spend time and meet in a place without prejudices.

“Košice is typical for huge housing estates, which are pretty dense and people actually don't spend much time outside of their home. They only just travel between home and work, which is usually somewhere totally different from the district where they do live. So we thought that maybe the school yard could be such a place where people could meet.”

And what has been the reaction from the other neighbours with these projects?

They were surprised! We were playing then with the Theory of Commons (the principle of communal ownership and universal access to shared resources) to create something that would be common and accessible for all the neighbourhoods, so we did flea markets, small festivals, workshops, various things on the courtyard, all in co-operation with the school. And people were surprised, positively surprised, but none of the projects ended in the way we wanted. None of the schoolyards opened for the public in the end, so we thought we didn't actually succeed. But around five years after this project, somebody wrote to us from one school that they are finally opening the courtyard, revising the idea of the project because of connections we made. I think this is the way with a lot of projects that include co-creation, you see the result much, much later.

It's important to have a gatekeeper, a person from the school who would push the project. Because it was something new, and people from Košice really don't want new things happening, they are not so much seeking alternatives to their daily lives or daily experience. It’s part of the post-socialist experience - in the West there was this huge alternative movement in the 1960s, but this was not happening in Košice, so people are not used to organise, not used to seek different ways of living. We were constantly situated in this contrast, we wanted to make the quality of life better, but people really didn't want to have anything changed in their lives.

And where did you go from there?

The big moment was when the main architect of the Chief Architecture Office at the time invited us to a dinner, because they were preparing the new zoning plan. Košice, like many cities in Slovakia, has an outdated zoning plan, many are maybe 60 years old. They're still working with a different sociopolitical setup, and they were changed many times, hundreds of minor changes, it's chaotic. So the main architect knew us from this school project, and they wanted our help to communicate with the public. We did an exhibition, we created new maps, we planned and then facilitated discussions with the public and the creators of the zoning plans. We did many activities with the public funding and from our own resources, we basically worked for free for that.

How have you found the communication and the processes with the Roma communities in Košice?

The Roma minority in Slovakia have such housing issues because between the wars, there was a law that Roma people had to build their houses at least two kilometres from the settlements of the majority, so they ended up settling under the forests. Then under socialism, the city gave them the right to build on municipal land, but after the fall of the regime, the land on which they built their houses was bought by the private owners. So now their settlements are illegal, so there was a mass movement of Roma people from the cities back to the outskirts. It's a terrible history. And this is how the marginalisation started and was performed, one of the unique historical levels of Slovakia, one of the reasons why there are so many NGOs working with Roma communities.

We usually cooperate with those groups, so we wouldn't be complete strangers coming there, like photo tourism. Because this happens a lot in Košice, for example, in Lunik IX, the excluded, mostly Roma populated, part where people just go to take pictures. We don't want to do that, we try to cooperate with NGOs in the field, usually educators who work with children.

We did do one study on Lunik IX, because there was this architectural competition in 2019 to rebuild after a major demolition. But we took part in the competition mostly to tell them that it's wrong to build the houses “top-down” there. We didn't compete, we just reminded them to work with their position more, to be aware of the context, to include the ideas of the people.

Do you feel like the political environment encourages groups like this to start organising and start doing participative projects?

It’s connected to the history of Slovakia and I'd say Central and East Europe as well, there is less of an alternative-seeking society, so that doesn't really give you invitation to create one. But as in other oppressive regimes that work against Roma communities or of the more-than-human world, or the 99% of the public with lower incomes, etc., the activism rises. NGOs need to do a lot of work here, a lot of social work and socially oriented architecture - because of the socialist past, this is completely missing in the government.

So this is the space where we tried to do something social. We are, like many architects, sociologists, and others working on urban design, responsible for how the city looks, and to actually make it better.

How is the network between the other actors in this field?

We actually did research on the similar organisations, because what we're missing is knowledge, on the experience of other similar organisations, and there isn’t much literature written about the experience of Slovakia or Czech Republic in caring urban design, so we tried to map it ourselves. We also need to connect with all those NGOs who are mapping the situation, because what Košice and Slovakia don't have is data or information, about how many houses are actually accessible or empty or ready to be lived in, how much they cost etc. So in 2021, we visited a lot of similar organisations like us and we talked to them about their experience with formal planning, trying to bring more knowledge to the field, so we could make it better. It's all interconnected and we try to help each other. There are a lot of us connected beyond Košice really trying for systematic change, to change the formal architecture into being a more caring, inclusive one.

What do you think are some of the first steps to engaging with people in a participative way, in this kind of environment, where it's not so normal?

I'd say situatedness and care, to get to know the local needs and base the processes on them, if possible.

We are actually not using the word participation anymore at Spolka. This particular word represents a theory that is based on the experience of the Global West and North, and it doesn't really suit the practices here. People who typically do “participatory” projects here, those are, for example, based in questionnaires, and there is not much qualitative research. They usually don't say who was not included and with developers and city officials for example, they use the results for appearances and political points, they really don’t say what did not work out, or represent genuine public opinion. We are not trying to do that, we rather use the word “co-creation”. The initial mapping reveals the actors, and the results let us know the next steps. That's also a bit problematic because we don't have any universal model, so it really takes us time to find out what is best suited for each location, where we could create some future change.

For example, we worked in one city very near Košice, Veľký Šariš - a lot of people were working in the bigger neighbouring city, Prešov, and nobody really spent time in the in the city where they lived, it was just cheaper to get a house there. So they didn't want to get involved in the future planning of the public spaces there. In the end we focused on the locals who were involved in small businesses, cultural centres, NGOs, activist projects, and the municipality, important active actors, and we did a series of workshops with them. Of course we went around and knocked at the doors of the people who lived there, but their results were not representative at all. So this was nice, because we ended up finding out what works for that location.

In another city, Nitra, we found out that there is actually no need for huge public co-creation projects. We worked on creating a vision for old barracks, which the city wanted to change into a public park - they needed advice on the atmosphere of the park, because it's huge, and it's beautifully wild. But there are three different owners of the land, so we found out that actually maybe not the atmosphere should be the first step, but long deep interviews. So we first did interviews with the owners and people who actually have some business in the barracks area. Then we created working groups of the owners, so they could start talking about the future. Later we included the public, but just to research the atmosphere, not precise activities that should take place there. So you see every project is very different. We are basically there for the municipality, to accompany them through the process and try to give them the tools so they could use them later and we try to give them the agency.

What do you think is the future of the city, these trends of NGO co-operation and the opening spaces for co-creation?

We expect Volvo, the car company, to settle a new factory just next to Košice, and that will bring a lot of newcomers to the city. With the war in Ukraine, the number of people living in Košice grew, and the city is preparing for that - the new zoning plan counts on building new living spaces in the city centre, the old brownfields, since we have many such in-between spaces. The city is planning for bigger growth, but there is really no discussion about accessible housing, social housing. NGOs are trying to cooperate with the Chief of Architecture Office, but the zoning plan is ultimately just a recipe of how to build cities, the actual building is by developers, so we know that it is really connected with profit - social housing, when not supported by the state, has no chance there. I would love Slovakia to have strategic attitudes towards building accessible housing, but this will take time.

We need to bring more actors around the table and maybe even prototype how good shared housing looks like, or how different housing typologies could look like in Košice, where housing is mainly built for traditional young families and not for example, single people, or families with more members or for young people who want to share housing because it's financially inaccessible - I think this will be the future. But of course, the government changed and we now have a more right wing political ruling political party, and already now the cuts in the culture and architecture NGOs are being executed. In Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Austria, the mood is the same, so we really need to be optimistic to survive.

It's good that there's already this network, all connected together to support each other.

Yes, we really try to connect, even outside of the country. The Lina Architecture Conference in Copenhagen this autumn, this was one example. I think that Spolka’s practice is relevant in the wider European context, and I think at the Lina conference we connected well with other actors, although we were the only ones from Slovakia. In this context it feels like the Western countries already solved the issues we are tackling right now and like we are a few steps behind, so it's very hard to then connect to other practices that are in the global West or North. Also with regard to the methodologies we used, those draw from feminist values. But feminist planning practice is already institutionalised in the global West unlike in Slovakia.

At the same time, although we might be considered a few steps behind, the Slovak context is unique, and the way we tackle the issues here I think could really enrich also the western field. The neoliberal approach here is, I'd say, more pure than elsewhere, or was adapted in a more perfect way, so maybe we in the same way we perfectly adapted neoliberalism, we can perfectly adapt some sustainable approaches to the future, and could pioneer in that.

I think the significance of us being in Slovakia, not somewhere else, is the capacity to stay with the trouble and to try to change things here.

What advice would you give to people who want to start their own organisations, in these kind of fields, but in other contexts around the world?

What we did with Spolka was a five year plan, hand in hand with utopian thinking. Utopia not meaning that we want to really make the plan happen, but something that gives us direction - maybe in the next few years we end up somewhere completely different than we planned, but this is something that is giving us the fire to continue and I like that.

Pictures by Barbora Bačová (2023) and by the author (2023)

For Slovak speakers, the atmosphere of the city is discussed here by two members of Spolka, architect Viktória Mravčáková and sociologist Zuzana Révészová: https://www.rtvs.sk/televizia/archiv/19501/364277#1168

and their most recent newsletter here!

https://mailchi.mp/5add6da20d9a/december-spolka-2024