Vision
Kenneth Balfelt Team is a non-profit organisation that works to develop social and physical situations from an artistic platform. We create social infrastructure for human development.
We create projects on all scales - from single events to large urban space projects - for private institutions, foundations, municipalities and ministries, among others.
We always follow an A-Z principle: Whether we do architecture, landscape, user involvement, strategic consultancy or knowledge production, the results are better if we follow the process from start to finish.
We work interdisciplinary, typically within the themes: Urban development, architecture, vulnerable neighbourhoods, vulnerable people, employment of vulnerable people, young people, conflict resolution between vulnerable people and other user groups around them, harnessing people's untapped resources, development and empowerment. We are passionate about creating space and methods in institutions, cities and urban development to include vulnerable groups - broadly defined - in society.
One of our core competencies is the translation social relationships into physical form and framework.
We build on a human and ethical focus that translates and rethinks social and development needs into concrete creative, spatial, architectural and artistic solutions and forms.
In all our projects, we work with participation, co-production and method development to achive the highest possible quality and innovation.
Services
User Involvement
Our long experience with user involvement shows that users are always the experts on their own context, needs and what's going on in their neighbourhood. That's why we make ourselves contextual by systematically involving everyone from the mayor to the gang. We believe that people act to the best of their ability and according to their own subjective logic. Our role is to understand these logics through sensitive ethical and empathic empathy, to facilitate alternative courses of action and to co-create projects in which the user feels at home.
See for example: Enghave Minipark, Folkets Park, Odense Gårdrum, Residential Centre for Vulnerable People in Roskilde Ring Park og The Needs of Vulnerable Families.
Neighbourhood analysis
We conduct in-depth area analyses through interviews and observation to provide councils and housing associations with a solid basis for improving urban and residential areas.We talk to everyone - including those others are afraid to talk to, such as the socially disadvantaged, young men, etc.The knowledge gathered is processed and presented through a holistic and systematic context analysis.The contextual analysis becomes a solid basis for action - whether it's policy and practice or architecture and design.
See for example: Folkets Park, Klostertorvet in Aarhus, Kennedys Plads in Aalborg and The Needs of Vulnerable Families.
Building projects with involvement and programme
We conduct thorough area analyses through interviews and observations to create a solid foundation for municipalities and housing associations to improve urban and residential areas. We go all the way round - including those who others are afraid to talk to, such as the socially disadvantaged, young men, etc. The collected knowledge is processed and presented through a holistic and systematic context analysis. The context analysis becomes a solid foundation for action - whether it's policy and practice or architecture and design.
See for example: Folkets Park, Klostertorvet in Aarhus, Kennedys Plads in Aalborg og The Needs of Vulnerable Families.
Strategic consulting
Problems experienced in the city cannot necessarily be solved in the city. The sometimes destructive (for themselves and for others) presence of socially disadvantaged people in the city is a symptom of other factors - private, psychological, social, political, planning, organisational, health and more. We help municipalities and housing associations to create well-functioning cities for socially vulnerable people - and for everyone else - through strategic and organisational advice and practice changes that bring cities, citizens and treatment closer together
See for example: Boligliv i Balance, Klostertorvet in Aarhus, Kennedys Plads in Aalborg og The Needs of Vulnerable Families.
Stress and well-being
Since 2014, we have been developing how we can create a new behavioural culture in our society that does not cause stress and unhappiness.Our goal is to create meaningfulness by integrating recovery into our daily lives.It's a break with stress-inducing ways of working and the compensatory balance thinking that characterises the treatment of stress today. Balance thinking is where we try to balance too much activity with occasional recovery. We continuously develop methods and tools for new behaviours.
See for example: Meeting at Kunsten, Sowing The Seeds of Love og Wellbeing of the Children and the Young
Knowledge production and methodology development
Kenneth Balfelt Team makes it a point of honour for others to learn and copy our methods.We have published leading publications with new knowledge, tools and new directions for the urban development and art industry.
See for example: Byen The City as Living Room, Build Them Up, Away from the Edge, Artistically Developed Methods for User Involvement og Methods
Other tasks
Contact us to hear how we can solve a task together with you!
Values
Movie: Projectland
Involvement
Kenneth Balfelt is passionate about involvement and has a vision that involvement will become a professional discipline in, for example, the urban development industry on par with architecture and engineering. We are critical of large parts of the type of citizen involvement that we see in, for example, the urban development industry, where involvement is often something that is “overcome” in a single evening workshop. Unfortunately, a slightly caricatured scenario often plays out something like this when citizen involvement is reduced to single workshops:
Citizens and users are invited for coffee and cake on a Tuesday afternoon and after a long and thorough presentation of an already approved project, it's just a matter of filling in yellow post-its with ideas for what citizens would like. When the evening is over, the advisors are left with 251 suggestions for play elements, furniture, planting, etc., which they don't know what to use them for – and the proposal that was presented was actually so well-worked out and fully developed that there is no room for major adjustments anyway.
Involvement based on stand-alone workshops is, roughly speaking, designed to either “waste as little time as possible” in the process for the clients or appears as a quirky – but insignificant – spice. Just as the work of the architect or engineer cannot be completed in a stand-alone Tuesday workshop, neither can citizen involvement. At least not without negatively affecting the design solutions.
As long as involvement is mostly a sham manoeuvre, we will never break this negative spiral: projects with insufficient involvement often result in irrelevant and incoherent design solutions, such as poor Euro pallet art and miserable planter solutions. And sad solutions without architectural value will only confirm to the client that involvement is not worth prioritizing, so for the next urban development project only minimal funds are allocated for it...
Involvement is and should be a profession with a set of standards for good and bad practice. Not for the sake of the involvement or the citizen involvement itself, but because deep and thorough involvement:
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raises the quality of urban space projects architecturally and functionally
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creates new narratives about and rebrands urban spaces
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increases safety in cities, districts and residential areas
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can help lift citizens closer to education and the labor market
Role allocation and translation
Local knowledge
Professional expertise
Good result!
Simple model for collaboration and role division between users and professionals. User involvement must be in-depth and thorough, but when inputs and needs from there are to be translated into physical solutions, it is professionals who are in charge. Illustration by Spektrum Arkitekter
Where is the line between involvement and design? Between those who want to have a say and those who have to produce high-quality solutions? ‘Users are the true experts’ is a sympathetic if potentially problematic statement often encountered in user-led urban development projects.
The worst thing you can do is to blur the line between professionalism and user involvement. If there is too much professionalism and too little influence in an urban development project, we run the risk of developing alien solutions that nobody wants. On the other hand, if there is too little professionalism and too much user involvement, we risk poor design. This is the line that involvement is constantly balancing.
User involvement and design should not be understood 1:1 - that users formulate what they want and we deliver it. User involvement is about creating a knowledge base that needs to be translated and worked on. This is the 'contract' that needs to be agreed with citizens and users: the users' area of expertise is their own needs and dreams and their knowledge of the local area, while the actual solution and design expertise belongs to the professionals.
While we often work with architects and landscape architects who are typically concerned with physical design, it is KBT's responsibility to shape the ethics of the projects. In other words, what values, moods, functions and emotions should the physical solutions support? A good result/quality is not only about the physical solution, but also about how it is received, understood and used by the recipients.
Involvement from A-Z
When transforming a project from needs to solutions, the architect naturally bears a large part of the responsibility. But let's make one thing clear. We don't believe in handovers, where a project changes hands one time after another in the process: For example, from involvement people to architects, who in turn pass on to tenders via the client consultant and finally end up with a contractor. We believe that there should be a number of consistent people in the process to ensure that the depth of understanding we gain in the involvement process permeates the entire process from the start until the craftsman cuts the bench.
Process diagram for how the involvement theme is pervasive and the architects follow along most of the way. Illustration by Spektrum Arkitekter and Kenneth Balfelt Team
Integrity
Involvement is a highly personal activity that requires building trust internally (client, architects/designers) and externally with the citizens with whom a dialogue has been initiated. The citizen involvement representative represents, defends and must ensure that the inputs generated by the involvement process is acted upon and followed through. The citizen involvement representative must not find himself in too many situations where he/she hides behind external barriers or excuses failed citizen wishes by saying “it was the boss’s order, the municipality’s policy, or the guidelines of the circumstances”. In that case, the citizen involvement representative has created unrealistic – or perhaps too specific – expectations about what will come out of the involvement.
The Kenneth Balfelt Team's approach to working with involvement originally has its roots in the art world. In the art world, the artist has to take 100% responsibility for everything they do and send out – including the work of the architect and engineer. It's all about integrity.
And what is the opposite of integrity in involvement? It is when the knowledge that is created in the interaction with the users is ignored or disregarded when it reaches the head office or the design studios. If there is to be complete integrity throughout the process, the community involvement person must follow the project to the door and must be able to vouch for the design solutions that the architects or other designers are preparing. And they can only do this if the design solutions respond to the needs and dreams that the citizens have expressed in the citizen involvement process. – And if the citizens recognize the solutions that the designers subsequently develop.
Qualifying users
Just as we as advisors need to build knowledge to solve the urban space project, we also need to build mutual trust and belief in the project through dialogue with the users. If the users are to be qualified to participate and their knowledge is to be used, we cannot simply invite them to a one-hour citizens' meeting. No one can become an urban planner, or provide qualified inputs to an urban planning process in a one-hour meeting!
It is also about asking the right questions. When we interview citizens and users, we are very focused on maintaining the division of roles between professionals and users, and thereby creating a conversation situation that involves asking about what we want answers to – not what we think they can answer! Experience has taught us that it can be a challenge if the users we talk to think that they should come up with solutions for the specific project. They should not. It is our task as professionals to develop the solutions. As described above, the users should familiarize themselves with the social situation or contribute to the physical analysis, but as a starting point we are not actually interested in their solution suggestions – that is simply not their job.
Everyone is an expert on their own situation, on the specific context, the social relations in the area and on the significance of the place. This also applies – or in fact especially – to the so-called socially disadvantaged and resource-poor, who are all too often underestimated and avoided in urban development projects. The beer drinkers from Enghave Plads are 'super users' of public space. They sit there almost all day, all year round. No urban planner, anthropologist, architect, municipal official or artist has as much experience with public space as they do.