The story begins in the year 1900, with the opening of a leather factory in Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia. It was the first ferro-concrete industrial structure in the city. After the Second World War, this factory was nationalised and began producing Rog bicycles.
Unsurprisingly, after the factory closed in the early 1990s, the 11,000 sqm complex in the city centre became the focus of conflicting interests, which were regularly amplified and polarised by the media.
While this conflict has been the most visible aspect of the Rog factory story, we will focus on a more subtle process that has been taking place in the background: a community-oriented revitalisation project spanning 11 years.
Factory of conflicting interests
In 2010, more than twenty years after the end of Yugoslav socialism, the Municipality of Ljubljana (ML), which owned the listed factory building, commissioned me to evaluate their 2007 plan to revitalise it by turning it into a cultural centre. I became one of the leaders of the planning process for this revitalisation, and in 2012 also the manager of RogLab, a small-scale live prototype of the future centre.
The team faced several challenges during the planning process, one of them being the presence of “temporary users” of the building. Their numbers varied over the years, from a few dozen to a couple of hundred, and they were occupying the decaying premises, which had neither electricity nor water, on the basis of an informal agreement with ML. Left-wing and liberal in their worldview, they were distrustful of both the politicians and the proposed revitalisation. At the same time, city officials were sceptical about my team’s plans for a participatory process that would involve both the temporary users and other grassroots stakeholders in the planning and decision-making, seeing it as a relic from the socialist past that had never really worked.
It seemed obvious that I was going to have to find a way of reconciling the top-down approach of the ML officials and the bottom-up initiatives of the grassroots stakeholders. There were obstacles to this, however. On the one hand, ML’s preference was for collaboration with renowned experts, representing the “elite stakeholders” of the future cultural centre; on the other, the temporary users were already using the space creatively, yet were not able to gain the support of public opinion, the multitude of other grassroots stakeholders, or their neighbours. There were at least two reasons for this:
(1) the premises did not appear to meet conventional health and safety standards, including on noise levels, and
(2) the method used for allocating rooms in the factory space seemed neither transparent nor democratic.
Despite these obstacles, we succeeded in involving the first generation of temporary users in our research and planning between 2010 and 2014. From about 2013, however, the space was occupied by a second generation of temporary users, who came to reject the concept of temporary use and wanted to take the factory over on a permanent basis. Consequently, they came to see the RogLab prototype project as a threat. In 2013, for example, Marija Mojca Pungerčar’s Socialdress exhibition, produced by RogLab, was destroyed the day after its opening by unknown masked individuals who stole the exhibited works and left leaflets proclaiming, “We will not be an excavator to demolish Rog”. Tekavec (2013) claimed at the time that “this was obviously an action against the municipal project, RogLab”, while the daily newspaper Delo (Mo 2013) quoted temporary Rog users saying they were “absolutely taking the responsibility for the bold theft”. This secondary generation sought to negotiate directly with the mayor’s office, claiming the Rog factory building should be run autonomously against the forces of gentrification, commercialisation, touristification and the city’s cultural policy. They did not succeed in this. In 2016 the conflict between ML and these temporary users escalated into a court case. It was arguably brought to an end in January 2021, when the city authorities evicted the temporary users from the building.
Factory of the future
My team has extensively analysed the attitudes and behaviours of RogLab users and stakeholders, and has used them to directly inform the latest plan proposed for the building. This plan envisages a cultural space that transcends the divisions between highbrow and lowbrow, elite and grassroots, that still thrive in Ljubljana’s cultural institutions. It also proposes a horizontal management model rather than the usual vertical hierarchy. Our factory of the future also combines top-down and bottom-up approaches in an inclusive fashion, curbing the weaknesses of each where necessary.
Our research and planning for the revitalisation project started in 2010 under the title “Second Chance” and in its first four years involved over 300 elite and grassroots stakeholders, including the temporary users, creators, educational and cultural organisations, decision-makers, entrepreneurs, international cultural professionals and neighbours (Štular 2016).
We gradually built stakeholders’ trust by involving them in all phases of the research and transparently documenting and sharing the results. In February 2011 the general public and grassroots and elite stakeholders had their first chance to contribute their views, at a public presentation of our SWOT analysis. Our research validated all the key aspects of the 2007 Rog Centre development project, but differed from stakeholders’ experiences in some important respects. This sparked a lively and fruitful discussion, with nearly 100 participants suggesting valuable improvements to the plans.
In April 2001 we conducted an analysis of the public-private partnership model proposed for the Rog Centre. This identified many internationally successful examples and lent weight to stakeholder calls for civil society to be a key partner in the development process. As a result, the city’s cultural development strategy for 2012-2015 (SRM 2012) was amended to include public-civic partnership as one of the key performance indicators for the Rog Centre.
In September 2011 we held a meeting with people living or working in the immediate vicinity of the former Rog factory. While they would have preferred to have been consulted earlier, they still showed great interest in the development plans. Their suggestions included a new, non-commercial public library in the Rog Centre itself and using the former factory yard for a public park rather than the originally planned exhibition hall and hotel.
The information gathered was incorporated into our draft Rog Centre utilisation concept and planned pilot activities, and the feasibility of the new concept was then checked with potential partners and users of the future Rog Centre. The analysis provided deeper insight into the needs of stakeholders, which is essential if we are to avoid merely implementing generic solutions determined in advance.
Factory in the shipping container
Prototyping has a long history in problem-solving (see Jacobs 1962; Schön 1984; Turner 2016; de Lange and de Wall 2019). We wanted to create a community-based live prototype for the future Rog factory, an important urban and cultural development. This approach drew on the idea of prototyping as something that involves “all kinds of artefacts” that “enable the different stakeholders to collaboratively explore alternatives and to articulate their different viewpoints” (Mulder and Kun 2019: 230).
In line with The Nizhny Tagil Charter for the Industrial Heritage recommendations (TICCIH 2003), we aimed for the greatest possible compatibility between the new and old uses of the factory. In honour of the knowledge, activities and workers of the former factory, we designed RogLab as a production space providing computer-controlled manufacturing technology and technical support services, catering to the needs of a wide range of target users, e.g. individuals and companies in the cultural and creative sector, children, students, engineers, makers, creative amateurs, senior citizens, etc, and with a high degree of inclusivity planned in from the start.
Sabatini and Trimarchi (2020: 22) argue that separation between different groups of cultural actors prevents productive interaction in cultural institutions and sustains the outdated paradigm of high culture vs pop culture. By contrast, our aim was to transcend the gap between elite and grassroots practices. More specifically, we wanted to create a space where interactions could take place between highbrow stakeholders such as designers, architects and contemporary artists, and lowbrow stakeholders such as DIY communities and up-and-coming CCS creators. We drew inspiration not just from fablabs, but also from libraries where, in exchange for a small membership fee, everybody is welcome, regardless of age, gender, political affiliation or personal preferences.
We expected the RogLab prototype to not only make a significant contribution to community involvement in city planning, but also to provide local decision-makers with concrete information and user experiences before the plans for the factory were implemented. This was not unlike Turner’s view (2016: 257) that unfinished prototypes inspire stakeholders to complete them and to act out the future exemplified by them.
The RogLab live prototype was initially planned to close after two years, in 2014. However, the factory renovation was repeatedly postponed by ML and only started in February 2021, so RogLab has been working around the clock for almost a decade now. During this time, more than 6,000 unique users, 70% of them female, have developed their products and services in our small container. Along with more than 80 stakeholder organisations, these users have also participated in the ongoing research and planning for the revitalisation of the factory.
At just 28 sqm, RogLab is neither large nor prestigious, so few influential people were either interested in it or understood its significance for the future of the Rog factory. Nevertheless, it has become a successful, award-winning space facilitating the exchange of ideas between inventive individuals and groups. The limitations imposed by the tiny space have actively encouraged a new culture of sharing and networking, resulting in a hybrid and diverse community working in a positive atmosphere, as well as extremely valuable research results.
As an example, our limited funding meant that we had to act flexibly and rapidly and experiment with new approaches, services and incentive programs, and this made them easier to monitor. As a result, it was easy to collect qualitative and quantitative data from and about the users and feed it directly into the cycle of iterations and improvements. The research and analysis resulting from the live prototyping over the years of the project (see IKC 2011; Uršič 2011; Štular 2017; Štular and Friderich 2018; Mihailovič 2019) have proven invaluable and have revealed the needs of the grassroot users, namely:
1) support mechanisms for socially or financially disadvantaged user groups;
2) the ability for users to access work space infrastructure, tech support services, educational, social and financing schemes, and international networks; and
3) a non-hierarchical, flexible and inclusively run cultural institution.
Conclusion
Sabatini and Trimarchi (2020: 24) argue that bottom-up challenges to established and often obsolete cultural paradigms tend to be unstructured and unsystematic and therefore often fail to break into policy debates where they could induce innovation and actual change. This is the case in Slovenia, too, but RogLab has shown how it can be overcome since the Rog factory revitalisation project represents the most extensive example of a highly participatory planning process for a major public investment in the Slovenian cultural arena.
This has not been perceived as such by the media, however, nor has it been fully acknowledged by either ML or the various generations of temporary users of the factory building. All the same, the collective work carried out by participants in the RogLab live prototype seems to have brought ML – which was initially sceptical about the participatory approach – to the point where it may adopt the RogLab model for the future Rog factory. Indeed, a number of public statements and video presentations from ML would appear to point to this.
Live prototyping is an important element in establishing new collaborative relationships between multiple stakeholders, but in order to be truly successful, it seems that new participatory approaches need to be matched by changes in the style of city management (Mulder and Kun 2019: 235). With this in mind, and also in view of the various powerful interests dictating the actual renovation of the Rog factory, it is not yet clear whether the RogLab participatory model will succeed in scaling up to the next level of the implementation of this project. If it does, it will be the first successful attempt of this kind in Slovenia.
References
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Footnotes
(1) The planning process was part of the Second Chance project funded by the Interreg Central Europe programme from 2010 to 2013.
(2) In the 1990s the now-closed Rog factory building was occasionally used for festival events and exhibitions. From 2006 to January 2021, however, it was occupied by regular users including artists, intellectuals and activists. These can all arguably be defined as “temporary users”, although the concept of temporary use – supported by the first generation of these users – gradually came to be rejected by the second generation.
(3) The grassroots stakeholders included diverse groups from the field of CCS; potential future users such as artists, designers, architects, makers, engineers, students and schoolchildren; potential partners such as educational and cultural institutions, NGOs and private companies; and temporary users and neighbours.
(4) The initial concept of 2007 was drawn up in collaboration with renowned Slovenian experts from the fields of architecture, design and contemporary art.
(5) The concept of RogLab was developed together with my colleague Urška Jurman.
(6) In 2018 RogLab won the EUROCITIES Innovation Award for its contribution to innovation in local ecosystems, involving residents in its decision-making, and its use of innovation to improve resilience and sustainability.
Meta Štular
The original was published in Arts Management Quarterly no. 136, p. 20 (2021)