Yvonne Rijpers talked to the four partners - Kees Jansen, Arie van der Ham, Jeroen Laven and Hans Karssenberg - about the Stipo approach. What does it stand for?
What is, in short, the Stipo approach?
Hans Karssenberg: "The Stipo approach is an approach to urban development, spatial strategies and concept development. The Stipo approach was developed at the University of Amsterdam and then further developed in practice, as new questions appeared at every corner."
Arie van der Ham: "The keywords in the Stipo approach are: solution-driven - thinking in terms of opportunities rather than problems and obstacles; strategy - setting a goal and then working out how to achieve it; and creativity - looking for answers outside the beaten path using unexpected partnerships."
What is the motivation behind the Stipo approach?
Kees Jansen: "One thing that always strikes us is the lack of any real conscious thinking about how to tackle urban development processes. We have seen how that leads to projects that deliver more of the same, or generate high levels of frustration along the way. We think you can, and should, take more time to think consciously about the right approach."
Jeroen Laven: "The motivation is to improve practice. We think of practice as everything that is related to the development of an area and the quality of life of people in the area, not just now but also in the foreseeable future. Restructuring, culture, spatial development, the economy or social developments - we tackle these things as a single, interlinked entity. That is what drives the Stipo approach."
What are the typical features of the approach?
Arie: "It's not a slot machine; you can't just throw in a coin and wait for something to happen. It is a collection of insights from practice and from the literature. If you want to enhance the creativity of development processes, you can learn a lot from the theory of creativity. However, this is useful only if you can transform the theories into practical applications.
The Stipo approach is an open one. It is developing continually. We look at what people expect at the moment from government authorities, who are often our clients. Other major players are corporations, investors, residents' organisations, indeed all the stakeholders involved in development areas.
The positions of these parties with respect to each other, and with respect to residents, has changed drastically over the last decade in the Netherlands, and in Europe too for that matter. And this change also impacts the approach. It is different from what it was ten years ago, and it will be different again in a decade from now."
What are the different steps in the approach?
Jeroen: "The first thing we do is to look at the job. Often, problem-owners formulate the work in narrow terms. So our first step is to re-formulate the assignment and place it in a broader context: the broader setting and the longer term. Next, we work out which process is needed and the appropriate approach. But even then, we make adjustments along the way. You can't be rigid in your thinking because every area is unique, every population is unique and every organisation is unique."
Hans: "In the early stages, we try to get to grips with the local culture, both in the organisation and in the population. You have to change the dashboard every time: in Parkstad Limburg you will do completely different things than in Enschede. In Amsterdam, or in Tatabánya in Hungary, your methods will be different again."
What are the main principles?
Kees: "You can teach people tricks, but they don't work when the circumstances change."
Hans: "That's why we make a distinction between understanding and know-how. The Stipo approach focuses on teaching people understanding, an awareness of why things work the way they do. They can use that understanding to structure the way they work."
Arie: "We always think in terms of a three-cornered relationship between content, approach and structure. If you change the content of your ambitions, your structure has to change accordingly. So you have to think about organisational structures, resources and instruments. If this shift has already been accomplished in practice, things often stop there. But you should be looking at the approach too; the skills, the attitude that people have towards their work. Otherwise, any change in the ambitions will never take root.
If you adopt more ambitious goals, you need a different strategy and skills to achieve them. You have to be able to establish support, defeat scepticism, find financial resources and establish an organisation. So you can never divorce content, structure and process."
Jeroen: "The approach stresses flexibility: you are always adjusting the process on the basis of your strategy, and on the basis of the substantive goals that underlie the strategy. We are always asking 'is this what we want to have achieved together in 20 years?' - the overall goal -and then we work back to what is needed to achieve that. So we don't work from the here and now to the future, but the other way round. Turning things round like this makes you much more strategic and directive.
Overall goals provide a direction, but they are never oppressive. To achieve the overall goal, you have do think about the strategy you have to develop, about the partners you need. Nine times out of ten, you see that municipal authorities and corporations alone are not enough; you need to talk to other investors - in the broadest sense of the term - and to residents' networks and so on."
Where can you use the Stipo approach?
Hans: "In development assignments in the broadest sense. We make innovations, because that's where the challenge is: not more of the same, but bringing out what is distinctive, and what is special. This is a cultural, physical, economic and social activity.
Let's take an example: the Stadionplein in Amsterdam. This square fronting the Olympic Stadium needed redesigning. As part of the process, we established a Coalition for the wider Olympic Area to think about programming and to establish an alliance for that purpose with stakeholders in the field. They back each other up in terms of bringing the distinctive Olympic character of the area to life, for example by organising sports and cultural activities. Another example is Zaanstad, with Inverdan West, the second component of the major project for the centre. We look at the social facilities required, but also at what is needed to bring quality of life into the assignment, and to prevent the area turning into a neighbourhood lurking behind the station.
We work on homes, welfare and care, concept development of the kind seen in StudentCity in Rotterdam, international projects like ReUrbA, and that provides an indication of the range we cover."
Kees: "We use all these projects in practice to add new knowledge to what we already know. We're a bit like composers: we bring together different influences to create something new. And we are open source in terms of passing on expertise and insights, both inside and outside projects."
Arie: "We also provide training to pass on expertise and insights: training on the job, coaching. It's typical of us that we don't see this as being separate from the actual work; for us, work in the field is training. Even when we are working on a project in the field, we combine that with the development of skills. After all, we always move on after a while, and the organisation has to be able to pick up where we leave off. And they often need skills different from those that they bring with them."
What scale does the Stipo approach focus on?
Kees: "The local, regional, supra-regional and international scales. We mainly opt for local, regional and supra-regional projects. The international projects also focus on what you want to achieve at those levels. We want our contacts with the field to be close enough. It is there that our approach has most effect; otherwise, energy gets expended on other things. Ultimately, we are primarily concerned with achieving lasting results for local and regional societies."