RE-ARRANGEMENT AND RE-CLUSTERING OF TASKS

ORGANIZING AROUND NATURAL WHOLES IN THE PRODUCTION PROCESS

Another aspect of the current mechanisation of neighborhood creation, lies in the fact that the packages of effort - the tasks as defined by the industrial machine - are defined for the convenience of the developer (architect, contractor, financier, etc), but are not chosen as natural wholes in a community whole-seeking process. Again, this cannot but fragment the resulting neighborhoods. Of course human community cannot be created in such a way.

For example, one cannot easily define the rooms in an apartment, on a paper plan or on a plan in a computer. What matters, the places best suited for rooms, and their best dimensions, depend on relations with views, width of outdoor space, direction of the sun and so on. All these things can be appreciated best, by a person who (a) will live in that apartment and (b) who is standing in the place where the apartment will be as the layout of rooms is attempted.

Such a down-to-earth and common-sense view of what to do and how to do it, requires a reorganization of people's tasks. The framer, or block mason, need to be on site, at the time when the family have shown (with chalk marks or sticks), where they would like the walls to be, so that they work directly from the feeling-based decision made by the family, not made rigid by adherence to codes. This process may be mediated (for practical reasons) by an architect, or by a project manager - but in any case, it is an entirely different process from the one in an industrial production scheme.

The same type of problem can occur, in an even simpler process - the moment when a house owner or apartment owner wants to choose the position, size, and extent of a patch of outdoor garden or terrace which is going to be the private outdoors for that apartment. This is very fundamental process, which may need to interlock with the signing of property documents, precede location of potential service lines, and be inconsistent (if wrong timed) with the usual condition of a site made ready to receive large concrete mixer trucks carrying and unloading concrete.

The same thing occurs again and again, through the building process. A process must accommodate the natural groups of cooperating men and women so that those who have the natural right, or natural ability, to make a given decision, can be gathered together at the right time and place, and above all at the right moment in the overall management process, so they can do a job well, and do it cleanly, efficiently, and fairly fast. Clearly this requires a different conception of project management, from the one in practice in the typical organization of large scale housing or office projects.