TEH: Building a Cultural Regeneration Project for Europe

To build is to destroy states architecture scholar Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Malterre-Barthes, 2024) in her recent advocacy for a Global Moratorium on New Construction. Under her analysis, architectural practices need to radically move away from well-established extractive and exploitative practices (and economies) that have intensely shaped the profession since decades and are today undergoing a profound crisis. For Malterre-Barthes, architecture needs to be profoundly reinvented through a new culture and economy of “care”; a culture entailing practices of continuous maintenance, repair, and self-repair of the built environment and of the social/ecological populations that inhabit them (Malterre-Barthes, 2023). A politics of “repair” and “self-repair” extending to architectural and urban disciplines with the ambition of transforming —in depth— a sector in deep crisis. From Stephen Cairns and Jane M Jacobs’ provocation that Buildings must die (Cairns et al., 2014) to ROTOR’s co-funder Lionel Devlieger argument for a need to rediscover the Art of Deconstruction (Devlieger, 2019), we could also argue that “to deconstruct” (rather than destroy) is “to (re)build” or, rather should be. In other words, one should not be allowed to demolish existing built infrastructures (a spatial capital, a valuable stock) without a clear vision of what this entails in terms of grey energy and reuse potential, without a comprehensive strategy for both the future of the building and the outcomes of eventual demolition.
Within such an extensive debate a concern clearly emerges, we need to reexplore and update an ancient and often lost culture of continuous care and repair for what we inhabit, to systematically reuse architectural, urban, and territorial infrastructures when they eventually reach the end of a lifecycle. -- Given the current discussions and concerns expressed both by public actors and scholars, concrete examples are needed of what alternatives to the usual resource-abusive architectural and urban developments could look like (their potentials and limits). Through a collaborative effort, the “Rebuilding to Last” project attempts to do so by documenting the capacity of independent Cultural Centres to address the regenerative future of their buildings and communities within the context of a specific, long-lasting European network of grassroots organizations. This publication, through multiple collaborative investigations on the activity of the Trans Europe Halles (TEH) Network and its members, aims to underline the capacity and limits of inspiring, fore running sustainable transformation practices for what they can teach us for future operations among cultural teams, audiences and communities, cities and beyond. The ways and strategies through which the TEH Cultural Centres have invested, repurposed and cared for neglected industrial buildings/infrastructures all over Europe since the 1980’s, constitute an important deposit of local experimentations from which alternative, non-extractive and community-focused ways to adapt, inhabit and transform our built environment could be learned.