2009 will be the year in which the financial crisis will fully unfold, yet also reveal its long-term potentials. Sustainable strategies will be on the rise; educational institutions will re-focus their attention on serious research and will no longer waste time on form generating strategies only. As most public and private institutions will suffer from a decrease of their operating capital, smart practice will also include the design and critical introduction of alternative economies. While Europe has recently witnesses a drift towards the political, the US – under Obama – will experience a re-politicization of the vast majority of its population. This will heavily effect spatial production.

In 2009, it is time to undo the innocence of participation. Based on romantic notions of untroubled solidarity, social inclusion and philanthropy, participation is often understood as a means of opening up, empowering, and shared authorship. New Labour’s legacy (that of the pc-nirvana) presents us with more participatory frameworks than ever before, while the country is now at an historic low of people actually wiling to get involved. While some think of empowerment, elected responsibility has been outsourced.

Without mandate? One should promote a conflictual reading of participation, a means to impose one’s criticality onto existing discourses: active decision rather than passive reaction. Thus, participation becomes a form of self-propelled critical engagement.

Cyclical Specialisation? The future spatial practitioner will be an outsider who, instead of trying to set up or sustain denominators of consensus, enters alien fields of knowledge by deliberately instigating conflicts as a micro-political form of engagement. Instead of breading the next generation of facilitators and mediators, we should produce the ‘uninvited outsider’: a crossbench-practitioner independent of pre-requisites and existing protocols. Architecture not as a means to serve a community, but to produce it.