Giancarlo De Carlo: Participation Depends

This is a first attempt to unpack the concept of participation as developed by one of its most passionate and authoritative advocates: Giancarlo De Carlo. The narrative hinges on the analysis of a number of texts produced by the architect, spanning his entire career, in which this topic takes a prominent position. This analysis reads also the experiences in which the architect adopted this instrument to understand the friction of his ambitious intentions within social and political contexts of Italian architectural practice, which changed profoundly from the post-war period to the 1980s. This paper will argue that it is precisely in this changing context that De Carlo refines and expands his idea of “participation” both conceptually and operationally. His experiences and their contexts are explored through unpublished archival materials, professional magazines, contemporaneous coverage and debate published in newspapers, and the scholarship realised on this theme to date.