About the Book
Architecture and the urban are connected to challenges around violence, security, race and ideology, spectacle and data. The first volume of this handbook extensively explored these oppressive roles. This second volume illustrates that escaping the corporatized and bureaucratized orders of power, techno-managerial and consumer-oriented capitalist economic models is more urgent and necessary than ever before. Herein lies the political role of architecture and urban space, including the ways through which they can be transformed and alternative political realities constituted. The volume explores the methods and spatial practices required to activate the political dimension and the possibility for alternative practices to operate in the existing oppressive systems while not being swallowed by these structures. Fostering new political consciousness is explored in terms of the following themes: Events and Dissidence; Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire; Climate and Ecology; Urban Commons and Social Participation; Marginalities and Postcolonialism. Volume II embraces engagement across disciplines and offers a wide range of projects and critical analyses across the so-called Global North and South. This multidisciplinary collection of 36 chapters provides the reader with an extensive resource of case studies and ways of thinking for architecture and urban space to become more emancipatory.
Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Ecologies of Resistance and Alternative Spatial Practices Part 1: Events and Dissidence 2. Introduction to Events and Dissidence 3. Concrete, Skateboarding and Building Community: The Battle for Venice Skatepark, Los Angeles 4. Re-Politicizing the Urban: Commoning Technicities in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement 5. A Common: The Architecture Lobby 6. Waterfront/Battlefront: Vallejo’s Black Landscapes of Resistance Against Police and Environmental Violence 7. Urban Squatting, the Agency of Empty Buildings 8. Paper Architecture and Politics in the Late-Soviet Period Part 2: Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire 9. Introduction to Biopolitics, Ethics and Desire 10. The Butcher of Nang Lerng: To Eat / To Speak Justice, and the Space of Becoming-Political 11. Desire and Micropolitical Architecture 12. Liking Like Likely: Applying Personality Traits Theory to the Design of Public Architecture 13. Practicing Ethics: Processes, Principles, Practices 14. The Surrounds: Configuring Urban Spaces Beyond Capture Part 3: Climate and Ecology 15. Introduction to Climate and Ecology 16. Mobile Commoning, Subversive Mobilities, Wayward Undercommons 17. Spatializing Queer Ecologies 18. The Role of Circular Fashion Practice in Creative Placemaking and Place Identity 19. Fast Slow: Prefabricated Architecture, DIY Earth Building, Personal and Planetary Wellbeing 20. New Architectural Eco-Politics Paradigm: Learning from Microbial Organisation as New Model of Domestic Infrastructure 21. Retrofitting in Context: Pushing the Boundaries of Building Performance Evaluation in UK Housing Part 4: Urban Commons and Social Participation 22. Introduction to Urban Commons and Social Participation 23. Skateboarding in Neoliberal Amman: Spatial Politics, Inclusivity and Infrastructuring 7hills Skatepark 24. Ageing and Architecture: From The Patient to the Citizen 25. Semiotic Citizenship and the Politics of Shack-Building in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa 26. A Triptych of Glitchy Linguistic Bots Co-Write Building and Planning Regulations 27. People’s Plan: The Political Role of Architecture and Urban Design tor Alternative Community-Led Futures Part 5: Marginalities and Postcolonialism 28. Introduction to Marginalities and Post-Colonialism 29. Indigenous Architecture and the Politics of Resistance: Waipapa Marae and the Fale Pasifika at the University of Auckland in New Zealand 30. Radical Placemaking: Digitally Situated Community Narratives as Inclusive Citymaking Practice 31. Atlas Otherwise: Navigating Across Impermeable Surfaces and Shaky Grounds 32. Situating Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Theatre and its Afterlives 33. The Hypnosis of the Belgrade Waterfront: Becoming Abnormal 34. Prefigurative Feminist Practices of Democratic City–Making: Learning from Socialist Feminism and the Greater London Council (GLC) 35. Necessary Transgressions in Architectural Education in Uganda 36. Conclusion: Robots, AI and Spatial Politics: Unpacking Potentials
About the Author :
Dr Nikolina Bobic is an academic and an architect currently based at the University of Plymouth, UK. Her research is preoccupied with political constructs of architecture and urban space. Within this domain, and engaging with the two disciplines in which she is trained (architecture and sociology), she addresses the intersections of power, politics, and space in their oppressive and liberatory mechanisms.
Dr Farzaneh Haghighi is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning, the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests revolve around the political role of space by drawing upon the intersection of political philosophy, architecture and urbanism.
Review :
“Driven by a remarkable roster of emerging and established voices, this is a tremendous and definitive collection that seeks to make sense of how architecture can deliver positive outcomes for human experience, public urban life and improved social conditions in complex and subtly varying built environments. A massive new reference work, this is a dynamic and playful collection that weaves state of the art contributions across the fields of architecture, urban studies with others from related disciplines as they are brought into dialogue with questions of social vulnerability, interstitality and the accommodation of social fragility. This is a timely and enduring gift to students of the urban-social and physical condition.”
Professor Rowland Atkinson, Chair in Inclusive Societies, University of Sheffield, UK
“Since the dawn of modernity, the call for 'what is to be done' has been followed by prescriptions and occasionally manifestoes, proposing strategies to address the ongoing crisis project now reaching a global scale. Nikolina Bobic and Farzaneh Haghighi’s groundbreaking collection, a follow-up to their previous handbook, compiles essays, each presenting a close examination of diverse aspects of the power triangle, including the world financial machination, media technologies, and the rise of populist politics. Each chapter attempts to reveal the scaffolding of our contemporary global spectacle, transcending traditional town and country trajectories. What sets apart the book’s take on this rather timely project is a call for resistance against ecological issues and sustainability problems, integral to neoliberal economic and political system. Bobic and Haghighi aim at presenting a project of hope amidst forces attempting to ensnare the dialectics between architecture and the capitalistic modernization of the urban.”
Gevork Hartoonian, Emeritus Professor of Architectural History, University of Canberra, Australia
“The challenge of creating new architectural practices that do not reproduce previous oppressions is a daunting enterprise, but one that this volume takes on with fresh insights. Surprises emerge by turning a critical eye on participatory design—a much needed critique—to new forms of dissent and collaboration that punctuate the 36 contributions from across the world and drawing upon multiple disciplines. Most importantly 'architectural' interventions and resistances are integrated into generating political theory as well as action, a feat that is difficult but crucial for the transformation in the world-making professions. Familiar concerns such as ecological sustainability, climate change, successful parks and waterfront urban development are reframed to reveal their critical potential through tracing the spatial politics of their social production. Spatial justice is a major theme and framework of analysis for reconsidering well-worn concepts such as the commons, communing and the common, and new concepts such as surrounds extend our vocabulary. The volume ends with a nod to the technological advances that might bring design closer to our everyday lives.”
Dr. Setha Low, Distinguished Professor, Psychology, Anthropology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Women's and Gender Studies, The City University of New York, USA
“Countering techno-utopian takes on ‘smart cities’ and the like and avoiding the hubris in much architectural and urban theory, the Handbook encompasses detailed analyses of all kinds of spaces – designs, places, discourses, practices – where transformative actions have been possible. The book is a reminder that architecture and urbanism can provide platforms – variously configured, provisional, agonistic – for imagining and projecting societal change. Maybe we can really be optimistic for design again.”
Professor Paul Walker, Faculty of Architecture, Building & Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia
“No one should be surprised about the role that architecture plays when it comes to issues like inequity, discrimination and power, but opening the hood to see how these things operate in real-life situations is by no means easy, and has for too long been ignored. This remarkable collection of essays proves the importance of that work. It is an impressive and timely collection of contemporary voices on contemporary issues.”
Professor Mark Jarzombek, Department of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
"This second volume of the Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics is impressive in breadth and clear in message. Including more than thirty chapters written by a stellar international cast of scholars, it convincingly argues that given contemporary societal challenges, we need to rethink the boundaries of the discipline and the role of the architect – to reclaim the agency of architecture and urbanism. Doing so, this compendium argues, will fuel a slow revolution towards more ethical, collective and ecological ways of living."
Professor Janina Gosseye, Professor of Building Ideologies, Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment, TU Delft, The Netherlands
"As a follow-up to the first volume's analysis of architecture as a tool of oppression, this urgent volume opens the door to a liberating space of resistance and affirmation. In the wave of autocratization washing over the world, Bobic and Haghighi insist that the boundaries of architecture must be questioned and expanded to find methods and theories that operate on the planetary scale. In this elegantly assembled handbook, 36 contributions show how 'democratic turnarounds' can be actualized through architecture and urban space. This important and vivid book is a must for everyone who searches for a meaningful future of architecture."
Professor Helena Mattsson, Professor in History and Theory, KTH School of Architecture, Sweden
"This volume should be on the bookshelf of anybody who is interested in the built environment. The contributors provide an exhilarating definition of architecture and urban space - everything from skateboarding to shanties. The contributors are hale from all around the world. As a result, they present tremendous diversity. There's something here for everybody."
Professor D. Medina Lasansky, Cornell AAP (Architecture, Art, Planning), USA
"Finally, architecture in its full political materiality! Finally, a cry to situate ourselves and our practices. This extremely ambitious and fundamentally useful collection of texts ushers us into a new era for architecture: it can no longer be conceivable to detach architecture and place-making from its political role towards its own world-making. Ethical, social, planetary, geographical, historical: the positions of this volume are an intricate tapestry of worldviews, all of which however are united through their astonishingly honest sense of responsibility for the past but more importantly for the future."
Dr. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor of Law & Theory, University of Westminster, UK / Artist / Fiction Author
"This well-crafted anthology covers global examples of social movements, identity struggles, and creative activism. It offers readers unique theoretical and empirical insights into the kaleidoscopic relationships between urban architecture, spatial politics, and social justice. How can common citizens reimagine, and reshape, political and economic systems amidst deepening social and ecological crises? What critical role do participatory and embodied forms of architecture play in challenging realities of exclusion and injustice? These are some of the many compelling questions that this collection conjures up, concluding with a due reminder that it is humans, not algorithms, who should decide on more inclusive futures."
Professor Martin Zebracki, Professor of Human Geography and Social Inclusion, University of Leeds, UK
"The most challenging problems in science and society lie increasingly on the boundaries between disciplines. Nowhere is this more evident than in the theory and practice of Architecture which has always stood astride blurred lines between art, culture, and technology, informing us as well as confusing us as to how we might create a future urban environment dominated by a seeming infinity of new technologies. Here the editors Bobic and Haghighi have assembled a rich selection of essays which show how architecture can cross many disciplinary boundaries but also generate a new understanding of how the social and material world needs to be designed. This is essential reading for all who use the lens of this new architecture to design a better world."
Dr. Michael Batty, Bartlett Professor of Planning, University College London, UK
"This vital compendium of strategies, tactics, feints, and subversions that can turn architecture from a built affirmation of the social, political, and economic status quo into a critical part of any attempt to create a more sustainable, just, and beautiful world should be required reading at every architecture school and in every office. It gives us a host of concrete examples of how we can make a difference through architecture. From small-scale interventions to other ways of defining the whole discipline, the Handbook draws on several decades of experiments in tactical urbanism to give us the building blocks for building an other world."
Aaron Betsky, Architecture Critic / Visiting Professor at Michael Graves School of Public Architecture, Kean University, US
"Who has the right to the city? To the planet? A timeless question, more urgent than ever. Design has the potential to mobilise alternatives, and help us move past inequity and ecological decline. To get there we have to reimagine how we build, maintain, and live in urban environments. This vital handbook collects the work of established and emerging scholars to offer careful insights that will open opportunities in theory and practice, redefining architecture and urbanism to centre those in need rather than those in power."
Dr. Daniel A. Barber, Professor and Chair - Architecture History and Theory, TU Eindhoven, Netherlands
"The community of architects and urbanists has been waiting for this handbook on the agency of spatial practices. It makes an excellent contribution to the discussion on how design can address social justice, equity, and inclusivity. Students, researchers, and practitioners will find chapters engaging with issues of politics, participation, and the situatedness of knowledge in relation to architecture, viewed from race-, gender- and class-sensitive perspectives. This handbook is essential reading for anyone interested in spatial thinking."
Dr. Martina Löw, Professor of Sociology, TU Berlin, Germany
