About the Book
This handbook provides fresh insights into the debates and challenges that unfold in the cross-disciplinary field of architecture and anthropology. Based on studies of empirical contexts across the globe, the authors launch and test a broad variety of methods and advance various theoretical concepts.
Architecture and anthropology have always had overlapping interests, but a range of developments in both areas make it more relevant than ever to intersect, overlap, combine or even merge the two disciplines. In anthropology, the spatial, material, and nonhuman turns have paved the way for an increasing interest in, and need for, of changing the world, rather than just studying it. On the other hand, architecture, beyond designing structures, has become interested in the uses and processes that unfold in, during, and after construction. The contemporary research and practices in both disciplines are testimonies that a cross-disciplinary exchange is inspiring for engaging with, and responding to, the challenges of a world in ecological, societal, and political turmoil.
This handbook addresses established scholars, students, and practitioners alike by outlining contemporary developments and tensions at the intersection of architecture and anthropology.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Critical Agendas and Contemporary Approaches to the Cross-Disciplinary Field of Architecture and Anthropology
1_METHODS
1.0_Section Introduction
1.1_Paperwork of the Everyday: Re-working Welfare State Housing with Dirt, Dogs and All
1.2_“Relevé” as a Tool for Drawing Attention: Migrant Dwellings in the Rif (Morocco)
1.3_On Sketch and Script. Artistic Sensibility in Urban Investigation
1.4_Comparing Fieldnotes, Converging Methodologies: Architectural and Anthropological Perspectives on Socialist-Modernist Mass Housing in New Belgrade
1.5_Visual Narratives of Inhabitation for Interrogating Inclusion in Social Housing Renovation in Brussels
1.6_Drawing Matters: Graphic Anthropologies in Architectural Education
1.7_The "Organic" Production of Space and its Social Order
2_PROCESSES
2.0_Section Introduction
2.1_Of Flesh and Concrete: Autoconstruction in the Fitness Architectures and Anti-Architectures of Medellín, Colombia
2.2_The Temporalities of Demolition: Anticipation and Refusal on a London Housing Estate
2.3_The Timeless Fruition of Perishable Buildings: Correspondences with the Mebéngôkre People
2.4_The Frustrated Need for Meaning: Situational Aesthetic Boredom and Collaborative Creativity in Everyday Architectural Competition Work
2.5_Tiny Homes, Unreal Estate, and the Precarious Politics of Housing: The Case of the Wendy House
2.6_Form Follows Kinship: Loneliness and Family by Design
3_USES
3.0_Section Introduction
3.1_Making a City, Reinventing Ruins: The Social Life of an Urban Infrastructure
3.2_Sharing Space and Making Home: Everyday Belonging in Multicultural and Low-income Neighbourhoods in Norway
3.3_Ways of Inhabiting and Perceiving an Álvaro Siza House
3.4_Can Good Fences Make Good Neighbours? Anthropological Explorations of Openness and Boundary-making in Architecture
3.5_From Function to Affordance: Observing Pedagogic Shifts Through Use of Space in an Open-plan School
3.6_Blue ‘Tin’ Roof: How Architecture and Social Life Reflect, Inflect and Deflect e-Each Other, in Nepal
4_ENVIRONMENTS
4.0_Section Introduction
4.1_On Polystyrene and Zebras: Integrating Ethnographic Perspectives and Architectural Innovation in Housing Retrofits
4.2_Circular Practices, Learning Processes, and Doing-It-Yourself on Japan’s Empty House Renovation Projects
4.3_“Nothing Goes to Waste!”: Processes of Demolition Material Reclamation in Istanbul and Beyond
4.4_Growing Spaces for at Least 100 Years: The Vegetal Politics of the Theatre of the Long Now
4.5_Dreams of “Stoffwechsel”. Matter, Evolution, and Form in Architectural Anthropology
5_FLOWS
5.0_Section Introduction
5.1_Volcanic Ties: Mutually Constituted Landscapes in Mexico and the US
5.2_Cementing Settler Colonialism: An Ethnography of Israeli West Bank Construction
5.3_The Cosmopolitan Pastoral: Mobilizing Peripheries from the Village to the City and Back
5.4_ Chinese Enclaves in Spain: Urban Transformation of Industrial Districts and the Global Economy
5.5_Foreign Experts and Chinese Airports
Parallel Worlds: Missed Encounters Between Architecture and Anthropology
About the Author :
Marie Stender is an anthropologist and senior researcher in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research focuses on architectural anthropology, disadvantaged neighbourhoods, urban-domestic boundaries, place-making, and social sustainability. She has founded the Nordic Research Network of Architectural Anthropology and co-edited the Routledge anthology Architectural Anthropology – Exploring Lived Space (with Claus Bech-Danielsen and Aina Landsverk Hagen, 2021).
Claus Bech-Danielsen is an architect and a Professor in the Department of the Built Environment at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is a housing researcher working in the field between architectural space and social life. In his research he focuses on postwar mass housing and on the development of social and environmental sustainability in disadvantaged housing areas. He was chief editor at Nordic Journal of Architectural Research for a decade and co-edited the Routledge anthology Architectural Anthropology – Exploring Lived Space (with Marie Stender and Aina Landsverk Hagen, 2021).
Aina Landsverk Hagen is a Research Professor of Social Anthropology at the Oslo Metropolitan University, with a PhD on architects’ collaborative creativity. She has published extensively on youth participation in urban development, innovation, organizational change, trans-disciplinary methods and action research. She co-edited the Routledge anthologies Media Management and Digital Transformation (with Arne L. Bygdås and Stewart Clegg, 2019) and Architectural Anthropology – Exploring Lived Space (with Marie Stender and Claus Bech-Danielsen, 2021).
Madlen Kobi is a social anthropologist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research and teaching focus on architectural anthropology, waste, infrastructure, urban political ecology, circular construction, and material culture with a regional focus on China and Europe. She co-edited the anthology Coping with Urban Climates: Comparative Perspectives on Architecture and Thermal Governance (with Sascha Roesler and Lorenzo Stieger, 2022) and published her research in journals such as Visual Studies, Social Anthropology, Urban Studies, Roadsides, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and International Journal of Urban and Rural Research.
Ying Zhou is an architect and urban theorist teaching at the University of Hong Kong. Her research on the urban transformations of Shanghai, contextualizing contemporary developments in the institutional frameworks and historical legacies of the city, was published in the book Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Productions in Shanghai's City Center (2017). Her current research looks at how the burgeoning of contemporary visual art spaces manifest the shifts in the arts ecologies of East Asian cities, and their intersections with heritage conservation, architectural reuse, gentrification, and the rhetorics of creative cities.
