Quaderns: If in the previous issue of Quaderns we related domesticity and politics, analysing how the small scale of the domestic is directly connected with macroeconomic factors, in this issue we are placing the focus on the urban scale. From your viewpoint, what role is played by the public space?

Saskia Sassen: When we talk about public space we do so about quite a formalised historical category, the very notion of public space is completely established in the very way in which we think. In this sense, the idea of public space in Europe means something very specific, it has very particular connotations. When we talk about the European public space, we think about a very important common asset, but at the same time we see how that space contains certain incrusted logics and codes that, as our cities become bigger and more heterogeneous, ultimately convert it, de facto, into a somewhat exclusionary element: the public space often makes reference to our customs, not to other customs. In that sense we need something more than that public space that is already recognised, respected, built and ideologically charged. Perhaps, the public space suffers from being overdetermined. We need other categories.

In this aspect I am extremely interested in the idea of indeterminate space. Everyone should be able to recognise themselves in it. Let’s focus, for example, on a critical subject: the powerless, the discriminated, or the importance of having indeterminate spaces available for social movements, such as 15-M. Speaking of the indeterminate, I believe that the word calle in Spanish does not hold that same meaning that somehow is contained within the English word street. The word calle in Spanish evokes a certain elegance; street, in contrast, evokes a certain idea of informality. It makes reference to something that is not totally finished, something that is still emerging. The idea of street, understood in this sense, is very important.

Q: Talking of street, you have often referred to the concept of “global street”.

S. S.: “Global street” refers to the complex space of the contemporary city. In the “global street” the connections are built between the major political and economic powers and the domestic sphere, households. A clear example of this is what occurred between the years 2000 and 2005, when access to mortgages was actively promoted, encouraging debt – we cannot forget that credit means debt –. Thus, the global financial system starts to enter the modest world of domesticity and debt is precisely the mechanism for achieving this.

The connection of the “global street” with the economic powers occurs through big capital, which gradually buys up bits of our cities, which it often does not even develop, so often the city becomes simply another form of capital accumulation.

However, it is also the space of those groups of people that we habitually call the invisible, the powerless. I always say that the city is the space in which those powerless people can make history. I would say that the street, in the English sense that I mentioned previously, is differentiated from the classical European notion of more ritualised spaces. Street and Square are different – even from the viewpoint of their political reading – to the piazza and the boulevard, perhaps two of the most emblematic elements of European public space.

The street, conceived in this way, more than a space in which to represent ritualised routines, is a place in which new forms of the social and the political can appear.

Q: You have just presented in Barcelona a book that is titled ‘Expulsions.’ Undoubtedly in many cases these expulsions were originated by that debt mechanism you referred to. What is the role played by the economic powers with respect to those kinds of situations of social expulsion?

S. S.: To talk about that we can take an example familiar to us all, the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos. The aim of these meetings between the major economic powers consists of constructing a cultural context so that the economic, political and media elites of the world alike, accept the neoliberal and privatisations model.

The Davos Forum meetings become dangerous, because they manage to present any issue under a new narrative, with the aim of deactivating it. For example, the theme of the last meeting was inequality. All the groups with economic power accept that it is an important issue to debate. And it is here that these meetings become dangerous, because they focus on the cultural generation of a new narrative – and a language – that make it acceptable. Inequality is no longer presented as such, but described in their own terms. Thus, situations of social expulsion are created while, conversely, the message is transmitted that work is being done to solve the problem.

We are living in extreme times in which the condition of “expulsion” is becoming invisible, because our categories – we are coming back here to Davos and the creation of a language – cannot take in these extreme times. We live surrounded by an entire series of invisibilities, conceptually speaking.

Q: The abuses of tourism, as in some cases that have arisen in Barcelona, have also produced small-scale expulsion logics. What is your diagnosis?

S. S.: To talk about the city one has to distance oneself until it is lost from view. The city is a complex but incomplete system, and therein lies its capacity to continue inventing itself over the course of the centuries, to capture momentary histories, outsurviving kingdoms, governments, or powerful companies. Nothing in our history has lasted as long as the city.

In this sense, the city cannot only be defined based on a factor such as density. For example, a megaproject may be very dense, but it does not construct city. That same logic can also be applied to tourism, mega-hotels and major infrastructures deriving from them: they do not necessarily construct city.

Q: When we reflect on the relationship of the public space with the political, we see how, in recent years, the focus has been placed on new technologies. However, it seems that it is the public space, and the fact of sharing a place, that has allowed people’s discontent and dissent to emerge – or at least to become more visible – as has occurred in many of the protest movements of recent years. What is your view?

S. S.: Boston has a terrible climate, therefore in its streets, potholes keep appearing in the road surface. To solve this problem, a group of residents developed an application with the aim of pinpointing the potholes and reporting their location to the local council so that, this way, staff can be sent out to repair the street. The project is called Fix my street and it is based on the knowledge that citizens themselves have of their neighbourhood, their locality. A knowledge that exceeds by far that which the experts may have, often subject to the centralised view that frequently dominates city management policies. This is only a very modest example of how to use new technologies and open source language (you can see my article “Open sourcing the neighborhood“) and make them converge with the public space.

In this context, the 15-M Movement can be understood as the first step on a trajectory that concerns us: we are all important for the city. That is why today it is so vital that new organisations – like Podemos – use new technologies to activate participation, or to debate on very specific issues. In parallel, the public space plays a very important role when reinforcing the neighbourhood fabric, which is a determining factor in recovering local economies and moving away from the economy of the banks, because the banks base their strategy on extraction.

Q: Following the global city idea, what are the systemic factors that are arising in the construction of the public space?

S. S.: We are living through a very special time, there is generalised exhaustion. While Syriza was taking power in Greece, Madame Christine Lagarde was saying publicly that the IMF was going to work with Syriza, contradicting in a minimalist and elegant way the intentions of the German government. At the same time, the head of the European Central Bank admitted that the European austerity programme had not worked. This set of contradictions reveals a search for change and, in the case of various countries in Europe, new politics are emerging from meetings in squares, in public spaces.

Every complex condition that exists is partial. But its partiality allows me to enter into a discussion that is closer, which is that which makes it possible for people to unite and fight for a common cause. That is why it is important that in Spain a political party like Podemos has been born. All these aspects emerge from the public space but, when creating relations, they also in turn create public space. For example, in Spain an economic space exists that is incredibly distributed, where every locality has its traditions and these traditions include distributed economies. Economies that employ people and that in addition maintain cultural elements and are based on local production, such as clothing, olive oil or cheese.

Q: Previously you have referred to the dangers of the instrumentalization of language, to the problem represented by naming something. This issue is titled ‘Atlas of Political Clichés,’ which undoubtedly concerns language and the recurring use of certain terminology -or concepts- and their pitfalls. What do you believe is the importance of language?

S. S.: The vast part of the vocabulary used nowadays has no power. Sometimes we use politically correct terms as an invitation not to think. The categories that one uses to think are very powerful, they concentrate a large amount of information, of historical connections of all kinds, such as “the State”, the “middle class”, etc.

We must rethink these categories. That is why a need exists to extend the conceptual space beyond the social world. To question language: not accept “climate change” but “dead lands”. This is the only way of avoiding manipulation of the message and managing to assume responsibility for our actions.

—Interview conducted in February 2015 by the editorial team of Quaderns, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Guillermo López, Anna Puigjaner, José Zabala.

Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

Studio Mumbai, “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity” [1]

Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai was in Porto’s Forum of the Future, last November, as part of the 2015 edition on the topic of Happiness. The Mumbai-based office has gained increasing visibility within the architectural scene of the past few years. This is largely due to a commitment to the use of artisanal materials and construction techniques, and to a discourse that advocates a sense of emotion and proximity with nature and place in an attempt to escape the “normativity imposed by globalization” (as can be read in the presentation brochure). Tradition, modernity, nature, landscape, are keywords of Jain’s lexicon, who graduated from the University of St. Louis, USA, in 1990, and whose career passed through Los Angeles and London before settling in India, where most of his built work is located.

Bijoy Jain’s presentation was consistent with his ethos. Following the modus operandi of many current architectural presentations, Jain entwined images of his personal cabinet of curiosities with photographs of his oeuvre. He devoted special attention to the description of construction details and traditional techniques, often emphasizing the work of artisans on site and evoking an overall harmonious relation between materials, techniques, architect, artisans and nature.

In a world where architecture is being increasingly afflicted by pure techno-logistical automatism and empty prêt-à-porter formalistic experimentations, Studio Mumbai seems to offer that last glimmer of hope and dignity that appears to have abandoned the discipline once and for all. It is thus not by chance that in a recent exhibition catalogue by the Canadian Center for Architecture – entitled Rooms You May Have Missed: Umberto Riva, Bijoy Jain, edited by Mirko Zardini – one can read that Studio Mumbai “proposes an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture and role for the architect in the economy of building”. However, it is precisely within this elated note of glorification that disturbing signs emerge to tarnish such an optimistic portrayal.

Athanasius Kircher, ‘Topographia Paradisi Terrestris’ (1675).

1. Artificial islands – nature, interiority, immunization

The first sign is the recurring appearance of the same type of program, the single-family house (notably generous regarding both dimensions and economy), but also the same kind of landscape, an exotic and wild piece of nature. Even in the case of their own office-house, located in a densely urbanized area of Mumbai, the city itself is presented in an aerial view taken at night, veiled in the quasi-poetic atmosphere of a soft mist (or is it smog?) that tempers the density, chaos and, most importantly, the disturbing inequalities that flourish in a megalopolis like Mumbai. These houses present a version of India that is absolutely idealized, stripped and disinvested of all the social and economic contradictions and discrepancies that dramatically affect and produce its everyday life and territory. [2]

It is not by chance that these houses tend to fold inwards. They act as shelters that either open up to chase fragments of a mystified virgin nature, or enclose themselves inter muros seeking to recreate an original Eden, a miniaturized and idealized Earth like a hortus conclusus [3]. Therefore, contrary to what is being claimed, this is not an “architecture of proximity”, but rather an architecture of distance: it separates and detaches. Paradoxically – and this is Bijoy Jain’s magical touchstone – the effective apparatus of this detachment from the exterior is nature itself, or rather, nature converted into landscape.

The erasure of the exterior is not operated by walls and fences but by the large openings – windows and doors framing those miniature paradises or staging those nature-cloaks. But exteriority is not merely a question of opposition between outside and inside, nor is it simply a matter of genius loci; it is the social, political, and economical circumstance in which every house is de facto inscribed. Exteriority is a condition of togetherness, a relationship with otherness that belongs irreducibly to the human, shaping his sense of community, his own social self. It is not space that is a condition for the possibility of being together, but it is the being together that makes space possible.

The more idyllic this nature-as-landscape is, the more efficient the exorcising of exteriority becomes. But this architecture has no nostalgia for a return to pre-capitalist ideas of community (as in William Morris) or to a status of spontaneous and holistic relation with nature (as with Rudolph Schindler, to name a reference close to the Indian architect). These houses are neither “shelters from the bustle of the city”, in the euphemistic formula of Bijoy Jain, nor the hortus conclusus of a subject who retreats from the world in an act of resistance or exhaustion. They are artificial islands (a sort of singular family condos or gated communities) where fences and walls have been replaced by the eloquent nature-landscape apparatus, subtly detaching the houses from an exterior, which in the particular context of India assumes an especially problematic and disturbing condition.

These artificial islands are not enclaves of resistance against a specific logic of contemporary spatial production, they are softened cosmopolitan capsules, biospheric universes of highly connected networked individuals, artificial continents where an elite with high economic power finds a form of isolation and immunization from the processes of spatial production of which they are primarily responsible. They are systems of immunization that create an artificial, self-sufficient environment while minimizing all outside communication and simulating their own private public sphere. In line with Peter Sloterdijk, we can claim that these houses constitute themselves not only as “integral mechanisms of defense”, but also as “ignorance machines” where “the fundamental right of not-respecting the exterior world finds its architectural formula.”

Unsurprisingly, the reverse of these artificial continents – so cynically frugal – is the slum. The city of Mumbai – built over the years on landfills conquered from the sea – is itself an archipelago of artificial islands surrounded by the great ocean of slums. As always, the flip side of the “ecology of fantasy” is the “ecology of fear and violence”. And in any case, as Lieven de Cauter points out, “where fear and fantasy build artificial biospheres, the everyday is abolished”, immersed as it is in the lonely design of its own self-immunization and self-consumption.

Studio Mumbai, house Tara

2. Artisans, nostalgia, indigence

But there is a second sign, another crack in this Arcadian mise-en-scène: the employment of traditional processes and construction techniques comes with a condescending view of the artisan. The example presented by Jain in his conference in Porto of a woman at the building site transporting – “with such elegance” – a pile of bricks on her head, is a clear indication of this. In praising the gesture’s aesthetic and performative dimension one does not respect the artisan’s know-how – her techniques, modus operandi, authorship or social relevance – but simply romanticizes and fetishizes the condition of being-artisan. If, on the one hand, this approach may be helpful in calling for a lost harmonious relationship with labor – useful to challenge the automation and abstraction of large building sites – on the other hand, it does not do more than soften and naturalize the artisan’s framework of exploitation. Naturally, an entirely different situation would arise if the artisan were mobilized in a process where her emancipation (political and social) or that of her community’s would be at stake, for example, in the construction of a collective building where she would be contributing with work and knowledge and where the architect would act as a technical mediator of this process.

The act of romanticizing the artisan thus accomplishes the same function as the nature-landscape apparatus: if the latter softens the contrasts and inequalities of capitalist spatial production, the former, by sustaining the myth of original happiness in labor, naturalizes the artisan’s indigent social and economic condition, for, once finished the job, she has no choice but to return to the field of slums without qualities and to the eternal destiny reserved to her by the castes and capitalist economy.

Studio Mumbai, house Copper II

3. Studio Mumbai: “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”?

The fundamental matter here at stake is not to assess the aesthetic or technical quality of studio Mumbai’s work, but rather to attempt to deconstruct the current critical narrative that legitimizes this practice as “an alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”. Both the praising of traditional techniques and the idyllization of nature have been, for quite some time now, the impetus behind multiple architectural practices who appoint themselves a role of resistance against processes of globalization (for example, Peter Zumthor). This sensitive phenomenological discourse, endorsing a relationship with the world under the umbrella of sustainability and ecology, is particularly powerful because it addresses an essential gap in the relationship between humans and nature that has permeated modernity and globalized capitalist production of space.

But the real ambition of this kind of discourse is far from any real resistance, on the contrary, it fully integrates within the dominant logic of production. It frames our nostalgia for a lost paradise, an original Eden, and it dissimulates the problematic recurrence of a territory impregnated with social inequalities and violent processes of extraction-production-consumption. All the while, its success within the architectural field stems from the fact that it works as a fetish, a “stand in”, replacing that which one cannot have. It gives us the illusion of effectively attending to architecture’s real anxieties, and so it captivates many people: the increasing technocracy of architectural design, its empty formal experimentation, the absence of any content independent of the monetary-economical circuit, its conversion into a lifestyle commodity, its reduction to mere instrument of territorial logistics (from the exhausting icons of the Western world to the urbanizations sans rêve et sans merci in China and Dubai). In short, this kind of nostalgic discourse is the way through which architecture attempts to exorcize the ghosts of its immediate future without giving them, however, any effective solutions.

Architectural practices such as Studio Mumbai certainly produce beautiful images that easily populate our imaginary; they may even provide us with precious indications of how to apply local construction techniques, or they might suggest seductive conceptions of domestic space. But their relevance does not go further. They do not offer any hints, nor any tentative alternatives, nor do they even begin to state apprehensions regarding the role and task of architecture in the present condition. Contrary to what is stated, Studio Mumbai’s architecture does not offer an “alternative means of production for contemporary architecture”, it does not even critically address it. It only fetishizes nature and the vernacular, fully absorbing them into the endless circuit of neoliberal economy, efficiently converting the anxieties and fractures that it itself triggers into new business opportunities. What Studio Mumbai so blatantly displays in those “beautiful” houses is none other than paradise as commodity.

Studio Mumbai, house Utsav. Photography: Studio Mumbai Architects.

4. Towards a critical project and a project of criticism

Such an “alternative means of production” can never be found in an architecture that renounces to critically assess the territory where it is embedded, the space which it transforms and produces. The question begs for a deeper inquiry into the means, discourses and practices through which architecture can probe and challenge the prevailing processes of territorial production, the mechanisms at play (often violent), the forms of life and modes of existence at stake. Only by establishing a dialogue with this problematic exteriority can one hope to address such fundamental questions – the unstable bond between humans and nature and the revival of artisanal constructive techniques – beyond all fetishization.

In order for this to be possible one must challenge the autophagic consumption that now permeates the commonplace of disciplinary discourse: the cult of minute historical fait divers, the deification of authorship and its backstage creative mechanisms and details, as banal as they may be. In so doing, one must thereby overcome this apparent death in criticism (and its replacement by the curatorial and prize systems) by reviving and assembling both a critical project and a project of criticism.

Studio Mumbai, house in Pali Hill. Photography: Helene Binet.

Afterword. At home – in the inner space of the world – with no threshold

It is difficult to accept Studio Mumbai’s houses as models of reflection on contemporary dwelling. We should rather see them as expressions of a crisis of exteriority that currently afflicts the human. A crisis of experimentation with the world as such, an enclosure towards an outside beyond all culturally dominant mediations. These houses float like lonely commodities that serve the consumption of a voluntary self-immunization. They piercingly announce the ultimate rise of the space of immunitas and the corresponding dissolution of its counterpart: the space of communitas.[4]

If, in these houses, all limits seem dissolved that is solely because the entire exterior has already been interiorized. The threshold fades as an architectural element, losing its meaning and potential for openness, its role of in-between space, of liminal mediation and measure between the house and its exteriority, between the self and the other. That which lies beyond the house remains inside. What is at stake in this dissolution of limits (Gr. Peras) is above all the very dissolution of experience, of the house as experience, because, as the etymological root of the word indicates (Gr. Experientia, ex-per-ientia), there is no experience without a “going beyond”, towards an outside, without the crossing-confrontation of a boundary. Experience is always the experience of a limit, of an unknown. And a house is only a house so long as it achieves to be the place of this liminal experience of the outside – experimentation of the world, for the world.

Therefore, once again paraphrasing Sloterdijk, we can establish that these houses are the inversion of inhabiting: they do not install themselves in an environment, they install an environment of their own. «In this mode of experience the horizon is encountered not as boundary and transition to the outside, but rather as a frame to hold the inner world».

In consequence, we can claim that this is not an architecture of proximity as much as one of absolute distance: an architecture without other and without common. It lives simulated and dissimulated by a nature converted into reassuring and mystifying landscape, incapable of positioning itself in a critical and problematic relation with the surrounding territory. The atmosphere of timelessness in these houses is in no way innocent – they exist in a time that is not of this world. Without present, without past and, especially, without future. These houses are thus paradises from which all mankind has already been banished and from which no redemption can be expected. Finally, in the ultimate glorification of this architecture, the discipline consummates its own dissolution, confirming its absolute estrangement from a world that is now only bearable on the absolute condition of not being visible. “D’emporter le paradis d’un seul coup” [“To carry paradise at the first assault”] was the motto that French writer Charles Baudelaire invoked, rather ironically, in his Artificial Paradises.

—Pedro Levi Bismarck, architect and researcher on the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto. Editor of Punkto Magazine.
Translated by Bárbara Costa and Pedro Levi Bismarck.

—–
[1] “Emotional architecture and architecture of proximity”, was the title of the conference held by Bijoy Jain in Porto’s Forum of the Future, 5th November 2015.
[2] According to the World Bank, one third of world population living in poverty is in India: 400 million (30% of Indians), a number growing since 2007. India is a territory stratified and crossed so much by the system of castes as by capitalist processes of spatial production, giving shape to a space where social and economic inequalities are particularly visible.
[3] Expression used by the Indian architect echoing a certain zumthorian geist or spirit. Hortus conclusus was the title of the Serpentine Gallery summer pavilion designed by the Swiss architect in 2011.
[4] Roberto Esposito, Communitas. Origene e destino della comunità. Einaudi, 2006.

***

Tomatoes shine in the sun and, already ripe, are picked effortlessly by an elderly lady in a white hat. The vegetable patch covers a large part of the plot. To one side, a group of people of all ages chat on benches built from demolition remains. This is Manhattan, on a summer’s day in 1973. The oil crisis is battering New York. Social conflict is constantly increasing in certain areas as real estate activity declines. From that year up to today, Guerrilla Gardens have occupied hundreds of empty plots in the city.

***

A white dome covers wooden tiered seating where, in the shade, a group of people listen to a talk about biofuels. Outside, a few people are cooking on a barbecue as they chat. Children run. Somebody turns over the soil to start sowing seeds in a corner of the plot, which until recently was empty and walled. We are in Barcelona one day in 2015. The place is not managed and equipped by the local authorities as in the case of Van Eyck’s parks, nor has it been occupied and then legalised owing to pressure from the local community like many of the New York vegetable gardens; in contrast, it is the result of a public programme by the City Council that temporarily allocates these plots to neighbourhood organizations. This programme, run by the Urban Area Participation Department of Barcelona City Council and known as the BUITS Plan,[1] selects unused urban plots and, via public competition, offers them for temporary management by the local community.

***

The playground at Laurierstraat, Amsterdam in the 1960s, one of the 700 that Aldo van Eyck designed for the city. (Photo: © Ed Suister, courtesy Amsterdam City Archives)

These three images serve to conjure up a storyline: a storyline of plots of land, urban policies and community management.

Following World War II, the social consensus represented by the Welfare State implied that the public institutions would take charge of mitigating inequalities through a certain degree of planning and redistribution. This could represent the construction of public parks such as those designed by Van Eyck, or the building of subsidised housing that fuelled the modern movement. During those golden years of town planning and urban utopias, this movement would opt to respond to human needs through a social architecture financed using public funds. It is important to remember that the Keynesian consensus sought to apply brakes to the expansion of communism, which had also carried out its own experiments in political architecture.[2]

In capitalist cities, beyond or rather along the side-lines of urban planning development of a speculative nature, spaces for shared use will have to be fought for by the communities as in the case of the neighbourhood occupations of New York’s Guerrilla Gardens. During the 1970s, the oil crisis paralyzed the real estate market and left countless plots of land empty and lives broken due to unemployment and poverty. That same crisis represented the breaking point of the post-war consensus and marked the progressive decadence of the Welfare State as a form of government and of social conflict in developed countries. It was a narrative that would be substituted by another that justified reducing to a minimum any state intervention advocated by the neoliberal order. From that decade on, architecture would never again express public values, only those of the private sector.[3]

We return to the present, to a Barcelona that is a pioneer in metropolitan branding policies – its own brand being its Universal Forum of Cultures of 2004. At this moment in time, a new crisis in Europe is at the root of growing social mobilisation, especially in the south, where it is unlikely that a new Keynesianism would be able to tackle the catastrophes caused by financialized capitalism and its speculative bubbles and tax havens, which make even distribution impossible. So, what new narratives will be necessary to prop up the next model that will emerge from this frontier that we are undoubtedly crossing today?

With respect to city government, the great narrative is that of the smart city, where opting for the public promotion of a technologized city – although articulated hand in hand with the private sector – fits in poorly with a policy of reduction in public spending. Undoubtedly today – less visible, but no less important for understanding the future of urban life – new mechanisms for the management of the public arena are emerging.

A “social” capitalism

The proposal of the BUITS Plan based on management by the local community of unused spaces is a response to a historical demand by the city’s neighbourhood movement that fits in well with the policies of cuts in public spending and the slowdown in the real estate sector. Given the State’s incapacity to productively activate spaces in the city that have momentarily lost value and to provide for the basic needs of all citizens – social rights, conquered through struggles that lasted over a century and today are in danger – this institutional experiment aims to test a new management model. One in which the social fabric, always active to protect life, can be redirected towards solving what is contemplated as a passing problem of public management, barely a parenthesis, which is the reason for the temporary duration of the concessions. It is what the City Council’s programme head, Laia Torras, has dubbed “meanwhile management”.

We can say that these new discourses appeal to mixed forms between the artistic subjectivity of the post-Fordist creative classes and a certain social awareness activated as a market niche of unsatisfied social needs.[4]

To put it a little more clearly: self-management has always existed in modern society, from workers’ cooperatives and their networks of mutual support to squatting, whether the properties being occupied are buildings or urban or rural lands. But it is only now that these practices are being institutionally guided towards conversion into an added economic and productive space. Seemingly corresponding with this type of mechanism are policies such as the BUITS Plan, where architects who are out of work due to the crisis – and qualified middle classes or former middle classes – are linked with residents who need spaces for community life but also cheap leisure and consumer goods. What could be an inter-class alliance to reconquer the public arena, suddenly behaves like mutual exploitation.

Taller Verical, Pla BUITS, 2013. Photo: Re-Cooperar

Social management and social innovation

It is no coincidence that these kinds of community experiences are starting to be called “social innovation experiments”, a rhetoric encouraged by the most prominent new think tanks, the true hinge of the smart city that is connecting social creativity with the private arena capable of extracting its value.

One example could be the Barcelona Open Challenge, a Barcelona City Council competition held in 2014. A call to “entrepreneurs” designed to “transform the public space and the city’s services” that focused on the concepts of social innovation and entrepreneurship as the driving forces of production. The underlying message in this kind of programme is that responses to social demands have to pass through public-private partnerships that can be sustained by social creativity and the community networks that inhabit a devalued urban territory.

In these discourses there will be no more talk of social rights, but of challenges that small-scale private initiatives may resolve, one of the keys behind why it is so interesting today to promote social innovation on a European scale.[5]

Faced with the legitimacy crisis facing the State, who better than citizens themselves to design public services? Faced with the financial crisis and the lack of public liquidity, what public service comes at a lower cost than that undertaken by the social organisations themselves? Faced with generalised unemployment, might entrepreneurship not be a possible solution?

No more talking about collective rights, but about individual work challenges. No more social redistribution, but personal contributions by entrepreneurs. The dispossessing of social rights creates an unattended space that opens up a pathway to a more “social” market: rights as a market niche. A strategy promoted by the European institutions whose objective is to change the apparently unfeasible Welfare State for a “participatory society”[6] better adapted to the new times: that represented by programmes such as the BUITS Plan and the Barcelona Open Challenge.

Crisis cycles bring with them profound institutional changes. Although past cycles can help us to understand the present, nothing can be automatically taken for granted in these processes of regeneration. The quality of the institutional forms of each era is not produced by any think tank, but is socially constructed. Community self-management of plots of land or collective action relating to rights prefigure a new kind of institutionality. An institutionality that points towards both the orthopaedic designing of free-rider mentalities and to a scenario of democratic revolution. Nothing is written in stone about it being one thing or another, nor does it seem to depend on the number of public concessions that are on their way. The tonnes of community resources invested in self-managed plots plus the solidarity that forges urban movements are not a fixed capital for social entrepreneurs, but the apparatus that may just lead us to storming and taking heaven by force.

—Nuria Alabao, journalist and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona. She has a degree in Information Science from the University Pompeu Fabra. She is currently researching on youngsters, Internet and politics as part of The Institut de Govern i Polítiques Publiques (IGOP) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).
—Rubén Martínez, specializes in the relationship between social innovation practices, public policies and new EU economies. He is co-author of the books Innovación en cultura: una genealogía crítica de los usos del concepto; and Jóvenes, internet y política, among others. Member of the Metropolitan Observatory of Barcelona.
—–
[1] Buits Urbans amb Implicació Social i Territorial (Urban Voids with Territorial and Social Implications). More information on the programme’s website: http://bcn.cat/habitaturba/plabuits
[2] If Le Corbusier perfectly expresses that Keynesianism in his “machines for living”, the Russian Ginzburg from whom he took inspiration is not just an architect committed to the Soviet Revolution, but his Narkomfin building aims to contribute towards encouraging a more community-based way of life, including spaces for collective life in the home. Two poles of architectural geopolitics connected by the thread of state intervention.
[3] Koolhas, Rem (2014) My thoughts on the smart city. Digital Agenda for Europe.
[4] For an analysis of the centrality of certain socio-economic profiles in the leadership of these processes see “la innovación social es de clase media” (social innovation is middle class) http://www.nativa.cat/2014/10/la-innovacion-social-es-de-clase-media/
[5] In search of a more in-depth analysis of these hypotheses, Rubén Martínez (co-author of this text) is currently working on an investigation into the promotion of social innovation policies in Barcelona and Madrid. Some texts written in relation to this research can be read at: http://leyseca.net/category/innovacion-social/
[6] Subirats, Joan (2013) ¿Del Estado de bienestar a la sociedad participativa? El País.

“You work in banking?”, asks the manager when I turn up there with six kilos of dirty clothes compressed into a bag advertising the country’s main financial institutions. “I don’t recognise your accent, where are you from?” With every transaction, he subjects me to a short interrogation. A year later he knows my address, telephone number and credit card number; my working times, my profession, the company I work for; my underwear, nationality, type of visa and my love life. Sometimes I discover myself dreaming about having my own washing machine. The other day, as I waited for him to return a couple of shirts to me, I looked at the framed certificates hung up behind the counter. “NYPD Operation Nexus” I read, “This business is a recognized participant in the counterterrorism program named Operation Nexus.” The manager, now back with the hangers, discovers me as I try to note it down. “So, you said you were an architect, didn’t you?”.

In 2012, as a consequence of 09/11, the New York Police Department established Operation Nexus, a nationwide network of businesses and enterprises, including everyday local businesses such as car parks, laundromats and stores, joining together with a common aim: the prevention of a new terrorist attack in the country. Since the launch of Operation Nexus, the police have visited over 30,000 establishments to encourage their owners and employees to use their professional experience to contribute to counterterrorism. For this, they are provided with a list of personalised protocols with which to identify “purchases, meetings or activities that may have connections with terrorism and to inform the authorities of them.[1] In exchange, they receive a framed certificate (like the one in my neighbourhood laundromat) and they become the first alert mechanism to protect the city of New York against another terrorist attack.

Back at home, while I do a quick search online for Operation Nexus, I think that perhaps, I ought to take my dirty washing elsewhere; I also think about how “security architecture” affects our relationship with the public space. In the last century, and especially in the present one, we have been witnesses to what Giorgio Agamben mentions in his book State of Exception as the “unprecedented generalisation of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government”.[2] For the authorities, and equally for the manager at Bubbleworks, we are all a threat to the country, until proven otherwise. Observed online, at airports and also at laundromats, the security measures established to prevent terrorist attacks have converted the presumption of innocence into the presumption of guilt. Like many of the counterterrorism initiatives established since the start of the so-called War on Terror, Operation Nexus and its general framework known as Urban Shield make us all (and especially immigrants) suspects and, also, vigilantes –“Stay alert, and have a safe day”, reminds the voice on the New York subway in every journey.

The terrorist, according to the police, may be anyone who portrays themselves as “legitimate customers in order to buy or lease certain materials or equipment, or to undergo certain formalized training to acquire important skills or licences” which subsequently could be used to facilitate an attack.[3] In this process, as we are reminded by philosopher Étienne Balibar, the stranger is transformed into an enemy and is, all too often, subject to violent repression and institutional discrimination or, simply. to continued surveillance that is a threat to privacy and freedom of expression.[4] No, I don’t have anything to hide, but for months now I have been taking to Bubbleworks only what I cannot diligently wash by hand at the weekends. I understand the importance of protecting national security, but I prefer to feel like I’m under suspicion when collecting my underwear or when seeing what could be a friendly neighbourhood chat becomes a police mechanism for the extraction of information about citizens.

The laundromat example is, probably, the most banal example of how current unrestricted surveillance practices, the result of alliances between the public and private sectors and the economic and political goals that they serve, violate fundamental rights and undermine democracy. Compiling data does not necessarily have to be harmful, but we must pay attention to the power techniques at play, something that reminds us of the declaration signed by academics from all over the world against mass surveillance. spying. Through this letter they request that states effectively protect fundamental rights and freedoms and, in particular, our privacy. “It is protected by international treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights”, they remind us, “without privacy, people cannot freely express their opinions or seek and receive information”.[5] And the fact is that counterterrorism tactics adopted by governments and the military place in evidence the violence inherent to the exercising of power and its capacity to undertake actions designed as much for our protection as the destruction of what makes possible our life in common, including our freedom and our political capacity.

Architecture participates in these processes. One could argue that the situation with respect to Bubbleworks would be resolved by having a washing machine at home. But in New York, their installation is often prohibited by contract and there are people who end up installing one illegally and emptying it via the bathtub. The question goes much deeper and the solution is not to change laundromat, but political action capable of articulating from legislation that regulates domestic architecture to technologies and “security architectures” that built the global “smart” city. The territory drawn up by the War on Terror is located at the intersection between physical and legal spaces, and it is characterised by the growing use of war technology and protocols in the civic space. Its “public security” apparatus tends to be managed by private interests.6 Within this context, sometimes I might forget that everyday I walk under the watchful eye of security cameras and urban surveillance systems, even interiorize the choreography drawn by my body – jacket and shoes off, hands behind my head – like the security checkpoints at airports. When talking on the phone, sending messages and using the social networks, my preferences and movements are stored in the cloud, where I share them with family and friends, and, i passing, with espionage programmes and data compilation companies. My habits are analysed by algorithms that classify me and by laundromat managers converted into police informers. Through a discursive operation, the institutions of power normalise this space of limbo between legality and illegality, law and violence, presenting it as an effective instrument in the fight against terrorism. Emergency becomes the rule and the city, a battlefield.

But if from the institutions of power legal and social hierarchies are being suspended to guarantee security, these measures are contested by opposing civic movements that employ technological innovations to construct spaces of freedom and political action: international networks of anonymous sources for the filtration of classified information; home-made drones that scrutinize the actions of the police; encryption systems for activists, journalists and humanitarian organizations; architectural designs with Faraday-type shields, or simply actions that range from covering the computer camera with a post-it, to refusing to pass through body scanners. This is the space in which our collective coexistence develops, the city as a great celebration of anomie.

In fact, as Agamben reminds us, the term iustitium – the technical designation of the state of exception – constructed like solstitium, means literally suspending the ius, the legal order, which connects the state of emergency with festival practices such as Carnival and other charivaric traditions.[7] “Anomic feasts dramatize this irreducible ambiguity of juridical systems and, at the same time, show that what is at stake in the dialectic between these two forces is the very relation between law and life.”[8] The anomic festival is, following this argument, the space in which we have a licence to suspend legal and social hierarchies and establish new orders, and in which it is possible to undertake “truly political” action, that which, as Agamben proposes, are capable of severing “the nexus between violence and law”.

I didn’t change laundromats. In a city like New York, you are grateful when people take an interest in you, call you by your name, ask you about your friends and family. When they miss you because you are on holiday. With every question, the Bubbleworks manager, in representation of the Administration, was protecting me against the dangers of terrorism while subjecting me to a legalised and standardised violence, structured by the logic of economic neoliberalism and masked behind an informal chat. Hours before leaving the city – and the country – I decided to make my last visit to the laundromat, this time to declare my right to privacy and the danger of surveillance programmes. And, deep down, to prove myself not guilty. When I entered I found my neighbour talking about how he had spent the weekend. I paid for the washing of the dirty laundry, took a photograph of the diploma, and said goodbye with a “see you soon”.

My next house will have a washing machine. Even if it has to be installed illegally.

—Marina Otero Verzier. Head of Research and Development, HNI. Chief Curator with the After Belonging Agency, OAT’16

—–
[1] Operation Nexus, Police Department City Of New York (NYPD), official website of the City of New York, [Consulted: 12-11-2014]. Available at: http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/crime_prevention/counterterrorism.shtml
[2] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trad. Kevin Attell (Chicago y Londres: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 12.
[3] Operation Nexus, Police Department City Of New York (NYPD), official website of the City of New York.
[4] See Étienne Balibar, “Strangers as Enemies, Walls All over the World, and How to Tear them Down”, lecture at Columbia University, 3 November 2011. Available at: https://www.francoangeli.it/Riviste/Scheda_Rivista.aspx?idArticolo=45634
[5] “Academics Against Mass Surveillance” [consultation: 4-1-2014]. Available at: http://www.academicsagainstsurveillance.net
[6] Judith Butler offers a reflection on the consequences of the militarization of the police force in the United States and the Urban Shield counterterrorism programme in her lecture “Human Shield”, given at the London School of Economics on 4 February 2015. Available at:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2859
[7] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 41, 71.
[8] Ibid., 73.

What is our commons and how should it be renewed, sustained, enlarged, drawn down, and/or extended to others?
—J.K. Gibson-Graham

The creation of instituting society, as instituted society, is each time a common world (kosmos koinos), the positing of individuals, of their types, relations and activities; but also the positing of things, their types, relations and signification—all of which are caught up each time in receptacles and frames of reference instituted as common, which make them exist together.
—Cornelius Castoriadis

How can architectural and design practice cope with current economic crisis? Do we consider multiple practices of design ranging from office practice to education and everyday co-existences? Although many architects and designers still base their practices on the office and depend on the neoliberal global market, some are forming collectives that exchange labour as well as creating practices based on a transversal methodology. The economic crisis may empower large-scale offices, but the Occupy movements, their search for alternatives to austerity, and trans-local solidarity networks are opening new paths of practice for design. The Kyoto-based RAD practice (Research for Architecture Domain) describes the need for future architectural practice: ‘The forces of economic crisis that influence the built environment, the difficulties of co-existence of small offices and young architects, the consideration of criticality towards institutional policies and mass architectural mainstream offices are some of the urgent reasons that small offices search for new types of practices.’ Many young architects from different geographies have started to form such research-based collectives that no longer follow usual architectural design practice, instead engaging communities, creating experimental ad hoc design tools, curating exhibitions, running educational workshops at a trans-local level and utilizing a knowledge of architecture to engage with various fields. How can they remain outside a neoliberal creative system that can absorb such practices easily via the comparative advantages to be gained by further exploiting the labour force and new cognitive subjectivities? This remains an important question. It is my guess that safeguarding the ethical and political stances of commoning and continuing to play with the transversal methodology of ad hoc practices that can modify institutions could empower an architecture and design that wanted to create alternatives and remain on the other side.

Traceable Renovation Workshop (2013). Courtesy RAD

A transversal methodology would respond to the need to build a common vocabulary relating to labour, pedagogy, commons, archives, institutions and the urban that is connected to our struggle and resistance to conflict in our everyday practices. This need stems from spatial practices in conflicted urban spaces: it is a need not only for a language that relates to the constrained environment of the recent socio-political and economic crisis, but also for a language capable of rebuilding a collective consciousness that can convey our communal coexistence. The question is this: how can self-organized, self-regulating networks and collective structures such as the urban Occupy movements inspire economic models, especially when the generation and redistribution of wealth is involved? And how can the urban spaces in which these networks and structures emerge under exceptional conditions serve as “common knowledge” based on the practice of “commoning”? Nowadays, the discussion is focused on precarious working conditions and their effects on cognitive labour.

Currently, our understanding of the nature of precarious labour is mostly based on a time/work frame that leads to labour exploitation and lack of employment security, but these conditions do not necessarily correspond to our varying experiences of different work types. Rather, precarious labour and conflicts concerning production take on totally different dynamics depending on which autonomous structures and networks they take place in. We can witness some examples of this in different geographies, where autonomous structures and collectives whose labour is based on relational collaboration and self-organization are being actively pursued and developed. There are practical cases of self-organized labour structures managing well on their own, not only to sustain production but also to maintain fluid networks of creative collectivism and collaboration, even though they may be limited to a certain extent by local territorial circumstances. For instance, the RAD architecture collective I mentioned before share a small room with their members in Kyoto, where they realize participatory preservation projects relating to old housing in common with the local communities. This preservation practice not only empowers the local community, it also allows RAD to re-invent ad-hoc preservation methodologies with different materials and common knowledge. In addition, they are involved with other research projects in Europe and other parts of the world; RAD architects can hardly pay their rent but continue their multiple collective practices while individually pursuing different types of design. Most of these groups and networks are involved in urban pedagogy based on the tools of empowerment and self-learning, teaching, acting, research, reclaiming alternative urban space, social media, urban farming and reclaiming citycentres threatened by aggressive real estate development plans. Additionally, they undertake daily activities, collaborating with temporary workers, the homeless and disenfranchised communities to create support structures for these groups. Apart from their autonomous structures, they also try to create criticality models connected to new forms of social relations and commoning.

KA2011 – Conference for Japanese and French young architects (2011). Courtesy RAD

HAPS Workshop , Building Traceability Project. Courtesy RAD

Examples of this can be seen in the organization of discussion groups, collective actions, urban movements and general meetings. From this perspective, their work can be seen as a research method for a practice of commoning—of being in common. I think that what is central to the meaning of “commons” is not what we own or share or produce in terms of property, but rather “social relations” that are closely connected to everyday life. According to political economist Massimo De Angelis: ‘Commons are a means of establishing a new political discourse that builds on and helps to articulate the many existing, often minor, struggles and recognizes their power to overcome capitalist society. He defines three notions in order to explain both commons, in terms of the resources that we share, and a way of commoning—that is, a social process of ‘being common’: the way in which resources are pooled and made available to a group of individuals who then build or rediscover a sense of community.

Food sociologist and activist Raj Patel focuses on the role of food in social movements and the forms of solidarity it underpins,whether that be the Black Panther movements that organized children’s breakfasts or the People’s Grocery or Via Campesina. He defines commons: ‘Commons is about how we manage resources together.’ But his argument is not only about managing and sustaining food growing and sharing, but also about how food-related movements should act in solidarity with other movements. Thus the concept of “commons”, as understood here, holds a sensitive position within any given community or public, especially in contested territories or cities subject to the threat of the neoliberal destruction of their built environment. Negotiation and the resolution of conflicting values are key to such commoning practices. As Stavros Stavrides argues, more than the act or fact of sharing, it is the existence of common grounds for negotiation that is most important. Conceptualizing commons with reference to the public does not focus so much on similarities or commonalities but on exploring the differences between people on a purposefully instituted common ground. We have to establish grounds for negotiation rather than grounds for affirming that which is shared.

Alessandro Petti and David Harvey at Dheisheh camp. Photo by Pelin Tan, September 2015

In Decolonizing Architecture, ‘Al-Masha’ refers to common land instead of commons: ‘The notion of Al-Masha could help re-imagine the notion of the common today. Could this form of common use be expanded by redefining the meaning of cultivation, moving it from agriculture to other forms of human activity? [...] How to liberate the common from the control of authoritarian regimes, neo-colonialism and consumer societies? How to reactivate common uses beyond the interests of public state control?’ Based in the “occupied territories” of the West Bank, this practice, which draws on the field of architecture, focuses on the reality of Palestinian refugees creating common spaces and perceiving the notion of the “camp” as a potential space beyond neoliberal citizenship and the dichotomy of public versus private space. In the activities of Decolonizing Architecture, the “common” differs from both public and private space. As we can see in most cities and urban spaces, public and private spaces are under the control of governments. Decolonizing Architecture collaborates with different background researchers, refugees, activists and civil representatives in using militant urban and architectural research methodologies to identify common spaces in refugee camps and former military buildings. Working with the inhabitants of Al-Fawwar camp, for example, they designed a small public space which was then realized by young Palestinian refugees and families. A space for the exchange of everyday life experiences and local engagements can be the most important form of resistance against colonization.

Campus in Camps, an educational platform initiated by Decolonizing Architecture and younger-generation Palestinian refugees in Dheisheh Camp, is contributed to internationally and locally by artists, architects and researchers from different fields. The “Concrete Tent” project, a concrete meeting place built with the participation of the camp designed and produced by Campus in Camps, aims to create a communal space for collective learning. Tent also references a collective political past of the Palestinian refugees who settled first in the tents that have now been transformed into concrete buildings. The concept of the tent also presents and preserves the heritage of these camps that are now somehow urbanized. Furthermore, Campus in Camps renders explicit the role of architecture in these communal acts: ‘Architecture is able to register various transformations that make the camp a heritage site. And in camps every single architectural transformation is a political statement. Therefore architecture registers political changes.’ The process in building this concrete tent was interrupted by a family who disagreed with the land-use agreement: ‘After ten days, one member of the large family prevented the labourers from working on the site. The family, the popular committee, and leaders of the camp spent several weeks trying to find a solution. However, this family member stated that, despite the initial agreement to guarantee the collective use of the land for the two coming years, he had now decided to sell it realizing that new attention was being paid to this abandoned land. In a single night all the shelters were demolished.’ After succeeding efforts of the younger generation of Campus in Camps, the tent was constructed again. I think the whole process of conflict in the community is part of the discourse in the camp and preserves it as a continuous decolonizing practice.

The Concrete Tent. Photo by Pelin Tan, September, 2015.

Another example of commoning practice could be the Istanbul-based collective of many young architects, Architecture for All (HerkesiçinMimarlık), which formed a practice of multiple designs, preservation and formats. Working with local people in villages in Southeast Anatolia to re-design schools with found or cheap materials is one of their practices. Their simple social architecture does involve social empowerment, but as in the case of the Dheisheh camp, their practice is more about creating a new discourse based on different knowledge, labour exchange and ways of commoning.

With reference to the practices of ad hoc and potential instant alliances mentioned above, it is important to consider how the labour exchange strategies applied operate. They are generally based both on immaterial and physical labour, there being no separation between these forms of labour production. Here, the alienating aspects of immaterial labour disappear and the surplus is handled on the basis of ethics rather than capitalist market imperatives. In this context, community economies and surplus dissemination processes, in the sense implied by economist/geography researcher J.K. Gibson-Graham, are of particular importance. For political collective action requires ‘working collaboratively to produce alternative economic organizations and spaces in place.’ Additionally: ‘The “collective” in this context does not suggest the massing together of like subjects, nor should the term “action” imply an efficacy that originates in intentional beings or that is distinct from thought. We are trying for a broad and distributed notion of collective action, in order to recognize and keep open possibilities of connection and development.’

Mesudiye Peyzaj Atölyesi. Source: herkesicinmimarlik.org

In short, collective action requires the ethics of a community economy. In fact, I would articulate this more as an act of ethics of locality that meets the needs suggested by our everyday knowledge and the experience of safeguarding our livelihoods in both urban and rural spaces. The relational network established as a result is more of an instant community that chooses to think and discuss together than it is a normative structure. Self-organization is not a simple hierarchy based on certain labour activities and their division but, conversely, a work/labour structure that allows one to be a farmer in the morning and a graphic designer in the afternoon. To reiterate Stavrides’ astute analysis, collaboration is about negotiation not affirmation. It is about debating critical issues in an urban space, where space itself is a pressing and compelling concern. Creating a collective, non- clerical political action in urban space is not about the organization or the event itself, but about co-existing and functioning together to achieve commoning. This is rooted in a reconsideration and realization of our practices of collaboration, alternative economies, autonomous networks, self-organization and surplus strategies, all of which differ radically from the reality of the neoliberal policies and logics of production currently being forced upon us.

We find ourselves at a stage in global history where local movements consisting of self-organized collectives are attaching themselves to translocal networks capable of creating rhizomatic dissemination and surplus. At the same time, the Occupy movements in different cities have introduced a realm of communal practice of difference that has gathered together pre-existing collective resistance practices. The anti-globalization protests that followed Seattle and continued with the Occupy movements are characterized by unique forms of solidarity, by translocal networks and by various types of transversal knowledge and pedagogy. Architecture for All created architectural drawings of ad-hoc structures in Gezi Park and along the barricades during the Gezi resistance. During the resistance, examples of in situ and instant architecture in Taksim Square and Gezi Park included a temporary mosque, a mobile food collective run using simple materials, and atent which served as an ever-expanding open hospital. Makeshift markers represented the borders of each section, which expanded or contracted according to people’s needs. More often than not, performative architecture is experienced during a”state of emergency”, under conditions of conflictual urbanism, instant architecture and practices of radical spatial resistance. These relational resistance structures led Architecture for All to create the #occupygezi architecture initiative, in which they claim: ‘We need new definitions for architecture in situations when architecture is removed from architects. Each unique structure that we encounter in the streets and Gezi Park has its own in-situ design and implementation process.’

#occupygezi architecture

According to philosopher Simon Critchley, ‘We can talk about Occupy. Occupy is not revolution—it is rebellion—but it is very interesting and it has made a very different set of political tactics available. Occupy is something very familiar to many of the people on the anarchist Left. [...] I believe in a low-level, almost invisible series of actions, which at a certain point reach visibility and then really have an effect. As Gramsci would say, politics is not a war of manoeuver or frontal assault on power. It is a tenacious and long-lasting war of position. This requires optimism, cunning and patience.’

Furthermore, for Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Occupy movements are characterized by taking pleasure in the other body and by an empathy for other alliances. In my opinion, we cannot and do not speak of a new activism anymore; but we do speak about an uncommon knowledge that we create, a new instituting power and a collective labour. This can be linked back to the practice of Decolonizing Architecture and its participants’ intention of questioning the “commons” from the perspective of Al−Masha: the form of research ‘is collective, relational and active.’ In this context, I think concepts such as “participation”, “agonism” and “hegemony”—concepts we often use in practicing radical democracy–are transformed in the process of more layered, conditional and foundational negotiations that question our values, relations and ways of acting in the society of today. The differences between institutional knowledge and its production can be challenged accordingly with a view to creating a co-existence which is at once active and fictive and which touches on everyday and urgent realities. When Decolonizing Architecture describe the ideas behind their actions, they say they seek‘to establish a different balance between withdrawal and engagement, action in the world and research, fiction and proposal.’

In conclusion, the main dilemma faced is how to develop and sustain ad-hoc practices that are based on heterogeneous economics, ways of commoning, collective ethics of collaboration and action labour against economic austerity and its political discourse? The concept and practice of commons and communing need more detailed analyses of political struggle, its history and the relative conceptualization of different geographies, bothwithin and beyond the EU and in different conditions of labour/surplus production. Architectural and design practice that is deeply but partially rooted in capitalist labour exploitation and market-based surplus dissemination could bring its own emancipative practice with its own design methodologies. Conflict and agonism would be parts of this practice in local co-existences.

—Pelin Tan, sociologist and art historian. Associate professor at the Architecture Faculty, Mardin Artuklu University, Turkey.

/// This text was first published in the e-Book Adhocracy READER (dpr-barcelona and the Onassis Cultural Center, 2015).
/// By permission of the author and the publisher, we reproduced it here. You can freely download the complete e-Book, following this link.

Lotus Park is one of the informal settlements of Cape Town. Almost 1/5th of Cape Town is composed of informal settlements and these are not on the outskirts of the city, but right at the heart of it. Mandela’s admirable restructuring and development program has hardly helped their upgrading, for the reason that the program is top down, formalized and subsidize housing as product, i.e. ignorant to [incremental] processes. Greater transformation projects in country and city scale, like the Cities without Slums [3] and the N2 Gateway project seem to favor capital accumulation but not the inhabitants of the informal settlements. Displacement attempts and protests are regularly on the news. One inhabitant who took us around Lotus Park resembled urban renewal in South Africa to the pressure cooker on the boil. [How] do you do urban upgrading or renewal in such a context?

Edge condition 1: Scrape yard

Edge condition 2: Dwelling production

Mbembe says the most social struggle of these times in South Africa can be read as the attempt towards the right to be urban [4]. In a city like Cape Town, where many are possibly ‘citizens without a city’ [5], the right to the city and the freedom of organizing collective capacities need to go hand in hand towards an open city and society.

Richard Sennett talks about the two main spatial elements of democracy in his reading of ancient Athens [6], Pnyx and Agora: “… the agora consisted of a large open space crossed diagonally by the main street of Athens; at the sides of which were temples and Stoa[s], shed[s] that opened sideways onto the agora… Perhaps the most interesting feature of the stoa and the agora was the transition space just under the shelter of the stoa… What import did the complex, teeming space of the agora have on the practice of democracy?” The agora was the place in the city for the tolerance of difference, diversity: “If the same persons or activities are merely concentrated but remain isolated and segregated, diversity loses its force. To count, differences must interact.” The Athenian agora made different citizens interact in two ways, the second, being the important one in our context: “…the agora established a space for stepping back from such engagement – at the edge, under the roof of the stoa; was a fluid, liminal zone between private and public. This edge was where change would start.”

Edge condition 3: The river, terraces and the neighbouring houses

Edge condition 4: The market

The edge, the stoa is what we are interested in the context of Lotus Park, Cape Town: Touching the neighbourhood on its edge, creating spaces for interaction with the city and the surrounding neighbourhoods, creating potential spaces of diversity at these edges, and expecting this to cause an impact in Lotus Park and Cape Town in the long run. An attempt of transforming the edges of the neighbourhood is also an attempt towards breaking the apartheid’s invisible borders and isolation. In Lotus Park, we propose to realize this transformation through creating collective economical capacity. Many informal settlements also suffer from unemployment, in our case half of the inhabitants of Lotus Park don’t have a job. Organizing the spaces collective economical capacity at the edges of the neighbourhood could increase the sense of ownership/belonging to the neighbourhood, while solving a practical, yet crucial problem of unemployment.

The second wave of post-apartheid urbanization will reshape the nature of cities in South Africa, which will most probably be characterized by the informal settlements and ‘urbanization of poverty’, a mutually reinforcing process, as the place of poverty moves from rural to urban areas6. In our opinion, initiating change at edges by creating spaces of diversity and organizing collective capacities have the potential of translating into an alternative, not only for the informal settlements but the post-apartheid city.

—Merve Bedir. PhD candidate I Delft University of Technology. Partner at Land+Civilization Compositions

[1] Robinson, J. [1996] The Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in South African Cities. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann
[2] UN-Habitat [2010] State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide. Nairobi
[3] The “Cities Without Slums” action plan was developed by the Cities Alliance in July 1999 and launched by Nelson Mandela at the inaugural meeting of the Cities Alliance in Berlin in December 1999: www.citiesalliance.org/cws-action-plan
[4] Mbembe, A. Nuttall, S. [2004] Writing the World from an African Metropolis. Public Culture, 16 [3], 347-372
[5] Appadurai, A. [2002] Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizion of Politics. Public Culture, 14 [1] 21-47.
[6] Richard Sennett describes the details of the spatial prominence of stoa in his article, Democracy and Its Spaces. There, he explains the details of contemporary design projects, which work with the principles of stoa’s transformative spatiality at its edge.

/// Land+Civilization Compositions is involved in the ongoing Density Syndicate project by African Center for Cities and International New Town Institute. This contribution would not have been possible without their invitation. We would also like to thank VPUU, South African NGO for informal settlements.

Greek architect Aristide Antonas has contributed to our last issue [Quaderns #265 'House and Contradiction'] with a visual of his project Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man. This project and its accompanying series of images are a representation of a system of independent users that substitute a community, inspired somehow by Tyqqun’s Bloom Theory. While developing this project, some of the questions that emerged are: How can we transform this reality to a political condition? How can we think about the Internet as a conscious space for another type of legislations now that both the state and the market withdraw?

What follows are some fragments and thoughts by Aristide Antonas about this project:

Magic exotic island. Interface version. Antonas Office

“I will be making a contrived description concerning the contemporary Internet Man. In this description of him, the Internet Man is organized as the hero of withdrawal. His place of reference is a warehouse. It is through here that my hero strolls, in his own special way. The description of the hero and the situation is not without a certain manufacturing practice of my own: I therefore name the character of the short narrative that follows: the Warehouse Man. The hero of the warehouse is interesting in that he is unable to structure himself. And yet this inability already characterizes him. He is conceived as a character precisely because of this inability; this inability is realized thanks to an organized system of shared, specific characteristics that are adopted by the Warehouse Man and which, at the same time, structure him as a character.

In terms of the Warehouse Man, there are three pairs of concepts that concern me. Through them I will describe the man and the situation: the hero lives in the peculiar, contemporary city. The first pair of concepts that concerns him is Material and Immaterial Homelessness. The second: Somnambulism and Insomnia. And, finally: Control panel and Warehouse [...] Even more so, as will become evident, the Warehouse Hero interprets the contemporary inhabitant of the Internet. The three pairs I introduced are intertwined. At the same moment the concepts are described (as if they make up a glossary or a small dictionary), I attempt to demonstrate their relationships. Material – Immaterial Homelessness, Somnambulism – Insomnia, Control Panel – Warehouse.”

“Before anything else” the Warehouse Man is manufactured by a disturbance of the condition of time and space. At once I ask myself: Can we imagine or can we already see the distortions of time and space which occur from contemporary man residing in the Internet? Does the technically described continuous on-line life have noteworthy consequences on the ethical aspect or the political experience of the society which will ensue? Or is the Warehouse Man nothing new but a mere transformation of an older character?

Nodes techniques. Antonas Office

Regarding the pair of concepts mentioned above, Antonas started with Homelessness, that has taken on a transcendental power in contemporary thought. Focusing on this concept, he pointed that since 1920, in his Theory of the Novel, György Lukács uses the term “transcendental homelessness” to describe man’s urgent, impatient expectation to be “at home” wherever he may find himself. He adds:

“Homelessness was linked to a certain modern concept of “the power to reside anywhere”. Thus, contemporary homelessness is related to the detachment from specific familiar places, as well as to a certain abstract familiarity that is uninterested in the peculiarity of any place. Therefore, the Material – Immaterial Homelessness points to the specific chasm between the literalness and metaphor of homeless residency: between literalness and metaphor, we are asked to talk about homelessness in the modern-day city [...] Buildings, streets, sidewalks, plants, parks and lights were all systematically organized as the material equipment of cities. They were also organized – primarily – as abstract representations. The distribution of space is always at work in modern cities. The apartment actualizes the concept of the urban allotment. Even though it usually remains uninstituted, it describes the law of the urban cell: the right to housing may or may not be constitutionally guaranteed but, in any case, the cell of the apartment embodies the abstract right of participating in a certain apportionment. The inhabitant of the city resides in the apartment. The apartment, as an urban cell which proceeds to multiply (as it finds its place in the urban fabric), builds the city: the city thus emerges as a system for the distribution of housing or as a peculiar archival machine.”

The Warehouse Man. Prison version. Antonas Office.

“Two human characters of the city abstain today from possessing an apartment. For different reasons and in radically different ways, two heroes in the contemporary metropolis make us wonder, immediately after we announce them, whether they belong to what we have, hitherto, termed the “city” [...] Their profile is defined by global characteristics: they are not the protagonists of a local play. The inhabitant of the Internet and the city’s Homeless Person are certainly both homeless. The former is living the metaphorical experience of transcendental homelessness, while the latter has been thrown into the literalness of homelessness on the stage of the city. The metaphor of homelessness is experienced as the condition of an infinite interface.

The hero of the warehouse, on whom I have been focusing from the outset, is an inhabitant of the Internet and an important figure of communal life to whom we refer when we think about the immaterial aspect of homelessness. The place of homelessness (immaterial and tortuously material) will direct every urban compilation of future societies. The difficulty of the homeless person to find a place defines the fact that yesterday’s city will not resemble tomorrow’s. The city no longer seeks simple positions for its homes, but different institutions of homelessness. Moreover: the increase in the number of possible positions for the Warehouse Man does not illustrate only Lukács’s argument for easy nomadic residency, but also the particular inability to reside in a world which is made up as a “population of fragments”. Communities that already form (in an invisible way) the contemporary city are composed of inhabitants of the Internet.

[...]

Accumulation transforms the resident of the Internet into a particular Warehouse Man. At the same time, faced with the voraciousness for stored things, the Warehouse Hero shapes the particular warehouse in which he lives.”

“Anything can be a thing of the Warehouse as long as it is already represented or is declared representable. We claim that in the Warehouse what takes place is not merely the consolidation of objects that were outside it through their classification and representation. The Warehouse contains only representations of objects, without the need to ever present the “objects themselves” [...] The search in the Warehouse is already a compilation of incongruous answers, it does not open the path to an open, unanswered question: it does not show the possible construction of a world organized by the inability to organize.

[...]

The collection of answers which each user receives in the Warehouse will become increasingly difficult to be explored at once as a whole: each answer separately inaugurates other questions and new manifold, fragmentary levels of answers.”

/// The Bloom’s Room, the Island Interface and the City Interface are images prepared at the Antonas office by Aristide Antonas and Katerina Koutsogianni.
/// Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man is an essay by Aristide Antonas, translated by Mary Kitroef. The complete essay will be published soon both in Greek and English. More info: Antonas web-site.

Nature has been testing strategies for 3,8 billion years to solve design problems, sometimes even before they appear. The term biomimicry [Greek bios, life, and mimesis, to imitate] means to copy or emulate shapes or functional solutions of certain species of animals, plants and natural systems. Even appeared in 1982, the term biomimicry was popularized by scientist and author Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Nowadays the biomimicry community has grown and exchange knowledge and resources in networks such as Biomimicry 3.8 where you can find references on how spiders manufacture a waterproof fiber around five or six times stronger than steel, or how the process of green chemistry lead to electrons in a leaf cell to convert sunlight into fuel.

Similar examples are shown in the exhibition Biomimicry. Design Inspired by Nature in Roca Gallery London [Until 24th May] which was previously held in Barcelona. The general thesis of the exhibition is that any of the problems and challenges faced by architects, engineers and designers have been previously solved by nature and the answers to all our challenges are around in our environment.

Latro Lamp Mike Thompson. Bio-light Philips

The exhibition curated by Ramon Folch Studio shows some commercial products which mimic nature in shapes, functions and systems. From nature we have copied not only its shape [e.g. the hexagon of honeycombs], but also its function [geolocation of bats] and its cyclic and efficient system [a termite nest]. In each of the exposed solutions we can see an improvement for the final product: in some cases it is less friction, and therefore a higher efficiency, while in others it is a better space use. The efficient use of water can be found in products like Lotusan Paint avoiding drops to adhere to the painted surfaces; they run down carrying dirt particles away. Taking care of scarce water, AquaMat emulates the absorbent and hydrophobic structure of the Namib Dessert beetle. Applied to construction, it allows to collect water with a fog harvesting mesh that facilitate the consumption of drinking water in desert environments.

Lotusan paint. Sto Ibérica

In one of its parts the exhibition also included four prototypes of products that are still in pilot stage: Stickybot by Stanford University: a vertical displacement device imitating small gecko toe which interacts at molecular level with surfaces thanks to a series of tiny strands generating a molecular attraction [the Van der Waals force], that only sticks when you pull in one direction. The second is an algae light generator called Latro Lamp by Mike Thompson, where a series of electrodes are inserted into the photosynthesizing organs – chloroplasts – of algal cells, thus generating a small electrical current from algae during photosynthesis. In the same line the project Bio-light by Phillips uses bioluminescent bacteria. In order to make this bacteria glow, you have to “feed” the microorganisms of the lamp with a mix of methane and compound made of waste generating a non-incandescent light by the interaction of an enzyme [lucyferase] with a molecule [luciferin], which emits light. More examples can be found in the Microbial Home project which is a proposal for an integrated domestic cyclical ecosystem.

Gecko toe showing strands that sticks at molecular level generating attraction by pulling it back.

The lectures held in Barcelona presented works of engineering, design and robotics closely linked to the functioning of the human body and perception. Some of the lecturers included Dennis Dollens, Frederic Fol Leymarie and Martín Azua. Stepping aside the presentations which were focused in biomimetic in its broadest sense it was remarkable the work presented by Materfad. This is a center monitoring research and technology in the field of new materials facilitating knowledge transfer between sectors as design, biotechnology, construction, transport and textiles. The technology tracking task allows to detect commercially available materials from one sector that can be applied in other fields. It is the only center on materials in Spain dedicated to innovation through a growing database, consulting and education activities and a showroom where designers can have a sensorial experience of new developments prior make a technical consultation to use advanced materials in their design project.

Photocatalytic Pavement. Materfad showroom.

According to Javier Peña, director of Materfad, we are facing a great opportunity to incorporate innovations in the production processes going from austerity to the abundance of solutions that can be found in nature, to transform our consuming buildings to buildings producing their own energy and materials [like collagen in our body]. In doing so its quite important to adapt education curricula to a new understanding of materials. In recent years we have worked a lot raising buildings and cities but have learned very little things on links between matter, energy and information in nature.

Fabric and textiles. Materfad showroom.

To overcome this situation, Materfad is actively promoting connections with centers like Happy Materials [Prague] and Danish Design Centre [Copenhagen] which whom they have set DAMADEI network to connect design and technology worlds through materials. At present, the network is also expanding to Latin America [Aguascalientes, Valparaiso and Medellin].

Recent advances in synthetic biology reveal the potential of using the basic unit of life [the cell] for product development through nanotechnology. We are starting to develop materials that are responsive to certain inputs [e.g. graphene] but the next step will be to develop multifunctional materials interacting with its surrounding.

Beyond smart materials we will develop strategies to react and evolve like nature. In doing so its fundamental to create synergies through interdisciplinary teams and new mental codes, skills and knowledge to build in a biosynthetic world. The answers are all around us… we should only learn to ask appropriate questions.

—César Reyes Nájera. PhD architect and publisher.
@cerreyes | dpr-barcelona

/// Exhibition [27th February - 24th May] 
Roca London Gallery. 
Station Court, Townmead Road, 
London, SW6 2PY
 | @rocalongallery

In 2014, for 50th anniversary of the 24th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana (BIO), the Biennial aims to reinvent itself launching an ambitious call for applications. It’s a fact that the design world has changed at a rapid rate in the past years, going from DIY [Do it yourself] to DIWO [Do it with others], we’re facing new technological inputs that change from one week to the other, creating new scenarios for design and new forms of economics and trade, such as crowdfunding, social money and micropayments, based on the confidence and support of the network. In this context, the Biennial is looking for individuals to shape possible futures for design; entering the realm of collaboration, where design is a tool to rethink everyday life, advancing into an experimental, collaborative territory where design is employed as a tool to question and transform ideas about industrial production, public and private space, and pre-established systems and networks.

Improvised Vacuum. Jesse Howard.

Organized by MAO, the Museum of Architecture and Design, BIO 50 breaks with the traditional system of awards, choosing instead to distinguish collaboration, its process and outcomes. Recognizing the idea that design is a discipline that permeates all layers of contemporary life, BIO 50 launches an unprecedented effort to engage designers and agents from Slovenia and abroad in a collaborative approach addressing themes that affect everyday life. Under a series of multidisciplinary mentors, twelve teams will tackle the themes of Affordable Living, Knowing Food, Public Water Public Space, Walking the City, Hidden Crafts, The Fashion System, Hacking Households, Nanotourism, Engine Blocks, Observing Space, Designing Life and an Open Category, creating specific projects to be developed and implemented during the Biennial.

Sasa J. Maechtig, designer of Kiosk K67, at exhibition BIO 5, 1973.

The organizers are looking for team members to devise possible futures for design, integrating and contributing to the outcome of each group. They’re looking for team members with diverse backgrounds and a multidisciplinary approach, students and professionals alike; self-motivated and unafraid to experiment; who can bring their expertise to the table and simultaneously learn from their peers.

/// The deadline for applications is 12 January 2014.
/// More information on BIO 50
/// BIO 50 Call for Applications

The annual theme ‘Money’ is divided in three competitions:

- Territories. Jurors is David Garcia, founder of MAP Architects.
- Culture & Society. Juror is Pedro Gadanho, curator of Contemporary Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art MoMA.
- Environment. Juror is Keller Easterling, architect and writer from New York City and a professor at Yale University.

/// MAGNETIC NORTH, the Arctic lands [From Greenland to Iceland, via Svalbard].

On Monday Dec 9th 2014 [7pm CET] the winners of the Money-Territories competition will be announced on an event at Lauba. During this event, a number of interesting international guests including Mason White, Miha Turšič & Dragan Živadinov from Ksevt, Marko Peljhan, David Garcia of MAP Architects, Ethel Baraona Pohl & Cesar Reyes Najera of dpr-barcelona and Tomislav Pletenac, will take us on a journey through mistic spaces of Earth and Universe as a final event in the Territories Competition Era.

After results announcements a round table discussion on the topic Culture and Architecture of Extreme Environments will take place. Also the second competition of the series Culture & Society. Building Without Money: Create a Space for Cultural Exchange. [juror Pedro Gadanho of MoMA The Museum of Modern Art] will be launched.

/// There will be live streaming for those living abroad Zagreb. More info on twitter @_ThinkSpace_ and Facebook on Think-Space.