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.

To resolve such problems, people don’t usually resort to architects. Probably nobody thinks of them as professionals willing to help, or to interpret the case history of a person or a residential community that requires on-the-spot analysis.

Arquitectes de Capçalera (General Practitioners in Architecture) offers the Raval neighbourhood’s neediest residents the possibility of collaboration with future architects in imagining, planning and studying the viability of such changes to their houses and residential buildings, improving both their habitat and relations between them.

The idea is to accompany them in charting their needs and diagnosing possible solutions, guiding them towards the start-up of the necessary rectifications, both in terms of planning and legal management, as well as the obtaining of financial subsidies for implementing them. The idea is to establish close contact, in line with the main goal of reconnecting architecture with society. This is an opportunity to place emphasis on cooperation models where learning intervenes directly in actions directed towards and by citizens.

Arquitectes de Capçalera at Piso Piloto exhibition

In the CCCB’s patio, during the period that the exhibition “Piso Piloto” (Show Home) was running, a Free Residents’ Advice Office opened allowing a limited series of cases to be tackled. A team of students and lecturers from the Housing and City course at Barcelona’s Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAB) was assigned to attend queries from the residents.

At university we are trained in an ABC that supposedly equips us with the instruments necessary to exercise as architects. Diverse and simultaneous study plans show the enormous difficulty in setting basic criteria aiming to make what the profession needs compatible with what is ordered by the European, national or autonomous community regulations, often governed by generalist bases that do not recognise the uniqueness of these studies that swing between the technical, the artistic and the social. Individual teaching units, even individual lecturers, have the responsibility and authority to accentuate the few levers remaining to them in order to gear studies towards wherever they believe is appropriate at a time when the dual crisis – economic and professional – is pushing us to reformulate the fundamentals of architectural training.

Some teaching staff believe that the important thing is to learn techniques consisting of tools and construction elements and supposed laws of composition that allow the planning, and ultimately, the construction of buildings. Others lay stress on cultural and artistic aspects, understanding that an architect acts as a creative director who has essential technical knowledge that allows him to run and coordinate the project’s conceptual and stylistic materialisation. Still others, in contrast, include architecture in a more diffuse field where the architect (whether he builds or not) mediates in a more complex society where technical experience is at the service of a collective aspiration influenced by other agents who demand complicity from the social sciences with the aim of exhausting reality through the design project.

All these simultaneous and complementary visions accentuate the nature of each study plan according to its traditions, and, of course, the labour context in which each operates. Because, let’s not forget, they should all share a common aim: offering studies that guarantee that their students achieve entry into the labour market.

Today, in Barcelona and the rest of the country, this target is far from being reached. One only has to review the statistics to realise the enormous and dramatic difficulties architects face in finding work, not to mention in embarking on their own entrepreneurial adventures.

Some will say that the problem is circumstantial, which means universities do not need to adapt to such ups and downs. “Everything will revert to normal”, they say, suggesting that the architect’s profile need not be substantially modified because sooner or later architects will recover their original status and society will continue needing talented (higher?) technical architects who will retake the sceptre and crown of the built environment. Others demand in-depth revision of the contents and assignments of a profession that has changed forever; whether assuming the remains of a certain technical responsibility, sharing it with other professional collectives that by simplifying and specialising their knowledge have demonstrated the same efficiency, or by demanding of themselves greater commitment to a disaffected society that is demanding bottom-up transformation, where the architect has not yet become fully incorporated as an agent in city policy, or in community management, negotiation or communication processes.

The level of disorientation is considerable and every teaching unit tackles it by emphasising its own criteria. In the case of the ETSAB – undeniably the star of the glory years of a Barcelona influential in architecture and urban design matters – the changes seem to be coming in fits and starts. Left orphaned of reference figures (due to deaths, retirements and departures), today nobody exists who can push and give a unitary sense to an in-depth transformation. In fact, we do not even believe that such a unitary vision is desirable in a profession that has diversified and is increasingly distant from society, and in a school that is in decline (in terms of students, resources and influence) and is resisting the renewal of its structures.

Something similar is happening in the whole of society, where the degeneration of democracy and of political parties is causing a systemic disorder. We are living through a crucial time where citizens who do not feel properly represented are demanding greater participation, transparency and a decided course towards a new model. At the university, which has many qualities of a laboratory but has never completely lost its link to the social reality, in-depth changes are also augured. The first symptoms have been experienced in recent years with emotive assemblies where many students have demanded greater participation in the definition of the studies model, with greater contingency in a pressing reality and with perspectives complementary to that of the invariable builder architect. Hopeful students who continue believing that the university is the best bridge for strengthening the contract that the profession has with a society that, these days, sees us as distracted with a supposed beautification of our environment, under the orders of the political powers or the pressure of runaway capitalism.

And although students are demanding changes, it is surprising that – for example – academic plans on housing are still so close to the “commission” and so distant from the emergencies that are shaking our city and by extension the world. One only has to ask associations such as Cáritas, Arrels, the PAH, Médicos Sin Fronteras, or even the military, how many architects are cooperating with them. But even more important is asking them what added or intrinsic value they believe architects can bring to the vast task of helping improve the habitats of collectives that suffer or are at risk of suffering exclusion and that, today, can not count on us.

They barely need us and this is hard to accept, despite the fact that the raw materials with which they work (subjects and objects) are also concerns of ours. At the university we remain ill-prepared to show capabilities in these issues or rather, we remain unwilling to accept that these matters also form part of our capabilities.

Coderch, in his oft-cited article for Domus in 1961, “It’s not geniuses that we need now”, reminded us of this contract with reality: “Open you eyes wide, look, it is much simpler than you imagine.”

I doubt that it is simpler, but undoubtedly it is more urgent, useful, surprising, impassioned and educational than many of us teachers imagine. Reality outdoes fiction and, in my opinion, the school is living in a determined fiction and being dowsed with a reality imposed by an inherited script that few will be able to put into practice in the future. The architect that does not yet exist (at least in the academic plans) is a different architect who should be able to work without a closed script that prejudges problems and solutions, instead being someone who investigates by opening their eyes wide, converting each project into a kind of documentary where, step by step, the usefulness (and the beauty!) of the project design is described.

The best examples are outside the university, in the hands of multidisciplinary collectives that day by day invent small-scale pilot proposals – real and utopian – that reveal truisms that academia does not see, does not look at, or that are at most relegated to “optional” status. These show us the enormous potential for cooperation in the gestation and co-management of projects with people. Knowing how to ask, demand, communicate and, in short, share knowledge, making private laboratory research work compatible with a clear vocation to open up the process by going down into the ring to contaminate it with harsh reality.

We do not know what will happen with the ETSAB and the ETSAV. Every day new and intriguing voices emerge that augur a progressive disappearance of one or the other, the sale of their premises to reduce the UPC’s enormous debt, cuts in the already miserly financial remuneration of their associated teaching staff, the impossibility of incorporating new staff or the refusal of resources for research projects already under way… Today, inviting somebody to give lecture is fundamentally a commitment based on personal favours that it is difficult to maintain, while publishing anything becomes an exhausting nightmare. The new management at the ETSAB is trying to tackle these evident shortfalls with fresh and promising ideas that we hope will maintain their freshness and a commitment to not justifying changes only through cuts. But I do not believe today that solutions will emerge from subtle adjustments and even less so from internal debates between professional classes who wave the flag of authorship and supposed responsibility for the “commission”.

Political expert Joan Subirats in his article “Repolitizar la Arquitectura” (Repoliticising Architecture), published in El País in relation to the project “Barraca Barcelona” (Barcelona Hut) of 2003, reminded us that from the 1990s onward, architecture abandoned its social and political commitment, becoming solely concerned with stylistic issues. We have abundant evidence of this when we see how the starchitects move around the world taking advantage of the major opportunities offered by a globalised economy and a technology that allows them unprecedented audacity. Architects, like any other technical experts, should start experiencing problems with their conscience if they totally sever technical solutions from social problems or from explicit or implicit objectives in relation to what is requested. We need to introduce politics into what we do and it is imperative that universities accept the challenge of re-politicising architecture and of asking themselves what is the use of what is done, who wins and who loses out because of it, and at the service of what reality we are placing our work.

—Josep Bohigas, architect. Curator of “Barraca Barcelona”, “APTM” and “Piso Piloto” and promoter of Arquitectes de Capçalera

***

In Febrero, 2016, the project Arquitectes de Capçalera has been awarded with the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2015. From Quaderns, we want to congratulate all the team and people involved in the project.

More info at Arquitectes de Capçalera

***

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.

The term ‘participatory urbanism’ has become a buzzword recently, and several publications focused on participation and participative processes had been published in the past years. Thus, what is the reason to make one more publication about this topic? Is still any interest on the topic or themes left to discuss? Perhaps is precisely because of that, within all the noise that emerges when a term starts getting trendy and overexposed, when it’s important to find those spaces that allow serious discussions to get in deep and to have a critical debate. This is the spirit of MONU #23, entitled Participatory Urbanism, where the pros and cons of participation are confronted.

Markus Miessen has already written that participation can be a nightmare, when it gets trivialised, commodified or adopted by governments to take less responsibility on their actions. As Miessen explains, “Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility.” In this critical context, on the most recent issue of MONU it’s possible to find several thought provoking written pieces and projects which permit to have a wider overview of different interpretations of participation both in architecture and urban design, even challenging the preconceived notions we have about architecture.

On an interview with Bernd Upmeyer, Jeremy Till argues that in participative practices one moves into new forms of the commons and shared spaces, which from the start can be understand as a contradiction to the standard premises of architecture, based on individualism and control. The social responsibility of the architect and its political implication should be in the core of a real participatory process, according to Till. Nevertheless, the process itself can be used as well just to fulfill the architect’s obligations. But even with this fact on sight, at this point there is an optimistic approach that it’s defined by the idea that there is still hope for architects, there is special knowledge they can share and bring to the table, based on social and spatial skills that can be used to empower new forms of social constructions.

Participation as a process of confrontation is also described by Gonzalo López on his essay ‘Towards a New Urbanism’, where he’s focused on the different possible scales of urban movements to develop a theory about Open Source Urbanism, a concept that implies a direct involvement of the citizen. This is a shift from traditional large-scale urban planning into new ways of thinking, understanding and working in and for the city. Some of the movements remarked by López—tactical urbanism, co-housing, collective architectures, among others—are exemplified by the projects published on the same issue, such as the case of the alternative urban practices at Ostkreuz [Berlin], described by Nina Gribat, Hannes Langguth and Mario Schulze as a site for experimentation,—within a series of failed development plans—that have settled the ground for a new civic modus operandi, based on sharing services and social economic networks. It is important to note that the political and economic limitations are revisited in this essay, to avoid the simple or superficial fetishization of this kind of practices and to discuss as well its failures, problems and governmental manipulation. What is described as an ‘Absolute Present’ can be summarized by the way that terms like ‘flexibility’, ‘self-responsibility’, or ‘entrepreneurialism’ are used to justify projects developed under precarious conditions.

‘Make City’ in Times of an ‘Absolute Present’, by Nina Gribat, Hannes Langguth and Mario Schulze

What Is Affordable Housing? toolkit, CUP.

The work of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a remarkable example of how to take the participatory approach to a long term process. Founded in 1997, the CUP is a nonprofit organization initiated by a trans-disciplinary collective, including backgrounds on architecture, history, public policy, political theory, and graphic designers, that work together to visually communicate complex urban-planning processes. Damon Rich, one of the founders, talks about the motivations to start this project and how education has been a leading issue on the evolution and success of their work. The pedagogical approach makes possible to move from theory to action, developing projects which deal with important urban subjects—public housing, air quality, waste, and water, among others—taking them along with neighborhood organizations and advocacy groups, and are used to educate others.

‘The Utopia of DIY Urbanism’, by Uta Gelbke

If participation is a battlefield, as Damon Rich says, by reading this issue we are reminded that participatory processes, DIY projects, and collaborative approaches are the product of infinite negotiations between different actors, as Uta Gelbke explains in the case of the Holzmarkt Cooperative in Berlin. It is located between the Spree river and Holzmarkt street, where the Bar25 can be found a few years ago. This is a site basically known as a ‘hipster village’ and the the group that founded the Bar25 wanted to start an alternative attempt of self-organized project, including places devoted to serve organic food, cultural events and more. That’s how the Holzmarkt Cooperative was created in 2012, supported by professional planners and legal advisers, along with the Swiss pension fund Abendrot Stiftung, which provided the financial resources. The current importance of the area and the success of the project, are used here as a clear case study of how civil society empowered itself in order to be legitimized as an urban agent.

However, this is also a perfect project to remind the inherent contradictions of participation and to not romanticize all participatory processes per se. It’s important to remember that this kind of development often tends to generate the same kind of homogeneity and social limitations that the initiators tend to criticize, as the authors clearly state.

The richness of this issue of MONU lies in the fact that an agonistic overview is presented. Not a romantic, easy description of participation, but a negotiation full of dissent in it’s own pages, where the theoretical essays create a dialogue with the projects, sometimes contradicting each others, other times, complementing the information. At that is, at the end, the best way to escape from the nightmare of participation.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editor at Quaderns.

/// We want to thank Bernd Upmeyer for sharing MONU with us. All the info and the TOC of MONU #23 ‘Participatory Urbanism’, can be found at monu-magazine.com

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.

The result is that foreclosures and forcible evictions have left thousands of homes empty and in the hands of financial institutions, while at the same time many thousands of people are denied access to housing by the requirements of the systems of access previously in force, such as that they constitute a stable family, couple or household with an income guaranteed by a permanent employment contract.

In light of the above, housing policies need to be rethought in response to the new conditions, and not only in terms of architectural design but also in terms of programmes, of the people and agencies involved, of systems of tenancy and economic models, and of the structure of the city.

All of this means that housing policies today need to be highly diversified and complementary, pivoting on a series of priority axes:

-The incorporation of empty homes for social use on a rental basis;
-The construction of homes with new models of management, tenancy and morphology-typology;
-Small-scale interventions attuned to the logic of the renovation and rehabilitation of neighbourhoods and actively embracing the different capacities and capabilities of the future residents, not only their ability to pay rent but also their potential for generating work.

In this respect, grassroots citizen’s movements have taken the lead in coming up with workable alternatives. The first of these, in legislative terms, is acceptance of the option of handing back the keys in termination of the mortgage in order to protect people against the situation of total and permanent exclusion, in time and space, in which households unable to meet the repayments find themselves; the guarantee of rehousing; and the fight against exclusion in the form of energy poverty.

Another crucial contribution is being made by experiments with new forms of cooperative organization, which involve active grassroots participation and will result in alternative architectural typologies and construction systems, given that they must adapt from the outset to a real diversity of lifestyles and economic and technical capacities. In this new context of a self-managed cooperative economy, if these homes are not flexible and sustainable then they are not possible. Among the characteristics that are beginning to reveal themselves in the new housing resulting from cooperative and participatory processes is a focus on austerity and efficiency in the space-durability-technology-beauty correlation, in so far as housing is clearly a utility that has no need of the superfluous and the merely cosmetic, the formal qualities of which derive from its essence and its process.

Social rent, directly related to people’s actual economic capacity, is the fairest legal way to implementing the right to adequate housing, in a society which ever fewer people have a permanent work contract, a condition of stability that was the basis for access to housing prior to the collapse of the former model.

This change in policy is essential to address the critical situation created by the system of social precarity that has been imposed by neoliberalism and poses a grave threat to people’s human and social rights.

—Zaida Muxí and Josep Maria Montaner. Montaner is architect and Councillor for Housing, Barcelona City Council; Muxí is architect and Director of Urbanism, Santa Coloma de Gramenet Town Council.

/// This text is part of the book Connection_Import Zurich. Cooperative Housing: New Ways of Inhabiting, catalogue of the exhibition with the same name, edited by Nicola Regusci, Xavier Bustos (CCP). First edition dpr-barcelona, 2015.
/// More info about the publication: dpr-barcelona
/// More info about Cities Connection Project, at their web-site.

Exhibition and book launch at COAC on October 22nd, 2015 7pm, Plaça Nova, 5, 08002 Barcelona.

The collective towns in Iraqi Kurdistan embody how the design of the built environment performs as device for political action. Imposing the idea of homogenized modernisation without any historical perspective they crop up as the materialization of the totalitarian state apparatus for infuse political plans on the ground. Setting terms and conditions over populations, design featured a key role applying political control based on territorial management, successive land reforms, massive relocation of resources, complex production structures and strategic enlargement of reproductible schemes followed by several organized layout systems of collectivisation.

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. Collective towns are still organised around a perpendicular grid as they were initially designed by Saddam Hussein. Photo: Leo Novel

Designing a model of state-owned land and forcing Kurdish tribal population—geographic and economically based on agriculture— to drift from their hamlets towards the urban areas, the Iraqi government ensure an atmosphere of dependency, of mandatory essential state-supply, dismantling local communities and production networks. Thus, razing Kurdish culture and local praxis through systematically destroying villages while enforcing evictions and depopulation, the modern rhetoric of optimization and services emerged as “solvent” reorganization, where entire communities previously settled on the mountains, had been relocate to settlements on plain lands, without agricultural and farmland activities. Drawing an homogeneous landscape of territorial units —designed on modulated patterns, gridded with perpendicular roads, uniformed neighborhoods, regular plots and generic typologies— called Mujamma’at (gatherings places) or Collective Towns, totally dependent from the State.

Although the Iraqi government claimed to have set services and supplies for them, the Kurds already had those facilities on their villages and rather than to stay in the new towns, they preferred to go back. It was after this first generation of massive relocated people “inspired” by progress and other rhetorics of a modern lexicon, that the second generation of Collective Towns — envisioned now as a political tool for struggle — became, according to Francesca Recchia, a new kind of “open air prisons”, due to its isolation by a buffer zone and strict clampdowns to go back to their native villages. In physical terms, the urban design was focused to encourage control and reorganisation, and since that moment became an imperative, destroying thousands of villages and displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians to towns which facilitate the control by military tanks, to patrol over straight streets (where visibility and surveillance are clearer than on steep road hamlets). Thus, design boost rural communities transformation into easier urban targets.

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. Collective Towns have now become fully urbanised and fully serviced with electricity and sanitation. Photo: Leo Novel

Daratoo, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. A man stands at a wide crossroad in the collective town of Daratoo. Photo: Leo Novel

As explained on Leo Novel’s photo essay, authoritarian systems enforce order through urban design, but it’s on the daily interactions, cultural expressions and activities, where the possibility of subversion relies. Recently, the expansion of Collective Towns into urban cores is encouraging upcoming scenarios for Kurdish urban development. Architectural variations start appearing overlapped into the original homogeneous, standardized housing systems. Organic and spontaneous alleys and labyrinth street systems are internally recolonizing the urban space, slipped into the regularity of the grid. And people are reoccupying the street by recovering their traditional behaviour and ways of inhabiting. Sometimes subversion starts by the simple means of taking home activities outside, to make them visible on the public sphere. This simple gesture enhances the possibility of sudden forms of spatial negotiation. Instead of massive changes, small actions. No political submission but collective subversion.

Collective towns where initially disconnected from main cities; the fast pace of contemporary urbanisation, however, is turning them in important urban cores. Photo: Leo Novel

Francesca Recchia wrote: “The design of space is neither neutral nor innocent”. It is a political operation.

—Leonardo Novelo, architect and founder / editor at INPUTmap.

/// Book review and reflections based on Devices for Political Action.: The Collective Towns in Iraqi Kurdistan, by Francesca Reccia and Leo Novel [dpr-barcelona, 2014]
/// More about Francesca Recchia’s work at kiccovich.net
/// Mora about the photographic work of Leo Novel at leonovel.com

But especially this past days, international attention is focused on Greece. The country has been in a long standoff with its European creditors on the terms of a multibillion-dollar bailout, and after several and long attempts to reach an agreement with the Eurogroup, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced a referendum on July 5th, to decide if Greek citizens want to accept the austerity measures proposed by the troika—the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF—which are based on more austerity measures in a country that is facing a high level of unemployment and where the debt is increasing almost in a daily basis.

The word OXI (No) is written on a wall in front of the Greek Academy in Athens, Greece. Photograph: Simela Pantzartzi/EPA

On this scenario where the word ‘debt’ resonates loud and clear, in a context where the metric to measure the health of a country is based in pure economic outputs; it’s more important than ever to recall projects that are based in other kind of economies, where the exchange of goods goes beyond currency and attempt to search for other possible metrics. As the Invisible Committee stated, ‘perhaps we don’t need an alternative economy, but an alternative to economy.’

The Decentralized European Bank of Trust (DEB/T) is one of those project. With DEB/T, Lodovica Guarnieri, Penny Webb and Zeno Franchini propose a speculative digital and material platform which explores a possible institutional response in the age of precarious working conditions and the rise of user-generated and digital economical systems in the context of Europe.

What follows is her description of the project:

Meant as a counter response to the ECB, this near-future scenario proposes a community as a bank, where the common wealth develops and depends on the users and their interactions. Relying on block-chain principle and specific designed prompt-tools, the DEB/T is both the place and the tool which objectifies the value of voluntary work exchanges. Users are enabled to mine and transform their action of barter of resources and emotions and their outcome, into a common profit represented by the Barter and Trust coins. The currency has both a crypto and material/relational reference, allowing citizens to conduct their activities while weaving their work to the creation of a community, both local and transnational, and to have a direct and democratic participation in cultural and local change.

Digital wallet. It permits the accumulation of the Trust pension Fund and the overview of the personal activities. It works as a printer of the Trust and Barter Coins

Feedback device: the appreciation card works via RFI reader, as a credit card for emotional connection with a project.

The interdependence of work is the necessary condition for the achievement of self-fulfillment which is therefore related to and represented by the creation of distributed communities based on trust. In adopting already existing systems of profit which use the interactions between users as a productive mechanism, as for example the like economy, the bank makes a detournment in their structure, sharing the profit of work among its citizens, instead of directing it towards centralized networks and institutions.

Printed Barter and Trust Coin.

After reading the description of the DEB/T project, it’s important to realize that, in reality, crisis is a form of govern and that is inherent consequence of Capitalism modus operandi. The representation of capitalism is that one of paper money, no matter on which currency one thinks, or in which bank you’ll find it. Our values are defined by this currency: the value of our knowledge, of our time, of our work. Certainly we still think that we cannot live without money, but by imagining new possibilities we are able to start questioning the conditions imposed as immutable starting points.*

Perhaps the most important message that we can learn from this project and that we need to keep in mind, is the same as the paraphrase of Paul Éluard that we have been recalling in Adhocray Athens exhibition,

“There are other economies and other worlds and they are in this one.”

— Ethel Baraona Pohl, César Reyes Nájera. dpr-barcelona

/// You can visit DEB/T at Lodovica Guarnieri web-site. The project was made in collaboration with Penny Webb and Zeno Franchini.
/// DEB/T was present in the chapter #4 of thisiswork.org publication
* This closing text is taken from The Echoes of Nothing by dpr-barcelona (Ethel Baraona Pohl, César Reyes Nájera). You can read the complete text in chapter #4 of thisiswork.org publication

Why, then, would the Mandatory Government go through all the trouble over a tiny piece of land? Palestine’s importance, in the eyes of the Empire, was clearly not an idealistic one: This old-new land was nothing more than a key strategic point, guarding the access to the Suez Canal [which offered the shortest and cheapest route to bring troops and trade to and from India], and would therefore not be given up easily. In October 1936, the brief hiatus from the Arab Revolts provided the fallen British Police a chance to start anew; a radical new project for the protection of the “hinge of the empire” was about to commence.

Enter Sir Charles Tegart: An awarded Irish-origin British officer, who spent thirty years successfully suppressing the Bengalis in India [including narrowly escaping six assassination attempts]. Tegart’s expertise in the fight against rural rebellions was to be implemented in the complicated geo-political landscape of Palestine. After a tour of the colony, Tegart realized the problem is a systematic, and had to be dealt from the very core of itself —and to the fullest extent; in that sense, the idea was that the land has to be re-conquered, for good.

Map of Israel locating Tegart Forts distribution (marked as P) alongside intersection and major towns. Source: Kroizer, Gad: ‘The Tegarts’ 1938-1943, (2011)

On the period of the the Arab Revolts, between 1936-1939, Tegart proposed —and designed— the establishment of a network of 77 fortified police stations, to be constructed next to large towns and major crossroads throughout the land. All of the forts were built as a bombardment-resistant concrete enclosure, which was self sustained and equipped with water cisterns to withstand a month-long siege. The stations were designed not only to provide a tactical and logistical base for operations, but to also house the officers and their families, thus separating the controlling forces from the citizens they guarded [a “fortress mentality” imported by Tegart from his days in the Irish Police]. Two years, three phases and 3.5 million British Pounds later, 66 Tegart Forts were completed.

Segment of the hand-drawn matrix catalogue of the fortified stations, drawn by British Mandate architect Otto Hoffman (retrieved from Israel’s National Library)

It was said that Tegart Forts could never be conquered. To the local communities, their ubiquitous presence had symbolized, more than all, the foreign, patronizing conqueror. In the following years, the desire to defeat the imperialist rulers became the leading motivation for the Jewish paramilitary organizations in Palestine, who planned and executed numerous attack on the prestigious British forts. The attacks proved unnecessary: Less than a decade after they embarked on the ambitious project, the British Police gradually withdrew from their costly stations. Both Palestinian and Jews took over the deserted structural treasures —then the largest, most efficient buildings in the land.

“Every place you walk, you see a Tegart Fort” says Dr. Gad Kroyzer, whose PhD at The Bar Ilan University provided an in-depth analysis of the project. Collective memory long forgotten, the British stations are now barely affiliated with their original owners, and serve the Israeli and Palestinian law-enforcing facilities. Today, 19 of the remaining forts are Israeli police stations, 16 serve the IDF as bases and training grounds, 10 were redirected as prisons and 10 are used by the Palestinian authorities in Gaza and the West bank; only eight of them remain abandoned and five were demolished in various rounds of fighting. Some other functions include museums, one university campus and  even one (oriental) restaurant.

Various Tegart Forts in their original state: 1940′s

Various Tegart Forts now with added ornaments, stone cladding, occupation iconography and various systems: 2000′s

In some cases, Tegart Forts became the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Ramallah’s monstrous Tegart Fort, which was used as a Jordanian prison in 1948, turned into an Israeli occupational stronghold in 1967 and finally transformed into the Mukataa: the Palestinian authorities headquarters and Yasser Arafat’s Compound. When the Jewish settlers moved into the West Bank after 1967, their first home was the Tegart fort, taking advantage of its residential abilities. In the 1980’s, these residential characteristics were used again in the the Katra fort near Gedera, in order to absorb and house the masses of immigrants that were arriving from Ethiopia.

The iconic Tegart watch tower was adopted as the symbol of the Israeli Border Police

Functionalism aside, the most interesting adaptation of the Tegart Forts, and perhaps a proof of the confused historical narrative of the local geo-political conscious, is the presence of the Tegarts not only in venues, but as symbolism: The Israeli Border Police, the militarized division which guards the infamous checkpoints in and out of the West Bank, are all proudly carrying a Tegart tower on their chest, now their official symbol [though doubtful many of them know its origin].

Like the forts of the crusaders, the amphitheaters of the romans and the relics of the babylonians, the Tegart Forts —the British-mandate forts— are now a monument to a lost empire, interwoven into the local conflicts and adapted, reinstated and seared into the geopolitical subconscious, inevitably affiliated with power, law enforcement, and oppression.

—Gili Merin (1987). Architecture student, journalist and photographer, currently living in Rotterdam.

/// Header photo: Abandoned fort in Gesher, the Jordan Valley, 2013. Gili Merin.
/// Gili Merin writing and photos have been published in various online and print publication including ArchDaily, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Detail and Frame. Gili’s research on the Tegart Forts and their adaptive use in the Israeli built landscape is conducted in the framwork of the Post-Brutalism unit at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (Jerusalem) lead by Prof. Zvi Efrat and architect Natanel Elfassy. Follow Gili’s blog here: gilimerin.telavivian.com