The Social (Re)Production of Architecture

Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice

Doina Petrescu, Kim Trogal, Doina Petrescu, Kim Trogal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317509226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

The Social (Re)Production of Architecture brings the debates of the 'right to the city' into today's context of ecological, economic and social crises. Building on the 1970s' discussions about the 'production of space', which French sociologist Henri Lefebvre considered a civic right, the authors question who has the right to make space, and explore the kinds of relations that are produced in the process. In the emerging post-capitalist era, this book addresses urgent social and ecological imperatives for change and opens up questions around architecture's engagement with new forms of organization and practice. The book asks what (new) kinds of 'social' can architecture (re)produce, and what kinds of politics, values and actions are needed.

The book features 24 interdisciplinary essays written by leading theorists and practitioners including social thinkers, economic theorists, architects, educators, urban curators, feminists, artists and activists from different generations and global contexts. The essays discuss the diverse, global locations with work taking different and specific forms in these different contexts.

A cutting-edge, critical text which rethinks both practice and theory in the light of recent crises, making it key reading for students, academics and practitioners.

1 — INTRODUCTION: THE SOCIAL (RE)PRODUCTION OF ARCHITECTURE IN ‘CRISIS-RIDDLED’ TIMES

Doina Petrescu and Kim Trogal

(RE)PRODUCTION IN THE EMERGING AGE OF POST-CAPITALISM

This book was written during the rise of a new political moment in global capitalist society. It is a ‘crisis-riddled time’ and, in the field of economics on different sides of the political spectrum, some thinkers have concluded that, whether we like it or not, we are moving into a different era, beyond neoliberal capitalism.¹ The claims that any crisis is ‘different’ might be easy to dismiss, since capitalism is remarkably versatile and adaptive. But many agree that today’s crisis, and the climate crisis in particular, are different. What marks this era as different from the others is that it is a crisis of reproduction not only of production, as the very basis on which things and life are produced is under threat. In times of austerity politics and the loss of waged work globally, in times of unprecedented migration flows and resources wars, it is reproduction, namely, how we sustain ourselves and our world that has become a ‘political battleground’.² As various national states withdraw their support for welfare, it is housing, health, education, childcare, care, the environment, wildlife, low-carbon technologies, the civic sector and culture, to name only a few, which are all targets. This is a time of transition, but what the transition is to is uncertain and some scenarios are grim.³ However, a number of thinkers argue that co-produced lives are possible but they need to be made and struggled over in the here and now, at many scales and at many levels.⁴

There is an imperative to change, to find new forms of organizing and means to sustain ourselves in the world. This demands new forms of collective politics, values and actions, in which space and architecture must play a role. This is already happening through a grassroots proliferation of new forms of (re)production, from community-supported agriculture, aquaculture, community actions on energy, water and environmental concerns, new kinds of collective practices of lending and sharing, new currencies, peer-to-peer production as well as new legal forms of ownership, rights and responsibilities ‘in common’. It is ‘a new way of living in the process of formation’ (Mason, 2015: xv).

Among the diversity of initiatives that are building new possibilities, some have started to work with the reproductive capacities of architecture. This engagement with (re)production is in the context of crisis and transition and, as such, it is different from the modernist project of architecture that took place under the welfare state.

Architecture needs to reinvent itself, it needs to revise its value systems, its means and definitions, its vocabulary of practice. The project of the future is very much one of ‘re-’ … The ‘(re)’ of the book’s title, whose brackets serve both as a critical elision and a reminder of the taken-for-granted status of reproduction, follows feminist work over the past 40 years to affirm that we can no longer speak about production without speaking about reproduction at the same time.⁵ Following feminist work, we must read beyond Marxist notions of production and beyond binary oppositions of production/reproduction, production/consumption. In the context of a built environment that is overproduced and overproduces in its turn, our ‘re’ also refers to other ecological ‘re’s, all with reproductive dimensions: reparation, recycling, reuse, resilience and the reconstruction of other spatial relations. In this trajectory and specifically in this book, we find spaces that are concerned with both production and reproduction (such as commons, community land trusts, cooperative housing), activities (such as consumption also considered as a form of production), and a concern with plural, diverse others (slum dwellers, prisoners, informal street sellers).

In opening up broad questions of (re)production in contemporary architecture, the book addresses three main concerns: (1) politics: what kinds of politics of (re)production do we need? How do we think through ‘the political’ in the social (re)production of architecture?; (2) values: in both the economic and ethical sense of the term, where and how is value (re)produced in and through architecture, and what constitutes that value?; and (3) actions: we suggest that architecture, art and design can bring specific (re)productive actions as a means to be active in, and change, places and contexts. These three main concerns are reflected in the three Parts: Part I, ‘politics’; Part II, ‘values’; and Part III, ‘actions’.

THE RIGHT TO THE CITY/THE RIGHT TO ARCHITECTURE

When speaking about the politics of (re)production in architecture, one important reference is, of course, Lefebvre’s (1991) famous work on the ‘social production of space’. According to Lefebvre, space, and we can also infer architecture, shape society and are shaped by it. Space and architecture are (re)productive, and citizens of any society, he wrote, have a right to shape that society in and through its spaces (Lefebvre, 1968). Later, after the 1968 upheaval, he claimed a ‘right to the city’ as one of the fundamental rights of all citizens. In the context of a society regulated by global capital, David Harvey analysed these reproductive capacities from the perspective of political economy, emphasizing how capitalist economies and relations are specifically produced through space and urban development. He showed how planning and development reproduce capitalist relations, and therefore argued that the production of injustice, through space, is systemic (1973, 2008).

With concerns regarding the reproductive aspects of architecture, our aim in this book is to explore what (new) kinds of ‘social’ architecture can reproduce. The notion that all citizens have the right to shape their societies in and through its spaces, suggests, of course, participation, but contemporary conditions demand that we go beyond participatory or ‘socially engaged’ approaches to work with more radical forms of politics and values. Drawing on recent debates on the ‘right to the city’, we argue that a ‘right to architecture’ not only concerns ‘having a say’ in development, but rather concerns real material rights (such as the right to housing, to public space, the rights to space) as well as the more elusive, psychological rights that Lefebvre evoked, such as the rights of imagination, or the right to play.⁶ These rights are seen ‘more as an emancipatory project, emphasizing the need to freely project alternative possibilities’ (Crawford, 2011: 34). Keeping in mind Lefebvre’s immaterial rights and a ‘multiplicity of representations and interventions’, we also try to work with Harvey’s assertion, that the ‘right to the city’ (and architecture) necessitates collective, global dimensions. As Harvey asserts, the right to the city is a common right, it has to be claimed mutually and collectively. The social (re)production of architecture, for us, is part of an ‘emancipatory project’, material and immaterial, individual and collective. The right to the city and a right to architecture involve not any architecture, but a just, ecological, creative, imaginative architecture, that we claim as users, managers, citizens and architects.

The social (re)production of architecture suggests that we have a different kind and quality of relationship with architecture as both practitioners and citizens. In the social (re)production of architecture, the aspects of architecture that become important are not the ones of form, surface, style or even structure, but rather demand working upon the ecological, economic, collaborative and processual aspects of making space. This book thus aims also to open up what architecture is in dealing with the challenges of our times, particularly when the conditions of reproduction have been radically altered in the last few decades. In the post-capitalist era, the social (re)production of architecture takes place under new conditions.

A DIVERSITY OF SCALES, LOCATIONS AND (RE)PRODUCTIVE APPROACHES

This book has a global span, with chapters discussing Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Netherlands/Serbia, Sweden, Palestine, Romania, Spain, Thailand, Turkey/Kurdistan, the UK and the USA to contextualize the (re)production of architecture and the architectures of (re)production. This takes different specific forms in these different global contexts: in Brazil, it is ‘popular’ (Hehl); in Kurdistan, on the front line of a war zone, it is ‘forensic’ (Tan); in the Mediterranean, it is ‘tactical’ (Betancour); in occupied Palestine, it is poetic and ‘speculative’ (Golzari and Sharif); and in Thai slum upgrading, it is networked and empowering (Wungpatcharapon).

The (re)production documented in this book takes place in specific ‘local’ contexts: in prisons, villages, metropolitan neighbourhoods, in suburbs, abandoned buildings, large parks and public squares. It makes use of different means, from pedagogy, curating, art, activism, installations, community fairs, networks, as well as buildings. The inclusion of diverse forms is for us deliberate, with diversity constituting part of a political project, following an approach taken by many feminist thinkers and activists.⁷ Such diversity also questions ‘Architecture’, and what we call architecture both as a discipline and profession. The architecture in this book includes architecture without architects, architecture which is relational and not solely physical (not least because reproductive work is always relational⁸). It includes different scales of architecture, from objects to regions and geopolitical areas that all have architectural agency. As such, the social (re)production of architecture can be considered to involve particular, relational processes, such as participatory ones (Mutschler and Morrow; Šušteršic; or van Heeswijk) and transversal, decolonizing ones (Tan; Krasny).

ARCHITECTURE FOR RADICAL, FEMINIST AND ‘AGONISTIC’ POLITICS

As thinkers have noted, neoliberal capitalism contradicts democracy and particularly so in contemporary development.⁹ Yet the democratic models we operate with are in crisis, they need to be reclaimed and transformed, and an important question in this volume is how, through architecture, can we enable a more democratic spatial production within critical conditions? Authors here directly confront issues of control and rights in spatial (re)production following Marxist approaches, yet are also developing ‘agonistic’ (Mouffe, 2013), radical, feminist and post-human approaches (Haraway, 2003, 2008; Braidotti, 2013).

Authors, such as Tatjana Schneider and Supreeya Wungpatcharapon, highlight the importance of taking control over the social production of space. In Chapter 2, Schneider suggests we need to find ways of ‘acting otherwise’, taking control of spatial production collectively through mutual knowledge and action. We find a concrete example of this in Wungpatcharapon’s Chapter 3 concerning the spatial rights and justice of slum dwellers in Thailand. Her case study of a marginalized population struggling to defend their presence in society shows how they have taken control of their own development. This involves not only the architectural development of buildings and spaces (primarily housing) but also the development of a range of associated tools such as networks, welfare schemes, saving schemes, income generation and the establishment of mutual rules. It is a good example of what Neil Brenner calls ‘institutional re-design’ in Chapter 8. He advocates practices that actively interrupt ‘rule-regimes associated with market-oriented, growth-first urban development’ (p. 116) to (re)design the systems ‘that govern the production, use, occupation and appropriation of space’ (p. 119). He argues that together with tactical approaches, we still need architectural strategies if we are to counter politics of neoliberal urbanism at scale.

A number of the claims to spatial rights in this volume are taking place in extreme or exceptional conditions, which can increasingly be seen as paradigmatic of our times. In a prison, a war zone or refugee camp when criticality is difficult, what kind of politics will guide us? A number of authors here bring in Chantal Mouffe’s concept of ‘agonistic politics’. In agonistic politics, difference can and should emerge. It demands the creation of democratic spaces in which conflict and divergence may appear, and their work helps raise questions around the limits of who or what is excluded.

In Chapter 4, Gabu Heindl presents the dilemmas of working with a prison and considers prisoners’ ‘rights to space’ in such conditions. She asks how to intervene in a situation of spatial injustice in a way that is not purely commentary, nor simply making a ‘wrong’ situation acceptable? With Pelin Tan, in Chapter 6, we learn from the limiting condition of the front lines of war. We see how, through pedagogical processes, staff and students at the Faculty of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University are creating critical and transformative connections to the conditions they are in. Through different methodologies (affective, transversal, forensic), she suggests that ‘architectural research that transverses and functions in both institutions and societies directly, can play a role in transforming knowledge and public “truth”’ (p. 77). Those things that are cast ‘outside’ of architecture come (back) in, expanding the field as a tool for democratic practice and justice.

In the context of Northern Ireland, in Chapter 5, Peter Mutschler and Ruth Morrow acknowledge the potential of small and transitory moments of injustice resulting from complex post-conflict situations, to generate radical politics and new spatialities involving unexpected relations. They advocate slow engaged actions, sometimes modest with little or no resources, but involving a broad and heterogeneous diversity of actors, such as pensioners, families, children, teenagers and artists.

Elsewhere in the volume we find other forms of democratic space-making in the limiting conditions of Palestine (Golzari and Sharif), or the precariousness of sustaining protest movements (Mörtenböck and Mooshamer). In these chapters we learn that under extreme conditions architecture might expand its remit, as in all these practices the usual tools we use for democratic spatial production, such as participation, are questioned. The politics become more nua...