Spatial Practices

Modes of Action and Engagement with the City

Melanie Dodd, Melanie Dodd

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351140027
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Architecture
• Thema: Architecture General

This book explores 'spatial practices', a loose and expandable set of approaches that embrace the political and the activist, the performative and the curatorial, the architectural and the urban. Acting upon and engaging with the public realm, the field of spatial practices allows people to reconnect with their own sense of agency through engagement in space and place, exploring and prototyping alternative futures in the here and now. The 24 chapters contain essays, visual essays and interviews, featuring contributions from an international set of experimental practitioners including Jeanne van Heeswijk (Netherlands), Teddy Cruz (Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, San Diego), Hector (USA), The Decorators (London) and OOZE (Netherlands). Beautifully designed with full colour illustrations, Spatial Practices advances dialogue and collaboration between academics and practitioners and is essential reading for students, researchers and professionals in architecture, urban planning and urban policy.

1 Space is always political

Melanie Dodd

Richard Rogers’s statement that “architecture is always political”¹ spoken at an event at the UK Houses of Parliament in 2013, was a timely challenge in the light of recent escalating housing crises, social displacement and gentrification. Rogers’s words returned to haunt him in 2015, when, after his nomination for the Stirling Prize (for luxury housing at Bankside in London), a public protest took place outside the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) headquarters on Portland Place with his quote plastered over protest banners – this time in ironic backlash. The organization that led this demonstration, Architects for Social Housing (ASH), represents one of a growing number confronting architecture’s politics; making an impassioned call to the architectural profession and the wider built environment disciplines to confront social inequalities head on. Recognizing that architecture’s politics are complicated by its complicity with capital, and the constraints it is subjected to via the building industry, many would argue that expanded forms of spatial practice move more freely, resisting the neoliberal hegemonies implicit in urban regeneration. And yet, already the parameters are in opposition – architecture versus spatial practice; complicity with capital versus resistance to it – establishing a binary relationship that assumes acting ‘politically’ requires a certain type of practice; even that it can be planned and understood as ‘political’ in advance.

This chapter will try to think harder about how ‘space’ is political, and therefore, how spatial practices act politically. The premise that spatial practices – spatial activism, temporary interventions and socially engaged approaches – have the capacity to influence or affect the ‘social’ or the ‘political’ is fundamental to the field. Yet these capacities are rarely explored in detail, and such ambitious assertions leave it open to counterclaims that these approaches privilege process over built outcome, and (at worst) perpetrate an ethically dubious ‘do-gooding’. Using Lefebvre (1974) as a starting point and Rogers’s statement and its repercussions as our contemporary context, this chapter will make a case not just that space is political but how it is, or can be, political through practice. Importantly this is not about a case for doing politics through space (making a case for a certain type of politics, appropriate for a certain context and situation) but rather about defining the ‘political’ more broadly in respect to space; and in so doing, providing this publication with a context for its unfolding stories of practice.

Space and the political

What does it mean to say that something is political, and why is it important? The political can be defined as “the process by which people negotiate and compete in the process of making and executing shared or collective decisions” (Hague and Harrop 2013, p. 6). As such, it is an essentially social activity, linked, on the one hand, to the existence of diversity and conflict, and, on the other, to a willingness to cooperate and act collectively. This understanding of the political takes us beyond politics as governance, toward politics as the fundamental underpinning of ‘public life’ in a civil society (beyond private/personal), in which, as Arendt states, politics is the most important form of human activity because it involves interaction amongst free and equal citizens ‘acting in concert’ in search of processes of conflict resolution (Arendt 1958, p. 244). For the purposes of this chapter, we will use the term ‘political’ to refer to these processes of interaction and the spatial situations that frame and support them.

How can space be political? In the last 50 years, there has been a noticeable shift toward questions of spatiality which has been crucial in reorienting the way in which we can argue space as political. The ‘spatial turn’ in the 1970s marked a rebalancing of principles of time and space, and the reassertion of space in theory. For many this marked the end of historicism (Soja 1989) in which instead of acting as the mere backdrop for an unfolding time, space became intimately linked to lived experience. The reframing by Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre began to move beyond traditional approaches for how we understand space, concerned with either the ‘conception’ of space (geometric, abstract, mental) or the ‘perception’ of space (physical, material, concrete). Instead, their conceptualizations moved toward a form of ‘realized abstraction’. For Lefebvre, this was captured as a third form of spatial experience in his conceptual triad of perceived (physical), conceived (mental) and ‘lived’ – where the ‘lived’ (social) is space that is processed and modified over time and through use. This more comprehensive mode of spatial thinking moved beyond those traditional dualities (objective–subjective, material–mental) to create a “consciously spatial praxis based in a practical and political awareness that we can act to change” (Elden 2007, pp. 105–106) which was also seen by some as a way to “make theory practical” (Soja 2009, p. 21). This may point to the appeal of Lefebvre’s work for architects, accommodating explicitly spatial ‘practices’. The ‘spatial turn’ worked across disciplines, as much within art as social theory, political science as geography, and engendered a ‘re-materialization’ in response to the prevailing conceptual dematerialization (of the work of art, for instance), renewing an engagement in cities and the built environment as a source of critical and practical focus.

The reconsiderations of space that emerged with the ‘spatial turn’ were not intended to become a fixed ideology or methodology. In his own words Lefebvre’s work provides us merely with an “orientation” to questions of space. As a theoretician of the burgeoning field of urban sociology, he states that “(social) space is a (social) product” (Lefebvre 1974, p. 35). This means it is not only within the notion of space ‘as lived’, but rather in the notion of production of space in which social and political process is enacted; meaning space is quite obviously political, being both a political product and a political stake; both an outcome of political conflict and struggle, but also a medium or instrument for it. Of course, the opportunities and dangers of linking the production of space with social and political facts is that these principles can be used to create a causal link between space and political objectives. If the ‘production’ of space allows it to be seen as political, then ultimately space could be misconceived as an instrument to create political effect. But this assumption of a ‘causative’ link from space to the political is actually a simplification of the more radical positioning being proposed by Lefebvre. Although he was interested in a utopia (meaning, he was interested in political projections of futures), he was focused on forms which do not deny reality but rather explore its potentialities from a perspective of transformation of political and social realities. Lefebvre speaks of a “concrete utopia”; not an ideology, nor a utopia that is outside our social time or space, but one in the here and now. Importantly for those who operate upon and in space, this utopia is not a ‘model’ and it does not have morphological or formal implications. In conceiving the production of space, Lefebvre did not intend that his analytic work in the conceptual triad be appropriated as propositional tool for action. This would naturally collapse the approach into a new form of abstraction or representation of space (conceived space). Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ is instead an understanding of, and a call for, a revolution in our economic, cultural and everyday life and essential to this are forms of participation and self-management, as opposed to projections imposed by technocrats, planners or architects.

Clearly the use of this spatial ‘turn of phrase’ is not without confusions, multiple meanings and problematic re-appropriations. When used by political and social theorists, it is rarely deployed to express the experience of space, nor the tensions and struggles created in the actual production of space. What’s more, for those interested in how space actually ‘happens’ (designers and practitioners, for example), the gap between a new understanding of the production of space as a powerful concept versus how we practice it down on the ground is still to be spelled out in all its complexity and difficulty.

It’s also worth asking how the ‘spatial’ is conceived by political theorists. Very early interpretations of the ‘spaces’ of politics (Plato’s conceptualizations of city and community, for example) were conceived as alternatives to the indeterminacy of the problematic ‘political’, privileging static and inert ideas of space. These were spaces of governance and control that fix and contain for order and stability – like the agora. In the twentieth century, conversely, forms of spatiality more appropriate to a political domain of democracy are employed. Arendt uses the term ‘public realm’ as the place of shared endeavour: “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it. The world, like every in-between, relates and separates man at the same time” (Arendt 1958, p. 52). This metaphor is a useful description because it acknowledges political space as the space that simultaneously gathers and separates us. This effectively explains the inherent diversity and antagonism of the public realm as a manifestation of freedom. In the creation of such a ‘realm of acting and speaking’, we create a political domain that is conceived as an ephemeral space which comes into being (as a potentiality) over and over, when people gather. It’s therefore a contingent space, and not able to be fixed. As a development of these conceptions of political space, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) conceive political spaces as spaces of antagonism between adversaries, and these are rather seen as multiple and overlaid, an array of ‘outsides’ or exteriorities as part of an overall ensemble – a domain of coexisting multiplicities. Jacques Rancière goes further in defining the political as a condition of rupture and change, which he calls ‘dissensus’ to mean a reordering of the senses, or a redistribution of the sensible (Rancière 2010). Art and politics are both forms of dissensus, meaning they are exceptions to the logic of normal rules governing social interaction, where genuine political action involves an emancipation from the conventional frames in which bodies are ordered.

What is important in the way recent political thinkers have used spatial language to explain political processes is that they all try to understand space as defining or encouraging change, and their conceptualizations understand space as constantly ‘opening up’ new possibilities. What makes space political is when an encounter becomes an interruption in the established order, the opening of a space for something ‘other’. The spatial practices of protest, occupation and activism provide clear examples of how this theoretical concept actually hits the ground with political effects. The dimensions of spatial protest and occupation are characterized by the transitory rather than the static; by the contingent rather than the complete; and yet they often have long-term legacies (legislation change, tenancy rights, new forms of governance). These are spatial practices in which the shape and form of the outcome occupies a broad field which is both immediate (performative) and strategic (seeking societal change). The understanding that for space to have political import, it must rupture the existing order, brings us to the next point.

Space versus time

As we have seen, the ‘spatial turn’ in the social and political sciences provided a reorientation in the way time and space have been conceptualized. Space had been historically conceptualized as the binary opposite of time, where the temporal is seen as active and mobile, and the spatial is conversely static and closed. In terms of its broader societal role this denies it those characteristics that are essential in order to ‘open’ it to the political. Many, like Doreen Massey (2005) address the ‘spatial turn’ full on by providing an argument which is recuperative of ‘space’ as a force with social and political agency:

It is my argument, not just that the spatial is political, but rather that thinking the spatial in a particular way can shake up the manner in which certain political questions are formulated, can contribute to political arguments already underway and most deeply, can be an essential element in the imaginative structure which enables in the first place and opening up to the sphere of the political.

(Massey 2005, p. 9)

Within the architectural and spatial domain, the vocabulary that has traditionally described space has been used to limit its agency, albeit for convenience. ‘Fixing’ space as a concept (likewise as a drawing or representation), reduces it conceptually in terms of constraining its ability to do more than act as a ‘container’ for actions. Conversely Massey deliberately uses terms which challenge these conventions. And she goes beyond simply stating that space hosts ‘multiplicity’ and ‘plurality’, that it is a product of coexistence and interrelations, that it is always under construction – never finished, never closed. She also powerfully identifies it as a realm which provides the opportunities for the political to be enacted and points out that this chimes with progressive new left politics in being a domain of constant shifting subjectivities. In doing so, she states that spatiality may from the beginning be constitutive of political subjectivities, not an outcome or setting for them. This is different to simply drawing relations between the spatial and the political, or understanding that space can be an instrument to create political effect and vice versa. As with spatial practices of protest and activism, space here is an essential ingredient in ‘enabling’ the political because it is by its very nature, a ‘multiplicity’.

Reconceptualizing space as a ‘multiplicity’ is not just a matter of using a different vocabulary. It sets the scene for re-conceiving spatial practices as an open field of always becoming interconnectedness. Rather than being portrayed as singular narratives, actions upon space join a “simultaneity of stories so far” (Massey 2005, p. 9). This is space conceived not as a product, an outcome or a fixed form, but rather as a myriad of processes already underway, into which we as actors (of many different types) can intervene. And these are not processes which have single linear trajectories but are rather an interconnected system of relationships and contingencies, with “loose ends and missing links” (ibid., p. 12). The stress upon positive multiplicity is important for an appreciation of the spatial, and challenges the “political implications of practising it [space] differently” (ibid., p. 13).

When considering how these reconceptualizations of space are helpful as context for ‘practising space differently’, the problems of representation are critical; these are the practices of analysing, describing and envisaging space so familiar and essential to the designer. Common vocabularies of architectural drawing and mapping convey the dangers of fixing space; looking at the world in ‘cross-section’ as a way to make abstract its essential complexity, and ‘holding the world still’. If space is an event, it cannot be represented (just like temporality) and it cannot be closed. Space is as challenging to represent as time because ‘practised’ space is a relational construction, it unfolds through interaction as multiple, overlaid paths. As simultaneously both spatial and temporal, these trajectories render space indeterminate, in a state of ‘becoming’. Experimentation in representation (mapping, representation, projection) has flourished in parallel to the ‘spatial turn’ as spatial practitioners have sought to acknowledge temporality and space together, often blurring the line between representation as projection and representation as intervention itself. These experiments, spanning from Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic Maps (1957), to Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts (1981) and beyond are counter-representations of space in which events, narratives, voices, occupation and invisible infrastructures are foregrounded, and from which new forms of practice emerge which privilege open-ended, ephemeral and transitory interventions over (or in parallel to) tectonic ones.

The irony is that ‘design’ itself has the tendency to ‘fix’ space, foreclosing open-endedness and eliminating chance. Practising space – ‘spacing’ – means negotiating countless intersecting paths where the focus is on a ‘practised relationality’, not conceiving abstractions which foreclose outcomes. Although the reconceptualization of space as potentially political seems (for designers, planners, practitioners) to imply that the operation of space can (like its form) be conceived and plann...