Spatializing Justice E-Book

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 129

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Spatializing Justice calls for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Architects should take a position against inequality and practice accordingly. With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture—Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions. These building blocks call for expanded modes of practice, through which architects can imagine new spatial procedures, political and economic strategies, and modalities of sociability. Challenging existing exclusionary policies can advance a more experimental architecture, one not bound by formal parameters. Architects must think of themselves as designers not only of things but of civic processes, complicate the ideas of ownership and property, and imagine new sites of research, pedagogy, and intervention. As one of the texts advises, "the questions must be different questions if we want different answers." Cruz and Forman are principals in ESTUDIO TEDDY CRUZ + FONNA FORMAN, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. The work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues across the world.

Leseprobe

SPATIALIZING

JUSTICE



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SPATIALIZING

JUSTICE

BUILDING

BLOCKS

Teddy Cruz and

Fonna Forman

Hatje Cantz Verlag

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts



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Return the Body to Democracy 7

For Michael Sorkin

Building Blocks: An Introduction 13

Building Blocks18

01Confront Inequality

02 Construct the Political

03 Recuperate Institutional Memory

04 Decolonize Knowledge

05 Radicalize the Local

06 Visualize Urban Conflict

07 Transgress Borders

08 Reimagine Jurisdiction

09 Complicate Autonomy

10 Temporalize Infrastructure

11Translate the Informal

12 Perform Citizenship

13 Socialize Density

14 Rethink Ownership

15 Resist Privatization

16 Demand Generative Zoning

17 Mobilize Neighborhoods as Political Units

18 Validate Everyday Work

19 Intervene in the Developer’s Proforma

20 Co-Develop with Communities

21Transform Housing Beyond “Units”

22 Transcend Hospitality

23 Democratize Access

24 Activate Public Space

25 Curate New Urban Pedagogies

26 Civicize Platforms

27 Design Mediation

28 Talk to the EnemyAdversary

29 Problematize “Sustainability”

30 Retool Ourselves

Notes 143

Colophon 144

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During the worst pandemic in a century, American society is divided between those who wear masks and those who don’t, between those eager to be vaccinated and those who refuse. The dissolution of social reciprocity, the collision between collective commitment and rugged individualism, between public and private, remain the single greatest obstacle to healing our society and rebuilding more equitable and inclu-sive cities as we slowly emerge from this pandemic. And climate change is coming. COVID-19 was the canary in the coalmine, like the universe testing us to get our priorities straight.

We lost our friend Michael Sorkin in the earliest days of the pandemic. We hear every day about viral mutations, and we wonder: can the virus–this virus that took Michael–mutate into an unexpected antidote to selfishness? Can this moment expose the collective costs of austerity, of eroding the social safety net, of neglecting public challenges like racism, climate disruption, deepening inequality, and surging nationalism everywhere?

In 1997 Michael was invited to deliver the Raoul Wallenberg lecture at the University of Michigan. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat and architect who saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the later stages of World War II. Honoring this humanitarian archi-tect and trafficker of people in an undemocratic state, Michael called his talk Traffic in Democracy.1A powerful reflection on the afflictions of urban democracy, the piece transcends decades, Michael’s voice lam-pooning the idiocy and injustices of rapidly ascending late 20th century neoliberal life in America–and yet it is astonishingly germane to this moment.

Michael’s narrative centered on the idea of propinquity, a concept that he and Joan Copjec explored further in their 1999 collection, Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity.2For Michael “being together physically,” bodies in space, was essential to the practice of deliberative democracy–and it was radically opposed to the American version of democracy, born on the frontier, understood as the right to be left alone. Michael valued an urbanity of propinquity–equitable linkages, connec-tions, flows and exchanges, where freedom is a collective and civic concept–active, positive, participatory. At bottom, propinquity summa-rized Michael’s determination to coexist with others in urban space. We cannot possibly imagine freedom, he wrote, outside of a structure of interaction with others. “City air makes people free.”

Return the Body to DemocracyFor Michael Sorkin

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building blocks

Propinquity was an illuminating concept to us back then, and we won-dered how we had ever lived without it. And now, with Michael gone, we feel we have never in our lifetimes needed this concept more. Democracy demands cities designed for propinquity. Michael loved the Athenian agora, a funky urban space that “supported both efficient passage and organized encounters while simultaneously offering innumerable routes and circulamsances for chance, unstructured, accidental and serendipi-tous encounters–so intrinsic to the working of democracy.” He might as well have been describing his beloved New York City–a perpetually unstable “juxtaposition engine,” as he called it.

But Michael worried that propinquity was under attack by a variety of forces, some remarkably relevant to our moment. One was the systematic fragmentation of the public, a function of both fashionable communitarian erosion from within as well as privatization from without. He worried that identitarian entrenchment fragmented the public into multiple publics vying for recognition, that it undermined collective resistance to the forcesof privatization encroaching into our public spaces. Communitarianism also unwittingly fueled strategies to market architecture as a bridge to fixed identities–and that typically ends up dispossessing and gentrifying urban neighborhoods.

He never imagined the virtual world we now inhabit; but even in its nascence Michael saw the internet as a menacing threat to democracy. While proponents were heralding the possibilities of instantaneous and free global communication, and no doubt there were emancipatory examples around the world, Michael worried about reinventing proximity through virtual encounter, and saw little value, for example, in virtual town halls, which he described as a passive “spectacle of someone else being heard.”

For Michael, democracy demands participation reliably “in the open.” In Traffic in Democracy, he asked: “What happens when neither wealth nor information nor happiness is exchanged face to face, when commu-nication increasingly takes place by dissolving the space of action?”

Michael’s was an urbanity of the body. “If the body ever ceases to be the privileged means of participation in and enjoyment of urban life,” he wrote, “urban life is at an end.” For him the answer to a bodiless body politic, to anti-public, anti-collective, consumerized, gated and themed idiocy was always to return the body to democracy. This is the driving theme of his Wallenberg lecture. And we have no doubt this would be his response today. Return the body to democracy. And for Michael, the neighborhood is always the urban increment. A space of face-to-face delib-eration among bodies in real time, neighborhoods are the logical scale for local democracy and environmental accountability. Neighborhoods har-monize the speed of the market and slowness of the civic, the private and the public. And they challenge the frontier mentality of growth understoodas an unlimited horizon to manipulate value at the edges. Michael’s radicalization of urban ecology was like Jane Jacobs on green steroids–but stained with a little bit of red–reminding us that greening the city without social priorities is just decoration and a feel-good response to environmental crisis.

What a moment he left us in. He might tell us now that the virus whichtook him might be the strange harbinger of something better, exposing the stupidity of selfishness during a collective crisis, the catastrophe of freedom-thinking, of isolationism, of disinvestment from public goods, and the eroding of public commitment.

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Return the Body to Democracy

Maybe this moment can instigate a paradigm shift in our public priorities once we bodily reunite? Can we envision the end of capitalist greed? The reemergence of a progressive welfare state? A commitment to more equitable and sustainable cities? The reorganization of institutions to confront racial injustice?

Our entrance into the third decade of the 21stcentury has been a wake-up call of our radical interdependence, our need for truth, trans-parency, social trust, and planetary coordination. Perhaps from all this, a renewed public consciousness might be born, reminding us that the survival of the individual depends on the health of the collective.

And yet, Michael worried that architects were dropping the ball. He believed they needed to engage this reconstruction of common ground. He closed Traffic in Democracywith bucket of cold water. If you like what I am saying here, why in practice are you all so damned com-plicit? Why have you embraced a politics of disengagement, abandoning the field to the avatars of bigness and smallness who have in common the production of sameness? We’ve become phobic, he said, to thinking of cities as physical as well as social constructions. And we suffer from a tremendous poverty of both vision and will. And the dominant models are unsatisfactory, consisting of “go-with-the-flow neo-suburbanism, fingers-crossed laissez-faire, tepid riffs on the garden city, retreaded modernism, and Disneyland.”

He insisted we scrutinize our clichés and platitudes as urbanists and architects, our banal ways of practicing. And he inspired an entire gener-ation, us included, to reflect critically on our own practices. WHYdo we do WHATwe do? For WHOM? WHERE? WHEN? and HOW? He thought, taught, wrote, and practiced by example.

Michael’s urban fantasies over decades, made of strange organic architectural shapes, unfolding seamlessly within social and ecological systems, threading public space, mobility and housing as integrated social scaffolds were both anarchic and unyieldingly civic. They manifest-ed a commitment to progressive governance and the agency of bottom-up self-organization and civic participation. Michael’s writings, sketches, and the echo of his words will always remind us of our radical interdependence.

Michael believed architects can be political agents, taking a position against what is morally and ethically wrong. His memory is heavy with the traces he left us. So let’s carry forward his infectious optimism for a bet-ter world, his childish energy and wicked humor lifting up the potential of everything from the rubble of conflict, injustice, alienation and pandemic.

Michael will remain the social and political consciousness of the architectural field. Our work dwells within the spirit of this legacy, and we dedicate this book to him.

Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman

San Diego/Tijuana, 2022

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We live just a few miles from the child detention centers that will forever stain this period of American history. The San Diego-Tijuana border zone is a geography of vivid conflicts and a microcosm of planetary crises: political violence, dramatic inequality and labor exploitation, fragmented social ecologies, the disproportionate impacts of climate disruption, unprecedented human displacement and migration across geopolitical borders. This zone also localizes the hegemony of neoliberal urbanization across the world, and the devastation it wreaks on collective economic, social and natural resources. The proximities of wealth and extreme pov-erty in this uneven region are staggering.

Remaining neutral in the face of these injustices makes one com-plicit. Working here over the last decades, we have questioned the role of architects and urban designers to confront the crises of our time. Engaging this unique territory of urgent challenges as a global laboratory has meant rethinking our approach to research and design, and reposi-tioning ourselves.

Our research-based practice, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, is an unconventional partnership between a political theorist and an architect. Merging research, practice and pedagogy, our office is based inside a public research university, the University of California, San Diego. Against the dystopic backdrop of the border region―and risking professional suicide as architects―we came to understand that spatial-izing justice demands not only a focus on buildings, but a fundamental reorganization of social and economic relations. We concluded at some point that exposing the drivers of inequality and challenging exclusionary urban policies that undermine spatial justice is a generative ground for a more experimental architecture. We believe that a new political economy of urbanization, and a new design intelligence, can emerge from within peripheral zones of regional contestation like ours (and that transforma-tional creativity is less likely to arise from within sites of stability and economic power). We believe that a new generation of architects and urban designers can anticipate new ways of thinking and doing, demand a new collective imagination with spatial implications, and steward a reorganization of public priorities and investment.

Anticipating new ways of thinking and doing means confronting the clichés of our creative fields and rethinking who we serve, expanding our range to contact domains that have remained peripheral to design, and cultivating a new kind of collective advocacy that transforms architecture

Building Blocks: An Introduction

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building blocks

into a social medium capable of challenging urban norms and spatializing public commitments.

We have learned a great deal about spatializing justice studying Latin America lineages of participatory urbanization over the last decades. In our lab we research municipalities that have “co-produced” the city from the bottom-up, from Porto Alegre and Curitiba, Brazil to Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia. We have been documenting these cases in close collaboration and dialogue with the key political and civic actors who led them. These cities have taught us that urban transformation must begin with social transformation―and that design has an essential role to play. We believe that architects and urban designers can be facili-tators of a new civic conversation, interlocutors of institutional memory, orchestrators of renewed public priorities, curators of inclusive civic pro-gramming, and designers of fresh formal and aesthetic categories that problematize dominant neoliberal agendas in the city that manipulate and monetize relations between the social and the spatial. We can design cultural interventions that expose the lie of trickle-down economics, that uproot anti-democratic myths that sow cynicism about progressive governance, undermine public culture and lead the electorate astray. Architects and urban designers can help reinvigorate a basic social con-tract that anchors individual well-being in collective well-being.

Reinterpreting architecture as a social medium capable of changing hearts and minds, and reorienting urbanization, begins by critically engag-ing the conditions that have produced our urban crises. These conditions become the material for design. Mobilizing urban conflict as a catalyst for design means exposing the controversies and contradictions inscribed in a particular socio-spatial condition, the exclusionary policies and the hidden histories of oppression. These critical investigations motivate a sense of urgency, and help to orient thinking and practical design methods. In our case, these critical investigations typically confirm our intuition that the first site of intervention is not a physical site, but a strategic detour from architecture into sedimented institutional proto-cols, harmful social norms, discriminatory financialization practices, the war between public and private interests, or the gap between top-down resources and bottom-up urban creativity. Traveling at the edges of the architecture field demands epistemic humility and openness to new worlds of knowledge and practice. Our aspiration is to partner with diverse urban actors to co-produce new knowledges and strategies, and to co-design civic and political processes that prioritize social, racial and environmental justice, urban pedagogies that render the complexity of contested urban dynamics more accessible to diverse publics, and new economic collaborations among conventionally divided sectors to share the responsibility of public works.

In other words, we seek to design and fertilize a new political ground,new civic languages, from which new infrastructures for inclusion can emerge. In our practice, the design of physical projects is always linked with the design of processes, protocols and programs that aim to civicize and democratize the spaces, knowledges and resources of the city.

This current period, marked by global pandemic, social rupture, insti-tutional polarization and paralysis, the corrosion of democratic commit-ments, and innumerable crises across all imaginable registers, epistemic, social, economic, environmental and political, has culminated in what we perceive as acrisis of the public: a failure to tackle collectively the most urgent issues impacting our shared destiny. Given the planetary

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challengeswe face in these early years of the twenty-first century, remaining socially relevant as architects and urban designers requires transforming our own design practices as critical sites of intervention, retooling ourselves, refreshing our approaches through new criteria, new clients, new briefs, new sites, new strategies of advocacy, and a new imperative