Camillo Boano

The Frontlines of Contested Urbanism Mega-projects and Mega-resistances in Dharavil

Currently, there appears to be an unhealthy disjunction between grand expectations and acknowledged reality in the face of urban transformations underway throughout the world. Drawing on the “right to the city” discourses, adopting a Lefebvrian approach to the production of space, and a critical regionalist approach to housing and the built environment, the article explores the conceptual analytical neologism of contested urbanism, where the struggle for bottom-up, inclusive development processes push against political hand market pressures towards becoming a world-class city. Dharavi, at the heart of Mumbai, India, is at the frontline of oppositional practices confronting neoliberal, futuristic Dubai-style mega-projects focused on capital accumulation, elite consumption, slum clearance, and deregulated real-estate speculation. Building upon a three-week academic studio exercise in situ, the confrontational power dynamics that shape peoples access to housing and redevelopment are depicted here as exemplar of a wider struggle over social justice, where Dharavi emerges as an eminent yet paradoxical example of a universal expression of contested spatial form in the Global South.

Processes for Just Products: The Capability Space of Participatory Design

This chapter explores the relationship between the process and product of participatory design. It argues that there is an unhelpful dichotomy that pushes the thinking and practice of participatory design through two separate schools of thought: planning versus design. This chapter suggests that advancements in overcoming such challenge can be reached by perceiving design through the lens of the capability approach. The concept of ‘capability space’ is proposed to explore the process and product components of freedom associated to participatory design. The chapter then elaborates on a series of normative values based on concepts from radical democracy and social production of space literature that aims at supporting the application of the concept of capability space. Design is embedded in the processes of deepening democratic practices by revealing power relations and navigating through dissensus.

‘Violent spaces’: production and reproduction of security and vulnerabilities

Introduction This article is concerned with the spatial dimension of humanitarian interventions. It elaborates on the links between space, protection and the spatialities that emerge after a war or a disaster. It will investigate different forms of spatial intervention in violent, post-conflict and disaster settings, positioning the essential integrity of architecture as a responsive, dependent and locally grounded process, thereby evolving past the simplified vision of building and architecture as the provision of commodified objects. Acknowledging the differences of such fields of study without aiming to be comprehensive, it will offer a brief review of the spatial significance of humanitarian actions. Drawing on Foucault, Agamben and Lefebvre this article challenges the epistemological, ontological and transformative agency of architecture in the design of effective protection measures in the context of a possible humanitarian architectural discipline.

Fences and Profanations: Questioning the Sacredness of Urban Design

Adopting an impure and contingent conception of urban design as a biopolitical apparatus, along the theme of urban informal squatter-occupied spatialities, this paper searches for an alternative narrative of urban design. It presents a theoretical and analytical framework developed around Michel Foucaults and Giorgio Agambens spatial ontology and political aesthetics as an aggregate source toward recalibrating the approach to urban design research, pedagogy and practice, integrating the debate around the dispositif and its profanation. Critically engaging with the complexity and contradictions of the current neoliberal urban design practice—articulated as a complex urban apparatus instrumental to regimes of security and control—the paper explores the conceptual tool of profanation as a potential antidote to the sacred production of the neoliberal city. The act of profaning the urban realm, of ‘returning it to the free use of men’, is approached through the lens of a design research initiative in a squatter-occupied space in Rome, Italy. The narrative that emerges from this theoretically inspired action research points to an alternative practice that can be read as a site of resistance in reclaiming the intellectual productivity of urban design theory and research.

The de-politicisation of housing policies: the case of Borei Keila land-sharing in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

This paper examines the design and evolution of a land-sharing process established for the on-site re-housing of an urban poor group in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), in the locality Borei Keila. The study is based on eight months of ethnographical and action research fieldwork. Some regard this land-sharing process as a success, but we find widespread criticism of it for excluding many original residents of the neighbourhood from the land-sharing agreement, leading either to their eviction or to difficult living conditions on site. We argue that these exclusionary results come from the deliberate misrepresentation of the urban poor group as a homogeneous block, and from the use of the housing provision as a pacifying tool against dissent. The case of Borei Keila highlights the risks of de-politicised and consensus-driven housing policies. It also provides the basis for a conclusive reflection on the recently approved National Housing Policy of the Kingdom of Cambodia.

Gentrification in (re)construction: Talca´s neighbourhoods post 2010 earthquake

Purpose This paper aims to explore the complex relationship between post-earthquake reconstruction processes and gentrification in neighborhoods of intermediate cities, calling on the critical role of recovery strategies in altering neighborhoods physical and social urban structure identities. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses a case study; the reconstruction process of the neighborhoods post 2010 earthquake in Talca, Chile and analyses in a six year timeline its socio-spatial changes. The latter based on mixed methods; primary data from strategic interviews with key stakeholders, cadasters of land value and real estate housing projects and neighborhood polls, and secondary data from official documents such as plans and policies. Findings Findings suggest patterns of incipient gentrification are an outcome of the reconstruction strategies. Acknowledging the intricate interplay among urban neoliberal conditions, historical heritage and identities, and post disaster recovery, inadequate housing sub...

Inoperative design: ‘Not doing’ and the experience of the Community Architects Network

This paper presents a renewed critical reflection of the position and role of architecture in the current social turn of the practice. By thinking through a ‘resistant’ lens, taken from Giorgio Agamben’s spatial political aesthetics, this paper proposes that architectural design practice can reclaim its social agency. These reflections are grounded in the practice of community architecture as it has recently emerged out of the intensifying experience of informality and associated slum settlements in the rapidly growing cities of South-East Asia. Born out of the decade-long experience of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, the Community Architects Network (CAN) was founded in 2010 and now connects practitioners in 19 countries. Based on a five-year-long engagement between the authors and CAN, the paper reflects on the critical possibilities of CAN’s practice, discussing propositions, ambitions, challenges, and opportunities, and the political potential of architecture. Additionally, it presents its limitations, questioning to what extent such practices can be considered a kind of ‘negligence’, that is, a resistance against the status quo as a way of effectively strengthening new subjectivities and voices.

Bajo escasez ¿Media casa basta? Reflexiones sobre el Pritzker de Alejandro Aravena

This article proposes a political agenda for a disciplinary trespassing against capitalist rule drawing upon the reasons that worthed a Pritzker award and the curative job in Venice Biennale for Alejandro Aravena. In both cases, the institutions argued that Aravena embodies a social architect with an agenda oriented to aid people living on scarcity. Along the article are revealed the ideological nature of these nominations and it exposes the necessity for emancipating architecture from the subjugation to profitability, capital accumulation, and powers reproduction. The subjugation to capital has destroyed the creative nature of the discipline, triggering a crisis whose release may be tackled through more theory, collective organization, and exploring new modes of production. The article claims for leaving the comfort zone for embracing the radicalism as a possible path toward disciplinary liberation.

Dharavi: Where the Urban Design Episteme Is Falling Apart

Dharavi is the iconic symbol of a “slum” understood as an inevitable spatial product of global predatory capitalism. Contemporary Mumbai and specifically Dharavi serve as an extreme example of urban design episteme falling apart and putting in place new urban imaginations and practices of resettlements and displacement. Such multiple forms of different urbanisms and heterogeneous forms of urban lives and occupations may be challenged by: fighting non-critical engagement with (re)interrogation of design practice, design thinking and design education, adopting a more nuanced and critical, transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary vision of architectural and urban design, as well as dealing with precariousness, scarcity and informality as constituent materials of everyday urban planetary condition.

Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment

Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is a little treasure, completely and unapologetically devoted to architecture, that Łukasz Stanek discovered in a private archive in Saragossa. This discovery can now be offered to a wider Anglo-Saxon audience thanks to an elegant translation by Robert Bononno, who also translated The Urban Revolution in 2003. The book confirms Łukasz Stanek in the pantheon of architectural theorists and demonstrates the relevance of Lefebvre’s thinking on urban space for the more specialised field of architecture and its social process of material and immaterial production. Originally written in 1973, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment has now been made available thanks to the urban sociologist Mario Gaviria, one of Lefebvre’s former collaborators. Gaviria not only champions Lefebvre’s critical spatial oeuvre in a continuous digging into as yet untranslated works, but also seems to be pushing forwards the critical theory of architectural practice by reconsidering the work of one of the greatest thinkers of social space in the twentieth century. With this endeavour, Stanek’s new disciplinary perspective complements the early work that started with Henri Lefebvre on Space 1 and contributes to a renewed reflection of Lefebvre’s writings in Anglo-American architectural culture that popularised the notion of everyday life. Scholars such as Crawford, Borden and Rendell speculate and advocate an architecture more attentive to people’s everyday environments. This suggests a more complex attitude to the practice of architecture that allows for its rethinking as part of an assemblage of multifaceted and heterogeneous practices of spatial production, more recently calling for a wider reflection on its agency, suggested by many others such as Jeremy Till. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment fully conforms with the spirit of the time. It is infused with libertarian revolts, freedom of the body and strongly politicised debates, and it resembles the manifestolike literature of the 1970s. Its style resembles that of a philosophical pamphlet that represents Lefebvre’s shift of emphasis from urban thinking to a philosophy of dwelling, focusing on a clear political architecture: an architecture of jouissance, or as Gordillo recently stated ‘Just as the goal of the building of a city should be the production of urban life, the ideal of good architecture should be the opportunities it offers to a happier development of the body and its craving for pleasure and joy.’ Stanek notes that Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment should be read as an advance of the transdisciplinary understanding of architecture that was implicit in The Production of Space (1991). This stimulates the multiple reflections on the ‘manifold possibilities of architecture’ with a clearer idea about architecture as a ‘mode of imagination’ and not a disciplinary restriction, grounded in the definition of the notion of habitation. 544