Tatjana Schneider

Flexible housing: opportunities and limits

Flexibility in housing design has social, economic and environmental advantages and yet is currently often ignored. The first of two papers sets out the history of this issue.

“If I was king of India I would get all the horns out of cars.”: A qualitative study of sound in Delhi

In this article we present an experimental sonic space—the mobile noise abatement pod (mNAP)—constructed and used over a two†week period in Delhi, India, during December 2014. The interdisciplinary project, involving a composer, designer, carpenter, development scholar, filmmaker, graphic designer and sociologist, sought to investigate how noise, including honking (one of the most prevalent sounds in Indian cities), is perceived. The fieldwork reveals noise to be a complex contextual, spatial and personal experience that is as much about habit as it is about identity and class, intimately related to economic inequality and inherently connected to social justice. The article suggests that attempts to reduce levels of noise need to take into account its meaning and position—by whom and how narratives of noise reduction are constructed and reproduced.

Discard an Axiom

In Chapter 7, “Discard an Axiom”, Tatjana Schneider presents a manifestation of the issues and problems transdisciplinarity confronts and is confronted with within the context of architecture, with a particular focus on the interface between education and practice, theory and praxis. In her text, these issues and problems purposely appear as fragments to illustrate quite literally the multi–facetted nature of different ways of doing: teaching approaches, ideology and architectural thinking, the organisation and expectancies of the profession, and teaching and design methodologies. Personal opinions are intermingled with notes from a series of design studios or instructions given to students; interviews are fused with theories and teaching; “I” is mixed with the voices of others, each of which is expressed in a different style – the voices of students (underlined text), teaching and writing collaborators (italic text) and “experts” (capital letters) – to be used as a reference guide throughout the text. The format, as a result (and despite its artificial construct), is a direct reflection on both the possibilities of a transdisciplinary approach and on what the author would see as the transdisciplinarity impasse. The text argues that architecture has eliminated chance, innocence, the unknown, and the ability to see that wasting time could be a positive thing. Over the last few decades, architecture has been introspective. It has isolated itself inside its black box, has progressively internalised discourse, and has put its entire focus on the building and technology. Architecture willingly adhered to rules and regulations, to client demands, until it was controlled entirely from the outside. Moreover, at the same time, it became fragmented into separate fields of knowledge. Yet architecture concerns the world. It sits within it and is embedded within it and depends on this world’s knowledge. This chapter attempts to conceptualise processes that value “open–endedness” over “closedness”, non–plan over tight–fit functionalism, soft over hard, games of chance over games of skill, disjunction and friction over problem–solving. By such means, it tries to rethink and redefine architecture as a field of questions and uncertainties wherein these tactics become tools of change, of transformative action.

Urban Revolution Now. Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture

When scanning contributions to journals on architecture, planning or urban studies these days, references to Henri Lefebvre’s work seem to be omnipresent and this immense production of writing that employs Lefebvre in various ways is only surpassed by the staggering number of books —on, about and by Lefebvre—which have been published in recent years. They ‘translate’ his writing for architects or the humanities more broadly; interrogate the value of his work in relation to the field of urban studies and beyond; propose Lefebvre’s writings as frameworks for new cross-disciplinary collaborations in research; meticulously dissect some of the more complex concepts for either beginners or advanced audiences or a combination of both. There exist now suggestions on how to use or apply his meta-philosophical concepts to specific disciplines, directions on how to treat his work in the correct manner, or, indeed, advice on how to actualise, deand/or re-contextualise his writing for today’s context. Urban Revolution Now. Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture is one of those many books. It is, broadly speaking, concerned with the critical interrogation of the possibilities around actualising and mobilising Lefebvre’s writing: or, in other words, to bring his historical perspective into the present. The publication’s editors are: the Manchester-based Lecturer in Architecture Łukasz Stanek; the Professor of Sociology at the Department of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule; ETH) and founder member of INURA Christian Schmid; and the Professor of the Theory of Architecture at the ETH Zurich Ákos Morávanszky. It is based on contributions initially made to two conferences also organised by the editors—‘Rethinking theory, space, and production: Henri Lefebvre today’ at the Delft University of Technology in 2008 and ‘Urban Research and Architecture: Beyond Henri Lefebvre’ at the ETH Zurich in 2009. Urban Revolution Now continues the editors’ long engagement with the French intellectual: a fact the reader is reminded of frequently by abundant references to books and other contributions to Lefebvrean studies made by them. Stanek, Schmid and Morávanszky’s book presents sixteen ‘scenes from highly contradictory and differentiated contemporary urban development’, which are organised around four thematic parts that are based on concepts discussed by Lefebvre: ‘on complete urbanisation’, ‘contradictions of abstract space’, ‘everyday architectures’ and ‘urban society and its projects’. The general starting point within which these ‘scenes’—a term to which I will return later—are embedded, is Henri Lefebvre’s thesis on complete urbanisation, outlined in a book entitled La révolution urbaine written in his native tongue in 1970 and which was translated posthumously in 555

Modernist Semis and Terraces in England

considers the shifting opportunities for younger people in Japan through a differentiation of housing trajectories between ‘parental home dwellers’, ‘single people’ and ‘family formers’. The argument put forward about the fragmentation of life courses amongst younger generations as they ascent the housing ladder is a compelling one. The book concludes with an engaging chapter by David Thorns, which questions the strength of home ownership sentiments in New Zealand and Australia, where property ownership is a key aspect of identity. Overall, this international edited collection has many strengths and is likely to appeal to a wide audience of housing and social policy researchers interested in better understanding the role of housing tenure in wider societal change. Drawing on debates about housing and society from Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific, one of the publication’s key strengths is the breadth of countries included (which usefully goes beyond the Englishspeaking nations). Yet national contexts are also explored in depth in order to tease out the inter-connections between housing and welfare regimes. This book will particularly appeal to those interested in the shift from collective to family-based welfare in advanced economies, which has housing (as an asset) at its heart. Nonetheless, the book does have some minor weaknesses. Discussion of the UK context is limited only to England, which is disappointing as an exploration of policy divergence between the four UK nations would have added another interesting dimension to the comparative analysis developed in the book. More substantively, because much of the discussion was focused at the macro level (perhaps inevitable given the focus on systems and regimes), it lacked the empirical richness that might be gained through micro-research (especially qualitative) at the local scale. This is a shame, for this would have enabled the authors to further flesh-out their arguments by directly evidencing how these transformations in state-citizen relations have directly impacted on the lives of those being evoked as ‘responsible citizen-consumers’ capable of securing their own future welfare. Finally, I would also have welcomed a final concluding chapter that developed upon the key themes of the book and highlighted gaps in our knowledge and understanding of this important topic. Nonetheless, this is a timely, eclectic publication which speaks to a broad audience about a key public policy issue.