For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing.
Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data.
This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.
Author(s): Nikolina Bobic, Farzaneh Haghighi
Series: Routledge International Handbooks
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 630
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Part I Introduction
Chapter 1 Spatialization of oppression: Contemporary politics of architecture and the urban
Part II Violence and war machines
Chapter 2 Introduction to violence and war machines
Chapter 3 The rise of zoöpolitics: On urbanism and warfare
Chapter 4 The 2015 Paris terrorist attack: A threat to urban life and territorial integrity
Chapter 5 Whose vision, which city?: Planning and unseeing in urban Asia
Chapter 6 Architecture as infrastructure: The spatial politics of extractivism
Chapter 7 Manus Prison: The brutality of offshore detention
Part III Security and borders
Chapter 8 Introduction to security and borders
Chapter 9 Dialogic dilemmas: Citizen participation in built environment alterations in Malmö, Sweden
Chapter 10 Regenerating Shanghai through urban spatial design?: The limits to experimentalism and participation
Chapter 11 The city and the camp: Destabilizing a spatial-political dichotomy
Chapter 12 Architectures of motion at the US–Mexico border
Chapter 13 Belfast’s ‘peace walls’: How the politics and policy of 1969–1971 shaped the city’s contemporary ‘interface areas’
Part IV Race, identity and ideology
Chapter 14 Introduction to race, identity and ideology
Chapter 15 The space of labor: Racialization and ethnicization of Port Kembla, Australia
Chapter 16 The audit: Perils and possibilities for contesting oppression in the heritage landscape
Chapter 17 The persistent design-politics of race: Power and ideology in American public housing redevelopment
Chapter 18 The socialist past is a foreign country: Mass housing and uses of heritage in contemporary Eastern Europe
Chapter 19 Collectivity and privacy in housing: Path dependencies and limited choices
Part V Spectacle and the screen
Chapter 20 Introduction to spectacle and the screen
Chapter 21 A ‘crisis’ of indeterminacy in the architectural photograph: Architectural spectacle and everyday life in the photography of Lacaton & Vassal’s Coutras House
Chapter 22 Mediated spectacles: Urban representation and far-right propaganda in crisis Athens
Chapter 23 Street protest and its representations: Urban dissidence in Iran
Chapter 24 Western fantasy and tropical nightmare: Spectacular architecture and urban warfare in Rio
Chapter 25 The political construction of Medellín’s global image: Strategies of replacement, erasure and disconnection via urban and architectural interventions
Part VI Mapping landscapes and big data
Chapter 26 Introduction to mapping landscapes and big data
Chapter 27 The sociocultural construction of urban wasteland: Mapping of the Antwerp Southside
Chapter 28 Brownfields as climate colonialism: Land reuse and development divides
Chapter 29 The bomb, the circle and the drawing undone
Chapter 30 Infrastructures of urban simulation: Digital twins, virtual humans and synthetic populations
Chapter 31 Posthuman urbanism: Datafication, algorithmic governance and Covid-19
Part VII Conclusion
Chapter 32 Intermission: Critical mappings of spatial politics and aesthetics
Bibliography
Index
