Spatial Agency

Contested Fronts is an exploration of architecture's role for commoning practices in ethnically and socially contested spaces. It focuses on the agencies of the ad-hoc technologies of architecture that can contribute to conflict transformation by advocating for reconciliation processes to go hand in hand with the urban reconstruction processes.

Characterised by chaotic hyper-urbanisation, the city of Chennai has seen the gradual disappearance of its public realm. The lack of democratic public space enables strict top-down mechanisms that promote chosen narratives and censor creative expression allowing only art that is deemed “suitable”. Differences are ignored, signs of rebellion are concealed, and voices of dissent are shushed. Thus, art, artists, public space and public discourse are segregated from everyday realities and slotted into scenarios that discourage wide public consumption. Opportunities for free artistic and activist expression are limited, with the need for governmental and/or institutional support reigning supreme. While a robust collection of artists and activists do operate with the help of such backing, the marginalisation of these artistic endeavours relocates the intended wider discourse to isolated social circles.

The DAM(ned) Art exhibition is an excellent example of such marginalisation. Originally intended as a larger festival celebrating the multiple water bodies in Chennai, it was restricted in its scope and forced to take the form of an art exhibition with a smaller audience due to the lack of sufficient governmental support. The exhibition, in itself, was made possible only due to support received from non-governmental institutions and relied heavily on word-of-mouth publicity to transmit its ideas to a wider public.

While considering this scenario, this paper seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of such restricted artistic dialogue and explore the need for alternative forms of public art, particularly in globalised Indian metropolises like Chennai with vibrant, diverse populaces being increasingly excluded from public dialogue.

Keywords: art, public space, freedom of expression, activism, censorship, subversion

This article analyses some of the proposals produced in the late 1970´s by the American contemporary artist Dan Graham, in which he uses technical means to investigate the audience´s perception and behavior. The questions raised highlight reciprocity phenomena and identity constructions-factors that affect our experience and behavior in contemporary cities daily life. All of these issues derive from Graham´s investigations of the main information and communication technologies (media) produced at that time, and which continue to offer reflections on current relationship between technical means and the subject-that is, his/her condition as audience, observer, spectator or user. A prática artística como campo de investigação e crítica: do 'objeto contemplativo' à (auto)percepção do público Uma das questões centrais inauguradas pela produção da arte contemporânea, desde a década de 1960, foi a atenção cada vez maior dedicada às diversas dimensões (físicas e discursivas) que constituíam o "objeto" de arte (KWON, 2004). Uma mudança na prática artística que se concretizou a partir dos questionamentos sobre as convenções que até então regiam a produção e a exibição das artes plásticas. Denominada como Crítica Institucional, esta vertente de produção reuniu uma geração de artistas em torno da crítica ao estatuto do objeto isolado e protegido dentro do sistema artístico, e também em torno do desafio de repensar novas formas de produção e de inserção social para a arte. Neste cenário, encontramos a produção do artista norte-americano Dan Graham, cuja contribuição para este processo de rompimento e abertura das práticas artísticas remete à atenção para a percepção e o comportamento do "público", dentro e fora dos limites do "cubo branco" (O´DOHERTY, 2007). Como o artista demonstra através de suas propostas artísticas e de seus escritos, a tarefa da crítica aos espaços, aos discursos e às práticas institucionais da arte deveria enfocar também a influência que todas estas instancias do sistema artístico exerce sobre a experiência individual e coletiva de seus observadores-ou seja, o público. E, indo além em sua própria crítica, Graham percebeu como os mesmos fatores que levavam os objetos, os espaços e os discursos da arte a instigarem certos tipos de comportamentos sociais, eram possíveis de serem investigados também em relação a outros objetos e espaços aparentemente banais presentes no cotidiano das cidades contemporâneas. Estes aspectos tornam-se mais claros se, em um primeiro momento, recorrermos aos comentários de Dan Graham sobre o conjunto de trabalhos de Dan Flavin utilizando tubos de iluminação fluorescentes. Remetendo à crítica sobre o vínculo entre os "objetos tridimensionais" do Minimalismo e os espaços expositivos, as análises escritas por Graham sobre a produção de "luminárias" de Flavin-presentes em "Art in relation to Architecture. Architecture in relation to Art" (1979), "My Works for Magazine Pages" (1981) e "Art as Design/Design as Art" (1986)-descrevem a curiosa descoberta por parte daquele que foi considerado um dos principais nomes da arte minimalista sobre a função exercida pela arquitetura do "cubo branco" em relação à apresentação e à recepção dos próprios trabalhos. De acordo com Graham: "Que o trabalho fosse equiparado ao conteúdo arquitetônico tendia a fazê-lo mais literal; tanto o invólucro arquitetônico como a obra contida nele estavam pensados para serem vistos como neutros e objetivamente factuais, quer dizer, como simples materiais. A galeria funcionava, literalmente, como parte da arte. A obra de um artista desse período, as instalações de luzes fluorescentes de Dan Flavin

Focusing on the Museu do Futebol and Google Campus – São Paulo, specifically their impacts on the space conventions of culture and labor, this article aims to investigate main questions behind the contemporary phenomena that erases previous boundaries between both fields. Manuel Castells´ concept of “informational economy” will be confronted with Michel Foucault´s theoretical perspective of power devices, social agency and the fabrication of the neoliberal subject to demonstrate how key terms such as participation, collaboration and interactivity – associated with informational technologies – are producing new spatialities that are functioning as sophisticated forms of social behavior and experience control.

In conflict, the major destruction of cities aims at and causes primarily the destruction of commons of the city. To start planning the reconstruction now, instead of post-conflict, would open up architecture and urbanism into becoming agents to transform conflict from an ethnic or religious one to the one where urban actors shall react to controversial matters related to the city, turning the conflicting narratives into processes of building the commons.
In order to act as a transforming tool, reconstruction processes in conflicted spaces should put forward strategies of emergencies and participatory planning. Hands-on design tools shall be employed
as support structures for grassroot civil initiatives and citizens for being part of decision-making processes towards a unified development of the cities. Such advocacy of citizens and city commons would bring legitimacy to the actions.

The spatial design of a home has an affinity to intimacy that might have been overlooked by many practicing architects. In this paper, the subject matter of housing will be discussed with a shifted focus from domestic buildings to the space of home and intimacy that scatters in a city. In recent years, some sociologists (Illouz, 2013 & 1997; Turkle, 2013; Jamieson, 2012) have underlined a social translation of a new spatial home by analysing an intimacy in a city that has been enabled by ICT technologies; business models i.e. Airbnb and Couchsurfing also indicated a new form of dwelling by demonstrating how share-economy can assist this spatial home and, in particular, assist the distribution of it so as to assist a city dweller to find and make home without possessing a house. And yet, neither of these examples of home are designed by architects who might actually know the best about the subject matter - this space of home and intimacy. What if the critical spatial design that an architect can produce isn’t the domestic buildings but the visualisation of this space? What is this critical spatial design of the home to cope with the shifting social needs already seen? Through Jeremy Till’s way of looking at buildings and beyond - the lens of Spatial Agency (2011) - the paper will further speculate these examples of home by architectural-writing this spatial design - this architectural-writing, as Jane Rendell describes in chapter of Essay Collections of Critical Architecture (2007), similarly to art-writing, “the very form of the writing itself is taken to be integral to the way in which a critic positions him/herself… The personal and autobiographical enter the debate, not in order to assert an ego criticism, but as part of an on-going political exploration of subjectivity.”

Sweden’s recent report on Urban Sustainable Development calls out a missing link between the urban design process and citizens. This paper investigates if engaging citizens as design agents by providing a platform for alternate participation can bridge this gap, through the transfer of spatial agency and new modes of critical cartography. To assess whether this is the case, the approaches are applied to Stockholm’s urban agriculture movement in a staged intervention. The aim of the intervention was to engage citizens in locating existing and potential places for growing food and in gathering information from these sites to inform design in urban agriculture. The design-based methodologies incorporated digital and bodily interfaces for this cartography to take place. The Urban CoMapper, a smartphone digital app, captured real-time perspectives through crowd-sourced mapping. In the bodily cartography, participant’s used their bodies to trace the site and reveal their sensorial perceptions. The data gathered from these approaches gave way to a mode of artistic research for exploring urban agriculture, along with inviting artists to be engaged in the dialogues. In sum, results showed that a combination of digital and bodily approaches was necessary for a critical cartography if we want to engage citizens holistically into the urban design process as spatial agents informing urban policy. Such methodologies formed a reflective interrogation and encouraged a new intimacy with nature, in this instance, one that can transform our urban conduct by questioning our eating habits: where we get our food from and how we eat it seasonally.

Currently, the biogas sector in Western Europe is faced by rapid technical and non-technical developments and innovations, and biogas markets are growing at a considerable pace. In contrast, the biogas market in Southern and Eastern Europe is rather small, although the potential is promising especially if organic wastes are used for anaerobic digestion. In order to support the biogas market

ABSTRACT: Currently, the biogas sector in Western Europe is faced by rapid technical and non-technical developments and innovations, and biogas markets are growing at a considerable pace. In contrast, the biogas market in Southern and Eastern Europe is ...

The Guide is about collective spatial practices that operate in contested spaces, contributing to urban peace building processes. They do so thanks to the commoning processes that challenge dominant divisive narratives, offer alternatives to segregating urban reconstruction approaches, and advocate for the transformation of ethnic conflicts into urban controversies. The Guide departs from the " Hands-on Famagusta " project, the instigator for the emergence of such collective spatial practices across the divided Cypriot territory, and opens up to other similar contexts. Architecture as urban practice, by virtue of the material and immaterial technologies devised by the " Hands-on Famagusta " project team, acquires agencies that support the transformation of divisive representations of contested territories into territories-of-common-concern. The Guide has a twin aim: firstly, to unfold the active agencies of the means of representation, modes of action, and pedagogies toward the emergence of common urban imaginaries in deeply contested societies, such as the Cypriot one. This is achieved thanks to seven stories about the active agency of the visible and invisible technologies of the " Hands-on Famagusta " project, written by Stratis, Akbil and Constantinou. The Guide's second role is to connect such methodological approach to an international debate and contribute to preventing architecture from becoming irrelevant to urban transformations in contested spaces. It is achieved thanks to four essays by Condorelli, Potte-Bonneville, Yaneva, Gaffikin and Sterrett as well as to the introductory essay by the editor.

Internet: www.wip-munich.de, www.big-east.eu 2 Slovenian Energy Restructuring Agency (Slovenia), 3 Ing. Gerhard Agrinz GmbH (Austria), 4 Centre for Renewable Energy Sources (Greece), 5 Ekodoma (Latvia), 6 Energoproekt jsc (Bulgaria), 7 Hrvoje Pozar Energy Institute (Croatia), 8 Finsterwalder Umwelttechnik GmbH & Co. KG (Germany), 9 German Biogas and Bioenergy Society (Germany), 10 N. Poushkarov Institute (Bulgaria), 11 SC Mangus Sol SRL (Romania), ABSTRACT: Currently, the biogas sector in Western Europe is faced by rapid technical and non-technical developments and innovations, and biogas markets are growing at a considerable pace. In contrast, the biogas market in Southern and Eastern Europe is rather small, although the potential is promising especially if organic wastes are used for anaerobic digestion. In order to support the biogas market in Southern and Eastern Europe the BiG>East project (Contract No. EIE/07/214) is supported by the European Commission under the Intelligen...

URBAN ACT. A handbook for alternative practices

Editor: atelier d'architecture autogérée (aaa), PEPRAV

Contributors: Texts by Jochen Becker, Kathrin Böhm (public works), Axel Claes (PTTL), Margit Czenki, Siynem Ezgi Saritas, Jesko Fezer, Mathias Heyden, Brian Holmes, Antonio Negri, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anne Querrien, Christoph Schäfer (Park Fiction)

2007

This document is the outcome of a series of discussions and collaborations with a number of people, involved directly or indirectly in a project within a European network. It shows a collective desire to create connections between different practices and research on the city. URBAN ACT condenses the idea of a certain type of activism, of a way of acting and organising actions, which is probably a common thread for all the contributors.

The book is distributed by the editors and through a network of voluntary agents, at the price of 20 euros per copy under the principle: 'one book sold/one book free' for the distributing agent. Resulting funds cover a part of the printing costs. A free PDF of the book is available for downloading on www.peprav.net and www.urbantactics.org

The idea of architecture as spatial agency is increasingly explored by architectural practices. I argue that this approach can benefit from an alternative mode of visual representation in order to reflect architecture’s contingent nature rather than the production of buildings. The research project Painting Architecture investigates how the act of painting can visually facilitate the process of spatial thinking. In this paper, I discuss the rationale and significance of the practice-led methodology through a critical reflection on the pilot study. By approaching painting as a process of confrontation, negotiation and collaboration with participants during dialogue sessions, the project explores what painting can do rather than what it is. This approach creates, however, a paradox for the analysis of the practice in which the reason for researching painting based on its medium-specificity is negated by analysing its effect. To resolve this problem, two trajectories are suggested that enable an interpretation of painting as a critical and engaged project. As such, a broader significance of painting is developed which, in turn, contributes to a new way of thinking about architecture.