Camillo Boano, The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism: Critical Encounters Between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture, New York: Routledge, 2017. (original) (raw)

Camillo Boano revisits the theoretical connections between space and politics by exploring the relevance of Giorgio Agamben's writings for the theory and practice of architecture as a discipline tasked with producing the built urban environment–the predominant spatial form of contemporary political life. Architecture, Boano argues, has abandoned the critique of modern-day capitalism as architects, planners, and urban designers have taken a position of ideological complacency with the industrial-capitalist complex that drives megalomaniac construction enterprises, fuelling gentrification and segregation dynamics within the existing forms of planetary urbanism. Boano thus envisages the book as a theoretical call for action that will " thematize and tackle questions relating to our ways of doing architecture individually and collectively, producing a repertoire of concepts that in the future could become eminently architectural " (p.167). In other words, this is not so much an inquisitive work on architecture, but rather a critical text that discusses the potential of developing a new language for architecture. In order to start thinking in such a language, Boano enlists Agamben, one of the most influential, albeit contested, political thinkers of our time. Agamben has inspired countless debates on the politics of space, mainly through his conceptualization of the camp as the main site of modernity (Minca 2015). Boano's objective is not to readdress already known debates about Agamben's work, but rather to utilize the latter's political writings in order to rethink the ideological goals of architecture and in a sense " make " space for new ways to articulate architectural concepts. Agamben's main potency, explains Boano, lies in the fact that he does not offer solutions from a higher, distant reality, but rather proposes answers that are radically immanent, inherited from within the very discursive mechanism we seek to deconstruct. By doing so Agamben enables a " line of flight away from this current age of theoretical poverty " (p.157). The book is divided into three parts. In the first Boano traces the multiple ways in which Agamben's writing resonates with the political and theoretical encounters between architecture and urban practices. The second drafts a " periodic cartography " of Agamben's oeuvre to familiarize readers with the latter's vocabulary and present the elements and threads at the centre of Agamben's philosophy. The third unpacks key Agambenian concepts such as " in-distinction " , " indifference " ,