Tracing Rights on the Ground: Spatial Controversies around Urban (original) (raw)
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The Right to the City-Implications for Architecture
Does the right to the city mean anything? Why should such a distinction be made? In addressing these preliminary questions it is important to look at the facts of the urbanization of the planet and what that means to those who form that movement to the city. The current draft Charter on the Right to the City is still in its early stages, but has come from a history of urban struggle, particularly for marginalized groups. There are implications to such a Charter in our access to the spaces and services of the city. There are also implications for way we plan city policy and design city infrastructure. If and when such a Charter reaches a broad level of acceptance there will be implications for the practices of architecture and engineering and, one might expect, the laws that govern the design professions. This paper will look first at the history leading to the Charter and then the implications of the Charter on the planning and design of cities.
Democracy on the Margin: Architectural Means of Appropriation in Governmental Alteration of Space
Architectural Theory Review, 2013
A recurrent dilemma of democracy-how to accommodate the marginal-is addressed here in relation to the possibility for citizens to contribute to changes in urban space. This study investigates the preparatory phase of the architectural renewal of a square, looking at both the general issue of equal rights to space and the more particular question of participation in planning processes. Although official procedures for the inclusion of opinions and rights are in place, marginalisation is seen to ensue from the planning authorities' response to the opinions of the community and individuals concerned. The study presents a theoretical basis for suggesting how an extended categorisation of the delegation of agency in planning policypossibly also embracing a modification of the architect's role-could influence the borderline between what is regarded as marginal and what is not.
Social Infrastructure as a Means to Achieve the Right to the City
2011
In "The Right to the City" Henri Lefebvre states that urban praxis requires "places of simultaneity and encounters" that make room for the fluid, shifting relationships of everyday life and social interaction (Lefebvfre 1996). Designers cannot create these relationships; they come from the people who actually inhabit the city. Designers can, however, "clear the way" and "give birth to the possible" by creating opportunities for praxis to occur. This paper discusses how contemporary design activism realizes Lefebvre's "right to the city" through techniques rooted in historical participatory design. It presents examples from the work of Aldo Van Eyck and Lucien Kroll and builds on these with the work of the contemporary activist designers Teddy Cruz and Urban Think Tank. These designers approach design as a facilitator of social interactions that can be shaped to meet the needs of diverse users and generate new types of social and economic relationships. Designed as systems rather than objects, their projects are open-ended and flexible while remaining functional and they make use of the informal systems already operating in their communities. These projects not only serve needs through spatial infrastructure but also create opportunities for urban praxis by operating as social infrastructure. Disciplines Architectural History and Criticism | Architecture Comments This paper license under a Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5
Political Theory and Urban Design
The Urban Design Companion, ed. Tribid Banerjee (Routledge) , 2011
Today the practice of urban design has forged a distinctive identity with applications at many different scales – ranging from the block or street scale to the scale of metropolitan and regional landscapes. Urban design interfaces many aspects of contemporary public policy – multiculturalism, healthy cities, environmental justice, economic development, climate change, energy conservations, protection of natural environments, sustainable development, community liveability, and the like. The field now comprises a core body of knowledge that enfolds a right history of ideas, paradigms, principles, tools, research and applications, enriched by electric influences from the humanities, and social and natural sciences. Companion to Urban Design includes more than fifty original contributions from internationally recognized authorities in the field. These contributions address the following questions: What are the important ideas that have shaped the field and the current practice of urban design? What are the major methods and processes that have influenced the practice of urban design at various scales? What are the current innovations relevant to the pedagogy of urban design? What are the lingering debates, conflicts ad contradictions in the theory and practice of urban design? How could urban design respond to the contemporary challenges of climate change, sustainability, active living initiatives, globalization, and the like? What are the significant disciplinary influences on the theory, research and practice of urban design in recent times? There has never before been a more authoritative and comprehensive companion that includes core, foundational and pioneering ideas and concepts of urban design. This book serves as an invaluable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students, future professionals, and practitioners interested in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, but also in urban studies, urban affairs, geography, and related fields.
Urban Design Governance, 2023
Urban Design Governance takes a deep dive into the governance of urban design around Europe. It examines interventions in the means and processes of designing the built environment as devised by public authorities and other stakeholders across the continent. In particular, the focus is on the use of soft powers and allied financial mechanisms to influence design quality in the public interest. In doing so, the book traces the scope, use and effectiveness of the range of informal (non-regulatory) urban design governance tools that governments, municipalities and others have at their disposal. Developed from the Urban Maestro project, a joint initiative of the United Nations Human Settlement programme (UN-Habitat), UCL and the Brussels Bouwmeester Maître Architecte (BMA), Urban Design Governance offers the first panorama of informal urban design governance tools from across Europe, and places the tools within a theoretical and analytical framework with the potential to be applied locally and internationally. Last, the book discusses and reveals the essential pre-requisites for the effective governance of urban design. Governments everywhere are increasingly seeing these sorts of tools as part of a necessary investment in delivering the high-quality built environments that their residents, businesses and investors demand. This book shows how.
Urban Designs as Social-Natural Resolutions
Nature Based Solutions for Cities, 2023
This chapter presents an integrative notion of urban design as an array of small-scale practices that “trigger” (Merwood-Salisbury and McGrath 2013) regenerative social-natural processes towards achieving a just transition from extractive to regenerative economies (https:// cl imatejusti cealliance .org/ just-transition/ ). Our perspective is that equitable and sustainable urban designs are only achieved through the material resolution of the dynamics between socially produced spaces and natural processes, rather than exclusively as modern nature-based solutions (NBS). Good urban designs achieve not only the right to the city (Harvey 2008), but also the right to nature (Apostolopoulou and Cortes-Vazquez 2018). Since its mid-twentieth-century origins, however, urban design has had a troubling authoritarian, anti-social and anti-natural history, tied to the misuse of bureaucratic power based on Western ideas of modernization (Berman 1981; McGrath 2020) and the misuse of natural metaphors to describe urban social processes (Light 2009). Based on this troubling history, we argue against uncritically adopting modern NBS to the already overly technocratic disciplines of centralized urban design planning, and advocate for the cooperative formulations of continually evolving social-natural resolutions (SNR) negotiated through diffuse but nested consensual management and governance practices. Social-natural resolutionary processes can continually advance both new frontiers in ecological science as well as advancements in design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020). The growth of low- to medium-density urbanization across the globe is a pressing issue today with urban land consumption outpacing population growth (McGrath et al. 2017). We offer here indigenously based designs through the practice of “spatial ethnography” (Sen and Silverman 2013) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as an example of designing for the new complex, connected, diffuse and diverse global urban realm (McHale et al. 2015).
The right to the city. The city as common good. Between social politics and urban planning
This Cahier de la Faculté d’Architecture LaCambre-Horta aims to contribute to the scientific debate on the right to the city, exploring the variety of objects, processes, structures, and relations – both at the conceptual, abstract and theoretical level as well as at the practical, experiential, and material one – that this idea has inspired. The publication offers multiple analysis of the relations between this concept and its application in the urban planning domain, providing a number of examples on how the concept of the right to the city can give practical guidance on urban development. The focus is thus on policies, programmes and projects that aim to intervene in the diverse processes of urbanization and different forms of urban structures and urbanity present in the northern and southern countries, addressing issues of equity, rights, democracy, differences (socio-economic, cultural, etc.) and ecology. The publication aims to explore the socio-spatial relations embedded in alternative approaches – at policy, planning and design level – and emergent practices of urban regeneration, upgrading, development, and management activated by grassroots movements, government agencies or different actors/institutions. This is the reason why we decided to explore the idea of the right to the city within the dialectical confrontation of “social politics” and “urban planning”. The rationale of this Cahier rests on two main principles. First of all, cities are built on the basis of both semiotic and the material contributions, which means that both imaginaries and practices are fundamental in shaping the urban space, its physical form and technology, its socio-economic structure, the social and spatial relations, the subjectivities, the relations with nature, and the daily life reproduction. Second, as the neo-liberal hegemonic culture has emphasized the urban horizon and the city-level in all its physical, social and cultural aspects, the city is the place where oppositional discourses and practices take place. Alternative imaginaries can challenge prevailing worldviews, show the contradictions of the neo-liberal hegemonic project and propose various forms of alternative sets of norms, beliefs, ideals; while alternative practices emerge at various scales of contestation, springing from deprived and often marginalised local groups and places, but also as national projects: there is a need to analyse the variety of imaginaries and practices that in spite of, and because of, the hegemony of the neoliberal culture, are resilient or are emerging (see Boniburini infra).
The Politics of the City: Critical Theory of Technology and Urban Design(s)
Technology in Society, 2023
This article aims at approaching urban design from a philosophical point of view, specifically through Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology. It attempts to present the politics of urban design, rejecting an urban-technological determinism that refers to a specific technical environment as the only one possible. If technology is an open process with social implications and consequences, the same holds for urban technologies and designs. This approach argues that contemporary cities are formed within a specific socio-technical context which is seemingly the most functional for the current social, political and economic world, but since environmental and urban crises rise, there seems to be a need for rethinking over the form of current cities. Thus, this article attempts to offer a theoretical contribution to the debate over alternative urban designs through Andrew Feenberg's insights. Drawing upon some of his most crucial notions, like the "technical code", the "interpretative flexibility" and the "operational autonomy" and presenting their role in a philosophy of the city, I attempt to highlight that current urban forms could be replaced by other functional alternatives. The choice over one or another urban design is political hence the need for the relation between the philosophy of the city and technical politics.