Barcelona's Interstices - essay #4

#4

essay #4 challenges at every scale: from economics to politics

challenges at every scale: from economics to politics

essay #4

If our aim, as architects, is to re-imagine our practice in the urban environment in a context of socio-politico-economical crisis, we firstly need to understand which mechanisms shape our space, society and everydayness producing the phenomenological output that we have been able to observe. A rather structuralist leap will allow us to unravel the debates over neoliberal regulatory frameworks and their relationships with the urban environment, called into question for being the global hegemonic system during the last three decades. Through the analysis of their socially regressive outputs, highlighting gentrification as the key issue, we will come to juxtapose the emerging alternatives that have been flourishing in response. Conclusions will underline the need to re-politicise, re-discuss and re-propose questions that have been erased from political debate. introduction Having observed and described the urban environment through the theories and methodologies exposed in essay #2, surely we cannot look at the city the way we were looking at it before. Isotropic, organicist, uniforming visions of the urban environment have become deeply unacceptable together with concepts such as unity, isolation and certainty. Furthermore, having approached the city through the lens of the urban interstice, we have come to witness the great phenomenological complexity of the same: as exposed by the qualitative material contained in this work, heterogeneity is the most emerging characteristic of these spaces.

However, limiting ourselves to this phenomenological, migrant, poetic description of space would be insufficient, our goal being a critical re-imagining

of design approaches in this very urban environment. If it is true that the act of description is a project itself, still we need to push our speculation one step forward in order to make our theory instrumental, to use it as a tool for giving shape to future proposals (Marcuse, 2010). We therefore cannot avoid excavating the structural mechanisms that come to shape this same space and that are implicitly contained in the previous descriptions. Leaving the space of Barcelona and moving to a more abstract and theoretical plan, unraveling and discussing intertwined global phenomena will be the topic of this chapter. understanding neoliberalism Times of intense debate due to long-lasting conditions of crisis see an increase in the use of certain keywords which contribute 89

to defining the battleground in which contestation is enacted. “Neoliberalism” is one among these and, in fact, it has already emerged in our discussion over the complexity of urban interstices contained in essay #3. A precise definition of the concept is therefore compulsory, as the expression’s meaning might be misconceived and hijacked through repetitive and intense use itself.

Originally referring to a set of doctrines regarding the appropriate framework for economic regulation, the term has been recently appropriated by politically and academically involved subjects to “describe the organizational, political and ideological reorganization of capitalism that has been imposed through the attempted institutionalization of such ‘free market’ doctrines” as Brenner and Theodore (2005, p. 102) very precisely advise. Again, Brenner et al. (2010a), whose work at Harvard is prominent on this topic, enumerate a few principles which clearly describe the logic which underlays this conception: “it prioritizes market-based, market-oriented, or market-disciplinary responses to regulatory problems; it strives to intensify commodification in all realms of social life; and it often mobilizes speculative financial instruments to open up new arenas for capitalist profit-making” (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010a, pp. 329-30). It is therefore important to understand how neoliberalism is, today, not only a technical definition exclusively laying in the field of economics, but a much wider conception which comes to regulate many aspects of the world in which we live in, since it entails a strong 90

ideological dimension focused on individual freedom (Jessop, 2002) which then results in economic and political regulations.

The detailed history of neoliberalism being not the central subject of this essay, we redirect the reader to Peck and Tickell’s (2002) precise periodisation of its evolution.

According to our goals, it should be sufficient to know that this strategy has been originally manufactured in Chicago but that it has gained its political momentum through reaganism and thatcherism, subsequently achieving a more technocratic dimension through the selfstyled “Washington consensus” in the 1990s and going global from there, becoming “the new religion” (Peck & Tickell, 2002, p. 381).

Smith underpins that the neoliberal project which has carried the twentieth century into the twenty-first is a substantial rediscovery of Eighteenth-century liberalism (ranging from John Locke to Adam Smith), which pivoted on two main assumptions: firstly, that the free and democratic pursue of self-interest led to the widest possible collective good; and secondly that the market knows best (2002, p. 429). These two axioms have become particularly resurgent in our “neoliberalized now” (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2013), quite in contrast with the Keynesian welfare state era where political institutions tried to regulate or compensate the excesses of the markets: state intervention has shifted from managerialism to entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989; Macleod, 2002). neoliberalism through cities Agreeing on the fact that neoliberalism is

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

“an essential descriptor of the contemporary urban condition” (Brenner & Theodore, 2005, p. 101), I would however stress the fact that it is a descriptor of the contemporary urban condition, one among many. We must not fall into strictly totalising views, fulfilling Amin and Thrift’s “doomsdaying academics” (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 178) profile, but instead keeping in mind the complex and heterogenous realm that we have been able to witness during this work’s experience on the field. Still, understanding and discussing both neoliberalism through the urban environment and the urban environment through neoliberalism seems to me one of the ways to politicise (and therefore rediscuss) some key issues that shape and even compromise our cities. It is therefore fundamental to enlighten a few points on the complex and mutual relationship between the two.

– Firstly, as it has been argued before, common interest and knowledge over “the urban” has seen an explosion in recent years. Nevertheless, this centrality is not only witnessed by the number of publications and debates continuously appearing in mainstream media, but it is scholarly grounded as well. From the geo-economical point of view, which is our lens of inquiry in this section, Sassen’s (1991; 1994) famous work on global cities remains fundamental: cities acquire great centrality within the postFordist economic system, as they become command centres of the network producing non-material goods. In addition to this, their physicality is, ironically, important as they host large infrastructures for the production essay #4

and management of such intangible goods.

If Sassen’s accounts remain “surprisingly statecentric” (Brenner, 1998, p. 11), Smith (2002) integrates her conception arguing that national states or industrial regions are no more the key economical containers, but instead hyper-growing cities like Mumbai, Bangkok or Mexico City “are increasingly the platforms of global production” (p.434, emphasis in original). Cities are the sites, both managing an producing, in which what he calls the “new urbanism” (N. Smith, 2002), the urbanisation of the current economic system, becomes very evident showing its organisational patterns.

– Secondly, cities are both a laboratory and also a mechanism of modification of the neoliberal project: they “have become increasingly central to the reproduction, mutation and continual reconstitution of neoliberalism itself” (Brenner & Theodore, 2002, p. 375). One key characteristic: “[it] is not a monolithic phenomenon” (Oosterlynck & González, 2013, p. 1076) and should not be conceived as such. In fact, scholars argue that the neoliberal project’s maybe strongest feature, the one guaranteeing its long-lasting survival despite cyclical and deeply problematic (and contested) crises, is the ability to adapt to different geoinstitutional contexts. In fact, it is interesting to note how this project has entertained a reciprocal relationship with pre-existing regulatory landscapes, absorbing inherited patterns in the fashion of a very malleable yet pervasive colonising strength. This is evident when looking at the very heterogeneous environments, scattered on a global scale, 91

Rotterdam, Marseille, Sydney or Genoa?

where neoliberalism has been absorbed, ranging from advanced liberal countries to post-socialist oligarchies or authoritarian formations. “Variegated” (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010b) or “mobile technology” (Ong, 2007), it certainly is a powerful because flexible project. Therefore, tracing its restlessly “moving map” (Harvey, 2005) is a difficult task but a necessary one, as the critical intellectual project of deciphering neoliberalism must continue to evolve simultaneously to the phenomenon itself (Peck et al., 2013).

This dual operation, which sketches the urban environment as both a test tube and an active part, explains why this lens is a privileged one for understanding the dynamics of the neoliberal project. cities through neoliberalism On the other hand, there are a few reasons to argue the equal usefulness of the opposite gaze, that is observing cities through neoliberalism.

– Firstly, and quite evidently, neoliberal policies have strengthened the role of market rules as a fundamental component if not the main driver of urban transformation. In fact, devolution increased cities’ dependence on own-source revenues, making them more dependent on those that create value: the private real-estate market, for which the built environment is nothing more than a gold mine (Weber, 2002). If this is commonsense, a slightly more refined hypothesis might be arguing that this necessity to rely on themselves has made cities to follow the essay #4

exact same growth paradigm across Western world countries. This is the competitivenessoriented approach, for which the primary goal is to attract capital embodied in service sector activities, especially research and technology, innovative culture and global tourism. Again, this might be common-sense, since it is the main argument found even in mainstream media, but not necessarily an evident one. However, it does become evident when uncovered: even a twelve-year-old can recognise the immense resemblances between, say, Genoa’s and Sidney’s waterfronts since the underlying dynamics that produce them are exactly the same.

Apropos, Harvey’s work on property-fuelled development of Baltimore’s Inner Harbour happening in the 1970s (Harvey, 2000) is prominent in highlighting a condition of uniformity which ranges from Barcelona and Marseille to Amsterdam, passing through North American cities down to Australian coasts. So, if neoliberalism is a constantly transforming entity as state above, it however clear that the same variety is definitely absent from the spatial outputs it produces.

– Secondly, if this has not been made clear so far, we should not conceive neoliberalism as an abstract, invisible, super partes agent. As neoliberalism can be understood as policy, ideology, or governmentality (Larner, 2000), it should be clear how strongly ideological features characterise this project: “its core propositions, of the free possessive individual engaging with others through market transactions, remain the touchstone” (Hall, Massey, & Rustin, 2013, p. 14). Conceiving neoliberalism not only as a prescription 93

for state retreat but as a set of changing technologies of power (Isin, 1998) in a Foucauldian fashion helps us understanding its more ample domain, reaching our quotidian reality. In fact, when Brenner and Theodore describe neoliberalism as the attempted “institutionalization of such free market doctrines” {Brenner:2005ia p.102, emphasis by author}, it would be insufficient to imagine such institutionalisation as limited to a politico-regulatory environment. To be specific, the word “institution” can also indicate an established custom or law accepted as a basic part of a culture.

In fact, the normalisation of such relational logics can, and does, happen on a much more daily level resulting in an active reregulation of our urban everyday in order to represent and reproduce the specific form of globalised, unrestrained capitalism that has been crystallising since the crisis of Fordism (Keil, 2002). “Economic common-sense” is now, precisely, common-sense and it is continuously reproduced: “Looking at the broader cultural picture, we detect similar tendencies: in consumer and celebrity cultures, the drive for instant gratification, the fantasies of success, the fetishisation of technology, the triumph of ‘life-style’ over substance, the endless refashioning of the ‘self’, the commercialisation of ‘identity’ and the utopias of self-sufficiency. These ‘soft’ forms of power are as effective in changing social attitudes as are ‘hard’ forms of power such as legislation to restrict strikes.” (Hall et al., 2013, p. 19) 94

My personal position is, however, slightly different. Not in the sense that I do not share this vision, but instead I propose to widen our understanding of these transformational logics: in this sense, I tend to reject the strictly binomial battle apparently happening between hegemonic and resisting forces, mainstream and alternative conceptions so evident in much critical urban scholarship.

In fact, I do believe that some behaviours are marked by the neoliberal agenda, but commodification or competitiveness are not the only logics shaping our relationships.

Nor, on the opposite, resistance and activism. Interpersonal affections, temporary sensations, past events, future hopes and even totally disinterested behaviours to name a few are still deeply influencing our actions and conceptions. However, as I have pointed out above, I must state that understanding the characters of (at least partially) hegemonic projects is fundamental to the politicisation ad re-discussion of their implicit contradictions.

Looking at cities through neoliberalism seems therefore to involve a certain intentionality.

This seems particularly important today, when deep crises have been and currently are so clearly exposing such contradictions.

In fact, the most rewarding aspect in terms of comprehension and subsequent critique seems to be the “Houdini-like ability” (Peck et al., 2013, p. 1091) of the neoliberal project to mutate and adapt to different conditions, aspect which we have already sketched above. It appears that long-lasting conditions of crisis are, in certain environments, taken as natural and actually hijacked as an opportunity (Oosterlynck & González,

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

2013), therefore stressing aspects such as flexibility and competitiveness once more, reinforcing neoliberal ideology. Needless to say, this has resulted in the widening of social injustice and exclusion as welfarestate provisions are continuously reduced. transforming cities, gentrifying cities As we have seen, cities are a key site for the realisation of the neoliberal project, in the process of which they are constantly designed, demolished and redesigned producing capital, consumable environments and reliable infrastructures for new production layouts. The prominence of this constant reorganisation of the urban becomes even more evident when, even if cities are still expanding and the “urbanisation of the world” (Véron, 2006) has not stopped, the front edge of urban design appears to lie in urban renewal: the relentless reworking of the existing urban fabric. If neoliberalism constantly transforms the built environment, it should not be forgotten that such buildings, infrastructures or even open spaces do contain lives which are deeply anchored to such material structures. We will analyse the contradictions of such neoliberal conception of the city through its threat over human lives, choosing gentrification as the evident tip of the iceberg synthetically representing its engendered injustices.

As a brief introduction to the subject, gentrification is a concept coined by British sociologist Ruth Glass in her famous essay entitled London: Aspects of change (1964). essay #4

She used the term “gentrification” to describe some new and distinct processes of urban change that were beginning to affect inner London, as middle-class individuals began to renovate old housing stock formerly inhabited by poor and working class dwellers. The emerging phenomenon of a new urban gentry was indeed new and distinct, especially if compared to deeply anti-urban approaches which characterised the 18th- and 19th-century rural gentry, at least in the United Kingdom. Gentrification has in fact been, and probably still is today, a key concept in challenging those theories that have been predicting total suburbanisation as inevitable, stressing the revived desirability of a certain “urban” lifestyle.

However, after fifty years of study evolution, gentrification has assumed multiple forms (Rérat, Søderstrøm, & Piguet, 2009) also including quite “suburban” ones. As the most recent publications witness, the front edge of the debate regards the geographical diversity of this changing process (Doucet, 2014): new spatial outputs are produced, as rural (Parsons, 1980), coastal (Griffith, 2000), provincial (Bridge, 2003; Dutton, 2003; 2005) and alpine (Perlik, 2011) gentrification have been located; new subjects are involved as gaytrification (Giraud, 2010), studentification (D. Smith, 2002), tourism (Gotham, 2005) and supergentrification (Butler & Lees, 2006) emerge; and new modes of governance characterise this phenomenon since gentrification can be municipally managed or maybe even a global strategy (N. Smith, 2002).

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Such a complex and arguably confusing diversity has obviously led to an intense debate over the actual effectiveness of the term itself in such different contexts. Already thirty years ago, Damaris Rose (1984) argued that gentrification was a chaotic concept that needed disaggregation. In a similar fashion although more recently, Bourdin (2008) states that the all-encompassing use of this word, mainly determined by a strongly political use made by anti-gentrification movements and websites, has made it more like a mask than a cognitive tool, stressing the academic inability of the term. Moreover, Boddy (2007) proceeds in arguing that “the concept has indeed been stretched beyond the point at which it has continued usefulness and distinction” (p.103), assuming more the shape of a banner or “a metaphor than a conceptual definition of processes of urban change” (ibid.).

Before continuing further into our argument, it might be useful to highlight my critical stance over the use of the term itself: following Clark (2005), I reject the positions discussed above, believing that gentrification should be “an elastic yet targeted definition” (p.258), capable of drawing under its umbrella the different processes which may yet emerge (Lees, Slater, & Wyly, 2008, p. 159) in order to be fully operationalised, meaning politicised. In fact, as Davidson and Lees (2005) have brilliantly argued, gentrification is the most politically-loaded word in urban geography, as opposes questions of structure and agency, production and consumption, capital and culture, and supply and demand (Hamnett, 1991). The above mentioned 96

ability of being politicised, following Slater’s (2006) call for the reintroduction of a critical perspective on this process, might be achieved by retaining Davidson and Lees’s (2005) four core elements constituting its roots: 1) the reinvestment of capital; 2) the social upgrading of locale by incoming high-income groups; 3) landscape change; 4) direct or indirect displacement of lowincome groups. Gentrification will be further discussed retaining these four points. In addition to this, we will concentrate our focus on its effects over the existing urban fabric, the key site of our search. gentrification, a practical tool In order to proceed in our argument we now need to underline how dominant powers, might they be private or public, seem make a strong use of gentrification as a tool for shaping urban space. More specifically, stressing the role of public power in gentrification outputs allows for the rediscussion we are aiming to.

On the theoretical plan, Smith’s (2002) contribution was perhaps the first one to strongly highlight the nexus between globalisation, neoliberalism and the changing role of the state in contemporary gentrification: recognisable forms and episodes of gentrification are a direct component of policies oriented towards urban and inter-urban competitiveness, intended as one of the fortes of a neoliberal conception of the city. Gentrification has changed from being seen as a problem for policy-makers, to being transformed into a

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

solution (Lees & Ley, 2008).

However, as Lees et al. (2008) remarkably warn, the affair of public power with gentrification is an ancient one. Case studies in New York City and London demonstrate how public sponsorship was already guaranteed to individuals who sought to renovate derelict housing stock in “difficult” neighbourhoods like Park Slope and Barnsbury used to be in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this rather micro-scale laissez-faire gentrification subsequently mutated into “the state […] fuelling the process of gentrification more directly than in the past” (Powell & Spencer, 2003, p. 450), defining what Hackworth and Smith (2001) have identified as third-wave gentrification.

Cities show very evidently the effects of this mutation, as: “The large publicly orchestrated redevelopment of brownfield sites, particularly on waterfronts, signified the point of transition. Perhaps the redevelopment of London’s Docklands provided the ideal typical case, for it was driven by neo-liberal policy and top–down planning practices, with its clear intent to consolidate the private-sector needs of the City of London as a global financial centre” (Lees & Ley, 2008, p. 2380) “A seemingly serendipitous, unplanned process that popped up in the postwar housing market is now, at one extreme, ambitiously and scrupulously planned” (N. Smith, 2002, p. 439)

essay #4

Recent accounts over this scale change in urban transformation show how gentrification is not only an almost automatic output but also an openly declared strategy to “sanitise” decaying areas. Some have in fact compared it to the “hausmannisation” of Paris (N. Smith, 1996) precisely for the large scale through which this intent is implemented. Strategies and plans for what has been marketed as the urban renaissance of the late 20th century seem in fact to share with Hausmann’s project the goal of recapturing the urban environment, operating in a quite “revanchist” fashion (N. Smith, 1996) at least in a North American context. However, as policy transfer is constantly increasing in speed and efficiency, we are beginning to notice similar features in Europe as well (Macleod, 2002). These have been subject to sharp critique, as some ask who exactly might be benefitting (Atkinson & Helms, 2007), while others suggest that these revived downtowns are increasingly privatised and securitised, their publicness being compromised by exclusively commercial interests (Coleman, 2009; Minton, 2012). Most importantly, however, connections between downtown and waterfront revitalisation and the displacement of communities have been identified in different contexts (Davidson, 2008; Lees, 2008; Slater, 2006) The emergence of these phenomena “prompt[s] misgivings about the social and spatial reach of any purported renaissance” (Macleod & Johnstone, 2012, p. 3), casting some strong doubts over the win-win discourse through which it is propagated. Apropos, 97

Tompkins Square Park Riot in New York City (1988)

some authors tend to make gentrification and urban regeneration perfectly collimate: “the language of regeneration sugarcoats gentrification” (N. Smith, 2002, p. 445), carefully concealing the social origin and goals of urban change while equally hiding the politics of winners and losers which naturally emerge from these processes.

Also, the word “regeneration” itself involves a linguistic problem: being derived from the biomedical and ecological language, regeneration appears to be a natural and naturally desirable process. Who would be against regeneration? Consensus is sought and opposition is immediately neutralised through the reliance on common-sense and a certain use of language, which some have brilliantly defined as Unspeak (Poole, 2007)1: the attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself.

Both the exclusion of certain social parts and the manipulative use of language in this context should per se endorse the need of a critical perspective, assuming that this has been evicted (or co-opted) in scholarly work over gentrification (Slater, 2006).

Scholars have in fact had a certain degree of responsibility in the institutionalisation of the process, as their optimistic understanding of it has eased policy-makers in appropriating and implementing the concept. Quite significative in this sense is Sharon Zukin’s (2004) co-authoring of an article over commercial gentrification in the Lower East Side through which she seems to defect her critical approach, best represented by her Loft Living (Zukin, 1982) in favour of the essay #4

creative class (Florida, 2002) militia. Again, attentive examination and our distrust for representations become key factors under this point of view.

However, my reliance on critical stances specifically relating to gentrification should not be understood as automatic generators of proposals for regulating, reducing or fighting gentrification: this is not the specific goal of this work and, more importantly, solutions seem to be localised and sitespecific in order to be efficient. Some have decided to fight it through open resistance and sometimes violent strategies as highlighted in Neil Smith’s (1996) account over the riots over Tompkins Square Park in New York City; others, such as the Ziyarates project in Fés (Morocco) prevent it through the utilisation of existing economical cycles.

Instead, I am centring my speculation around the belief that different forms and episodes of gentrification originate from a certain idea of transformation of the built environment, namely the one aiming exclusively at extracting profit from it. Challenging this vision through possible practices is my key point. urging political responses Apropos, if gentrification is a practical tool for allowing transformations in the urban environment, as it has been demonstrated in the previous paragraph, still it remains a very subtle and almost invisible tactic to not attentive eyes. This might be the reason of its success, however we should not forget that this process allows the implementation of 99

strongly political actions, therefore implying political values. It is the uncovering of such politics of gentrification which might allow us to challenge it.

Most importantly, already gentrification per se seems to be a key political issue, in the sense that it easily sparks political debate as witnessed by many discussions happened during the drafting of this work. This happens because it perfectly summarises the uneasy connection between exchange and use value. It forces us to consider the relationship between social networks, affective relationships, daily encounters or collective feelings attached to the built environment and its non-fixed exchange value submitted to non-contingent conditions. The place- and time-specific possible combinations of these two components seem to me a certainly political issue. In fact, as Gary Bridge (2014) points out discussing gentrification in a very clear fashion, “politics still count” (p.235).

As it emerges from the previously exposed dimensions of the process, politics do count on multiple levels: 1) institutional: the weight of public institutions in gentrification processes is in increase; 2) representative: researchers and discussants have a key role in influencing public policies regarding it; 3) grassroots: gentrification is a manifestation of neoliberal policies at the neighbourhood (and therefore personal) scale.

However, gentrification is obviously only the tip of the iceberg, representing and summarising but very clearly the contradictions of neoliberal, market-oriented conceptions of urban transformations: it is an intuitive process tightening the relationship 100

between urban renewal and social injustice.

In this sense, it is valuable in highlighting our deeply socially concerned vision of urban transformation. Furthermore, it seems to me very interesting to note how such contradictions appear to be intrinsic to the system itself: the famous slogan “we are the 99%” used by Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2011 summarises the scale of such contradictions quite precisely (see Krugman, 2011). Harvey (Harvey, 2009) stated this involvement already fourty-one years ago: “Patterns in the circulation of surplus value are changing but they have not altered the fact that cities [...] are founded on the exploitation of the many by the few. An urbanism founded on exploitation is a legacy of history. A genuinely humanizing urbanism has yet to be brought into being. It remains for revolutionary theory to chart the path from an urbanism based in exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species. And it remains for revolutionary practice to accomplish such a transformation.” (p. 314)

Therefore, in order to maintain the widest possible point of view in this work, we are going to discuss issues and responses concerning social impacts in general rather than focusing solely on gentrification, as this remains just one part of the problem. Social concern seems the key issue for it summarises and problematises quite evident phenomena affecting our everydayness, intimately linked to the neoliberal strategy: growing rates of unemployment (especially among

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

the younger sectors), constant shrinkage in social provision (particularly burdening women) and increasing commodification of basic social amenities like housing, transportation and public space. It needs to be discussed as our struggle to abandon a “global bust regime” (Keil, 2010) unfolds through both theory and practice (Marcuse, 2010), striving to envision and build cities for people as opposed to cities for profit (Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2011).

First of all, it seems to me necessary to point out how the current crisis of the neoliberal model is instilling “growing distress, discontent” and most of all “de-politicisation” (Hall et al., 2013, p. 20), generating both discontent towards the established political class and resignation to a rather Thatcherian “there is no alternative”. Instead, as the authors of the Kilburn Manifesto2 (Hall et al., 2013) claim, the re-politicisation of issues through democratic debate is the way out, fostering radical thinking “which goes beyond matters of electoral feasibility or what ‘the markets’ will tolerate” (p.21). In fact, their practical goal is to open up a debate over the political recapturing of our future.

I find this line of research sufficiently congruent with those engaging with the post-political dimension institutionalised by dominant forces: following the fall of the Berlin Wall, post-ideological politics have strengthened their aspects of consensusbuilding and social administration rather than active decision-making. However, despite the post-political being a valuable notion in highlighting the contemporary state of politics and its dynamics of essay #4

marginalisation and reinforcement, it can nevertheless be counterproductive in terms of action. In this sense Davidson and Iveson (Davidson & Iveson, 2014) propose the use of Rancière’s “method of equality”. This means the disruption of the “police” (the institutionalised political order) through “politics” (meaning an egalitarian process) conceived as the tool for re-engaging with democratic action offering an antidote to post-political consensus. It is worth to note that equality is not a goal per se but rather a premise for democratic political operation. Both share a concern towards the possibility of dissent, the active commitment of the individual self and the reconstitution of reality through political debate.

Quite a number of academics and scholars seem to have engaged in this direction. As Mark Purcell (2006) notes, “the recent interest in urban democracy and citizenship arises in part out of a widespread concern about neo-liberal globalisation: the increasing functional integration of all people and places in the world into a single, laissez-faire and capitalist political-economy” (p.1922) that “has more power to produce urban space with respect to ‘the public’, however defined” (p.1921). Arguably, democratic decision-making strongly collides with the ideals of the global competitive economy, as it is seen as slow, messy, inefficient and less likely to produce the kind of deregulation which interests to those fostering capital accumulation. Evidently, the goal of this text is not being a complete account of the burgeoning literature over democracy in general and urban democracy more 101

specifically. However, stating that recapturing democracy (Purcell, 2008) is one of the possible ways to foster and enhance social justice seems to me insufficient. In fact, democracy does not seem to be a selfevident process as it can be inflected in different forms: are we discussing Chantal Mouffe’s (Mouffe, 2000) radical proposals for a “genuinely agonistic” democratic debate, politics based on the encounter in public space or rather consensus-based democracies? Do we proceed retaining Henri Lefebvre’s (1968) framework of the “Right to the City”3? Are we discussing Amartya Sen’s (1992) notion of empowerment?

Following Amin and Thrift’s (2002) innovative proposal, relying both on the acknowledgment and the creative use of the previously exposed strands of political philosophy, I do want to stress the possibility of using democratic forms (theoretical models) in order to inspire democratic practices (lived experiences) through the notion of experimentation. This last experimental dimension seems to me the key aspect in their proposal, especially because of its intimate connection with the urban environment: “cities can be key places to experiment new foundations” {Amin:2002ui p.214, emphasis in original} for their extreme institutional richness found in grassroots political organisations, small community action groups and independent practitioners and thinkers.

However, this affection to cities should not encourage us to abandon projects for wider democracy in general: the urban scale is indeed very valuable and could appear as 102

endowed with much more feasibility than, for example, the trans-national one; in any case however, restrictions and misconceptions about intrinsic properties of particular scales should not be considered as reliable tools as scales have been found to be socially constructed (Marston, 2000) and non-fixed.

This becomes particularly evident when observing some experimentations on the theme of participation and empowerment, where the local scale is privileged and considered intrinsically genuine (see Iveson, 2013), subsequently configuring what has been defined as “the local trap” (Purcell, 2006). In some extreme cases, participation at the local level per se is not only insufficient but also counterproductive in guaranteeing socially just outputs (Huisman, 2014).

In sum, the interplay of the positions unraveled above permits to highlight a series of points which appear to be useful in constructing an ethical position towards political (and subsequently architectural) practice. Conscious of being partial and without claiming any newness, I intend the following as a tentative basis allowing me to proceed in my speculations: 1) the need to analyse and understand underlying structures in order to produce theory to inform practice; 2) trespassing the focus on one specific scale considering it as interconnected with other dimensions; 3) the active involvement of the self as a tool for genuinely participatory processes; 4) the showcase of dissent, allowing for the imagination of alternatives to mainstream solutions; 5) fostering debate as collective action; 6) the possibility to experiment

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

assembled forms of communication and action. ‌architects?

Having highlighted the key issues that animate our possible futures, we are now ready to return to our primary concern: architectural practice. Resuming the issues exposed in essay #1, the following lines will contain a meditation on how architects can be, first of all, reattached to the world as we have described it and hopefully contribute with their (renewed) expertise in imagining alternative pathways.

Endnotes 1

see a brilliant interactive documentary by the

Submarine Channel gathering six short films, visualised data and a user-generated vocabulary through the Unspeak website.

2

see the complete instalments constituting the Kilburn

Manifesto on the Lawrence and Wishart website.

3

see also Harvey’s (2008) contribution to the topic.

essay #4

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This essay is part of a series of five, which together form the research work entitled: Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice. Essay #1 – Opens questions: observing design through geography works as an introduction; essay #2 – Dealing with the urban: theory, method, tools discusses the theoretical and methodological framework employed in this work; essay #3 – Interstice as shifting space unravels possible debates over complexity, instabilty and layering towards urban space; essay #4 – Challenges at every scale: from economics to politics explores key theoretical questions regarding the formation of contemporary urban space; essay #5 – Personal practice: immediate reflections on future paths concludes this work exploring directions for future architectural practice.

bibliography Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: reimagining the urban. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Atkinson, R., & Helms, G. (Eds.). (2007). Securing an urban renaissance: crime, community, and British urban policy. Bristol: Policy Press.

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