collective space

production of collective space

collective production of space

spatial production of collectives

Contents

Introduction

Relationality: -­‐ Relational Practise, Time and Urban Collectives

-­‐ Architecture of Concern

Spatiality: -­‐ The Capsule – an Illusory Quest for Independence (and Individualisation) -­‐ “Things are not always what they seem…” – ANT and Situated Knowledge

Materiality: -­‐ Reflections on Cyborgs, the Cognisphere and Social Exchange

-­‐ Urban Collectives as Human-­‐Material Assemblages

Conclusion

1

3 5 7 9 11 14 17

Introduction Since the text-clusters offered such a wide scope of different approaches I decided to get carried away, in spite of my original plan to keep very close to the key concepts in my thesis.

In this concluding document, however, I have revised my texts and tried to relate them to focus mainly on questions connected to either the production of public space or to sociomaterial issues. In the following texts I investigate collective space and urban collectives as aspects on public space and public life. I do this to examine if the collective approach can add a new or different understanding of the production of public space and public life. Some texts fall outside of this objective and examine other, sometimes related, issues.

My theoretical approach is imbued with Actor-Network Theory (Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law) and Territoriality (Andrea Brighenti, Mattias Kärrholm). Thus I apply a socio-material perspective that includes a relational, partial and situated approach to urban life.

Introducing urban collectives and collective space: I try the idea that urban public space can be comprehended partly as a conglomerate of different, sometimes overlapping, collective spaces. A collective space is a situated space where a group of people repeatedly perform a specific activity that is more or less dependent on or provoked by the material constitution of the space. Some collectives are not connected to a specific geographical place, but move around freely or use different sites that have the appropriate spatial configuration and material settings for their activity.

Collective space can also be understood as a proto-public space. To take part in a collective activity in an urban setting sometimes can be perceived as a pre public experience.

Consequently I see the collective space as a test bed for public life, a training facility where one can prepare for the major urban publics. Because of the shared interest within the collective and the restricted membership the social interaction and the sharing of information is likely to be more intimate and have a more profound impact on civic matters and social formation.

Individuals can appropriate space, even though it is hard for most people without particular or exceptional resources. It is easier and far more common that we form collectives together with others to demarcate territories. Collaboration can empower individuals and through collective agency act “otherwise”, appropriate space and make a difference.

Collectives can be strong or weak. Examples of strong collectives can be: skaters in a skatepark, football players in a football field, pensioners playing boules in a park etc. The conditions for membership are important. To be part of a strong collective you need to have social bonds to a member of the collective and an understanding of the suggested rules of behaviour. Sometimes the ability to perform the same activity as the collective is sufficient to be accepted as a member. Members in strong collectives are depending on each other when practising the activity. You interact by active choice with the other collective members. The activity is essential for how the space is conceived, as it´s materiality is the condition for the action itself.

Examples of weak collectives are: youngsters hanging in a town square, parents and children in a playground, shoppers in a market place, sunbathers on a bench, people in a taxi queue etc.

The weak collectives can be defined as groupings related to specific spatial affordances and/or tactics. The people using the space do not have to relate directly to each other to perform the collective activity. They are simply performing the same activity in spatial proximity to each other. The difference between the strong and weak collectives is not absolute, it is fluctuating and temporal. Collectives can evolve and transform over time, from being weak to become strong and the reverse.

My notion of collective space is related to Deleuze´s and Guattari´s concept “agencements – social and spatial assemblages” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). My understanding of agencement is as a concept that integrates the social, the material and human practises in a situated space. An urban collective space is an agencement constituted of humans, space, artefacts and territorial tactics, most likely driven by a particular activity. At length collectives execute territorial claims through spatial appropriation. Normally a collective need artefacts and specific spatial conditions to emerge and to produce a stable agencement. To survive most collective spaces must continuously be produced by acting people.

ResArc – Philosophies, module 01 1

Relational Practise, Time and Urban Collectives

‘Time and not space should be seen as the primary context in which architecture is conceived’ (…) ‘by positioning time as the key context for architecture, space become active, social, and it’s released from the hold of static formalism’. (Jeremy Till, 2009, pp. 95–96 in Petrescu, 2012)

Jeremy Till´s elaboration on time and architecture offers an interesting perspective on spatial culture, practise and politics. Time situates a space. Various actors dynamically contest and change the space under the mediation of material as well as non-material actants. Spatial production is thus an ever on-going process. Contemporary planning tools and concepts seem however to be more final and goal-oriented than processual. Spatial design rests on the idea of fulfilment, or completion, and defined spaces are illusively stabilised through material manifestations. Doina Petrescu and her collaborators seem to think and act differently.

Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou initiate collaborative projects through their practise Atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa). aaa produce social collective space through tactical networks rooted in relational activities. They claim that they do not plan, they act. Their tactics “are unfolded in spatial objects and infrastructural devices which increase connectedness, (…) encouraging collectives of inhabitants to appropriate space” (Petrescu 2012). Multiple artefacts and devices, non-material and material mediate the agency of neighbourhood inhabitants. aaa formalises and researches these relational and participatory projects by thorough mapping, documentation and analysis. This work is interesting and probably very rewarding, but how can we validate its outcomes?

Petrescu establish and maintain urban collectives by prearranged activities and frame them by material territorialisation and administrative appropriations of space. The spaces aaa appropriate for their projects are normally residual sites that are being designed to match the objectives of the projects. Mobile devices are used to support the intended activities. Thus the “natural” or bottom-up relations between the social ambitions, the project activities and the actual urban sites are weak.

The artefacts and infrastructural devices that aaa introduce maybe already are there, in the existing urban context, mediating social formation and spatial production. Will the sociomaterial networks, initiated by aaa, stay active when the motor (the inflicted activities) is gone? Is there a way to make these collectives and relationscapes take form and stabilise without organising the activities or adding the purpose-built spaces and objects? Can the design of material space in itself generate agency to people and catalyse the formation of collective social life? What are the material, or actantial, keys? Can we find those key actants in the work of Petrescu, Petcou and their associates? Are there other ways to identify vital

socio-material mediators and actants that generates agency, without the predetermined activities inflicted from above?

As a response to the following texts: - Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, edited by Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, Jeremy Till, London: Routledge, 2011.

- Doina Petrescu, ‘Relationscapes: Mapping Agencies of relational practice in Architecture’, in City, Culture, Society, 3, 2012, pp. 135-140

ResArc – Philosophies, module 01 2

Architecture of Concern

“The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism. (…) … the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact.” (Latour, 2004)

If we translate “matter” into “architecture” the concept gets more specific and situated.

Architecture of fact would then stand for context-less, prefabricated buildings with no sitespecific qualities. Architecture of concern, however, would be the opposite: situated, social and the result of craftsmanship. What would this mean regarding the spatial quality, adaptability and complexity?

Can Architecture of fact metamorphose into architecture of concern through a process of successively becoming relevant as social space? Probably. Because architecture, I would claim, is always a matter of concern, it cannot be mastered instrumentally or without the collaboration of numerous actors and forces. Architectural space is always networked and always social, always connected. Even the most objectified architectural spaces have the intrinsic capacity to become situated, social and significant, regardless of manufacturing processes. (But, that is no excuse for architects and planners not to try their best to design in collaboration and with great social concern!)

Applied on public space you could say that the collective appropriation of space is an act of concern, an act of turning a factual, prosaic space into a meaningful place – a unity of entangled bodies, artefacts and space. Collective space, in my view, is partly just about this transformation; the production of spatial meaning through territorial production and appropriation. Can spaces where no collectives ever form or situate themselves be regarded as spaces of fact more than spaces of concern? This is however also a matter of the temporal dynamics of human activities; a new activity can suddenly change the meaning (concern) of any space. Skaters, free runners, traceurs and boule players all change spaces of facts to spaces of concern. A farmers market in a residual field or flee market along an abandoned street do the same.

Latour uses Whitehead to undermine the existence of matters of fact: “The solution or, rather, the adventure, according to Whitehead, is to dig much further into the realist attitude and to realize that matters of fact are totally implausible, unrealistic, unjustified definitions of what it is to deal with things” (Whitehead in Latour 2004).

Foucault´s concept of biopolitics/biopower can go well together with Latours material and spatial agency. “…’biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’, that is, those mechanisms and forms of power that invest the human body as a locus of productivity and action, and in this sense also situate the subject as free, or at least endowed with a certain agency.” (Wallenstein 2010, p.47) Latour draws on Heidegger´s connotation of material entities as being gatherings – relational implications of networks, if you wish. With some inspiration from Whitehead and Tarde, Latour associate matters of concern to the concept society (Latour 2004). So, if we merge these concepts we will have humans and things, equipped with agency and thus with power, producing situated networks. To me that makes a relevant and most promising image, or conception, of a populated urban space! And an interesting set of tools to research it with!

Vitruvian space as matters of fact ”… architectural implications, for instance in the sustained discussion on the role of the hospital and the medicalization of urban space, where the Vitruvian paradigm comes to an end and architecture begins to be understood as an ordering and production of space instead of a representation of a pre-existing order.”

(Wallenstein 2010)

Wallenstein presents an interesting point here! When architecture in part is taking another route, towards a social and truly collective space-making activity, the role of architecture and space, as well as the production of it, become increasingly relevant for people outside the traditional practise of architecture. You could say that architecture returns to its origins, before the emergence of complex cities and the division of labour etc., when those who should use the space produced it.

Most architecture produced today seems to be true to the Vitruvian paradigm, resting on a pre-existing order, or tool box, in its making. In its purest form, Vitruvian architecture can be depicted as matters of fact (Latour 2004) and objects (Heidegger). A space-making process built around material and human agency and considering social aspects then can be referred to matters of concern and Heidegger´s thing.

As a response to the following texts: - Bruno Latour, ‘Why has critique run out of steam?’ in Critical Inquiry, 30, Winter 2004 - Sven-Olov Wallenstein, ‘Noopolitics, Life and Architecture’ in Deborah Hauptman and Warren Neidlich, eds, Cognitive Architecture. From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010

ResArc – Philosophies, module 02 1

The Capsule – an Illusory Quest for Independence (and Individualisation)

When Lieven de Cauter introduces the concept of encapsulation (de Cauter 2004) he draws on the fragility of the human body. The encapsulation concept provides an intriguing perspective on built space. We simply need the support from a variety of technologies and material devices to protect our delicate bodies. Architecture sometimes is denoted as a third skin, a shelter – basically a climate protection. In addition to that, architectural space, or capsule as de Cauter sometimes labels it, also form a protection from the social, from others and from the indirect presence of others (smells, sounds and distant visual appearances).

A growing part of private resources (money) appear to be invested in the material capacity to control the level of contact between individuals in public space. The more resources an individual accumulates the more he/she seems to invest in the filter to the common, in devices that can be used to regulate the level of interaction with others. Sloterdijk frame this phenomenon in the context of apartment housing, referring to Corbusier’s concept “psychic ventilation”: “An architecturally successful living unit does not just represent a piece of enclosed air, but rather a psychosocial immune system that is capable of regulating the degree to which it is sealed from the outside on demand.” (Sloterdijk 2007)

This notion has an obvious bearing on issues of exclusion, class and segregation. The most apparent examples of that are: gentrified and homogenised neighbourhoods, a growing stateand private surveillance apparatus, apartment tower blocks with controlled and policed access, walled private homes, increased retail security with entrance guards and CCTVobservation, etc. Even in regular middle class areas the level of unintentional interaction with strangers are controlled by means of home security systems, neighbourhood signs declaring zones of surveillance, fences, walls etc. The increasing encapsulation of housing enclaves can be understood as an urge for private security and a desire to belong to well-defined collectives of equals. This is as understandable as worrying. The detachment from a pluralistic society and its common grounds does not go well together with contemporary endeavours for urban diversity and tolerance.

The notion of collective space might be an interesting point of departure when initiating a housing development. If collective space can be considered to be a kind of proto-publics it gives good reasons to regard collective life and collective activities in public space as vital aspects of housing communities. ***

The apartment (capsule) can be regarded as a material quest for individual independence – a spatial urge to master ones own, private life. The apartment-concept is indeed boosting our desire for individuality, as Sloterdijk advocates, but its significance as a fortress might have an even more profound impact on society as a common ground – contesting the city as a civic space for exchange. As Lieven de Cauter puts it: ” …fear leads to capsularization, and capsularization enhances fear.” (de Cauter, 2004)

Sloterdijk claims that even outside or in-between the apartments we maintain an innerworldly individualism using Ego-technical apparati, like head sets, cell phones, small screen computers etc. to control the level of social exchange with others (Sloterdijk 2007). De Cauter comments this relation between humans and high-tech media as virtual or mental encapsulation. He identifies the digital media devices, expressively the screens, as extensions of the mind, as the car is a capsular extension of the house (de Cauter 2004). De Cauter argues further that the capsular society evokes a historic view on public space as something outside, something potentially dangerous: ”The capsular civilization might be a return to older phases in history, in which public space - the world outside the fortress - was, by definition, unsafe and uncontrolled territory.” (de Cauter, 2004)

The perception of the apartment (capsule) as a fortress, an individually controlled space of independence, is however an illusion. These private capsules need extensive support from a well-organized society. It is due to tremendous collective efforts we finally can experience an imaginary or fictional independence. Beyond the apartment walls there is a supportive infrastructure that cares for water supply and drainage, heating, transportation of digital and analogue information, security logistics, financial systems etc. Without the cooperative efforts to maintain this infrastructure we would very hastily have to return to a more collective life, dependent on mutual trust in others and in public life per se.

As a response to the following texts: - Peter Sloterdijk, ‘Cell Block, Ego-Spheres, Self-Container’ in Log 10, 2007 + - Lieven de Cauter, ‘The Capsule and the Network: Notes for a General Theory’ in Capsular Civilisation: On the City in the Age of Fear, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004

ResArc – Philosophies, module 02 2

“Things are not always what they seem…” – ANT and Situated Knowledge

Bodies, as well as objects, are always situated, at least in the material world. It is from the body “the world unfolds”, not from “Husserl’s study” (Ahmed 2006). One starts to realise the world through learning about how the body perceives, responds to and affects objects and other bodies. To study an apple falling from a tree, measuring its size, form, weight and the speed at which it falls, doesn´t guarantee an understanding of gravity, nor the practical effects of gravity. Holding the apple, feeling its weight, throwing it up in the air and catching it coming down offers a vastly more significant knowledge about the nature of gravity.

Additional information, like the smell of the apple, the texture of its skin and how the wind affects its trajectory one will get for free. This is to say that situated knowledge can emerge from interaction; of being partial and using all senses to unveil what´s there and examine it.

Situated knowledge is then to reveal actor-networks.

The physiological, objective data of a table (Husserl´s or anyone´s) tells me very little about what a table is and its affordances. When watching children playing with a table, turning it up side down and convert it into a boat, with the tablecloth mounted as a sail and the kitchen floor transformed into an ocean tells me more. Watching the play I notice a new and unexpected affordance and furthermore I observe how heavy the table is, where it might break if not handle carefully, how the legs are mounted, etc. (I can even note how it may be improved to match this new use!) This is situated knowledge about a table. The actor-network is a key to situated and subjective knowledge.

Heidegger’s notions on objects as tools or “equipment” attaches the object with it´s predetermined or intended uses (Ahmed 2006). When the object is handled the way its intended it becomes an extension of our bodies and cease to be an object “in itself”. This is a useful notion from some perspectives but at the same time slightly deterministic and limiting. The object emerges as an objective object when it fails to function as intended or when it´s broken (Ahmed 2006) – this is a bit mysterious. Sarah Ahmed remarks that a hammer might be too heavy for one person to use, and then fail as an equipment, but it might be perfectly adequate for another (Ahmed 2006). This is to me relational thinking. The hammer becomes a hammer when connected to someone that use it as a hammer, and it gains its properties from a situated network, not from a preconceived idea about its use. Another person can use the hammer to stir a soup and the hammer will still be a hammer, but used in another context, being part of another network.

These notions are interesting to apply on architectural space since it is normally designed to match a specific use but concurrently it has to be flexible regarding functionality and open for radical change. Humans, animals and objects are constantly contesting the complexity of architecture and public space. To understand space from a partial and situated perspective is crucial since relevant knowledge about space is profoundly entangled with unpredictable life and unforeseen actions. The physical facts of things, buildings or public spaces are not sufficient to disclose their respective affordances. The nature of things and spaces is interesting to us because they can embrace meaning (-s) and be of significant use in some way. Arjun Appadurai suggests; "We have to follow the things them selves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories" (Appadurai 1988: 5 in Ahmed 2006) and that we need to “supplement phenomenology with an ‘ethnography of things’” (Ahmed 2006). This coincides very well with Haraway´s notions on situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) as well as with an Actor-Network-Theory perspective.

As a response to the following texts: - Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives’, in Feminist Studies, pp. 575–599, 1988.

- Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006

ResArc – Philosophies, module 03 1

Cyborgs, the Cognisphere and Social Exchange

”A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a worldchanging fiction.” (Haraway, 1991, p.149)

Donna Haraways´ cyborg concept can be regarded as an upgraded variation of the assemblage concept. Notions on the cyborg concept appear to suggest a very close amalgamation between humans and objects. As I understand Haraway humans become cyborgs through an intimate unification with high-tech communication and information devices. “Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms. “ (Haraway, 1991, p.165) To put the cyborg concept into work in a spatial context I construct a framework where I label the cyborg objects first-hand artefacts. The first-hand artefacts are private, attached to the body and carried around. In the everyday spaces we move there are other artefacts that we interact with and through, and even form assemblages with; these I label second-hand artefacts. The second-hand artefacts in this framework are detached from the body and generally belonging to a public domain, e.g. benches, bollards, lampposts, edges, canopies etc. These two categories of artefacts effect human behaviour and social interactions; they heavily influence the networks that are being produced in urban public domain. The agencies of first-hand artefacts interact with the agencies of the second-hand artefacts and of course with the agencies of the human actors.

For instance, the use of mobile phones can make us search for shadow to be able to see the screen properly, we try to escape disturbing urban noise to be able to hear better and we sometimes search for spots with better connection to telephone or Internet networks.

Occasionally we need to put down an electronic device, a bag or a rucksack, to be able to use both our hands when handling it. Then we look for horizontal surfaces in suitable heights: as low walls, bollards, building socles, window ledges etc. Cyborgs also look for places to charge the batteries of their machines. Attractive second-hand artefacts gather cyborgs and thus become objects of appropriation and of possible social exchange, i.e. actants with obvious networking capacities.

My point is that the cyborg is a prime socio-material actor with multiple and integrated agencies. The cyborg gets further complicated by the interference by a set of second-hand material agencies. This makes the analysis of socio-material agency and social exchange a complex mission.

The privateness of cyborgs To be private requests having a conceptual idea of what it is to be public. Today we seem to be private everywhere. Owing to advanced information technology, extensive communication networks and individual, portable electric media devices we can be private everywhere.

Thomas Whalen (2000) introduced the concept cognisphere to denote “the Internet but also networked and programmable systems that feed into it, (…) the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly embedded.” (Hayles, 2006, p.161) The cognisphere have a huge impact on our everyday lives, in private as well as in public domains. As cyborgs in cognisphere societies we can be located, contacted, talked to and heard everywhere. We are filmed, tapped, registered and even addressed by semi-intelligent machines in most public domains. As cyborgs we are constantly connected to people, information systems and spaces in spatio-temporal other-wheres.

But as cyborgs, connected to the cognisphere, we can always disconnect from the immediate context and turn our focus to other places, humans or media. Our electronic devices are by all means connective but they are also disconnective. We can use them as shields against public social life and protection from the mundane practise of interaction with strangers. Does this have implications on spatial design?

High-tech media devices call for attention. In public domain the auditive or visual senses can simultaneously be devoted to different realities, due to the agencies of portable media devices.

Walking on a street and talking to someone in another space (and maybe in another time zone) over a mobile phone, watching a film on an IPad in a café or skyping on a train change the perception of the space we are in and the way we relate to other humans in that space.

Strangers can easily be ignored and friends shut out.

Cyborgism and the cognisphere have obvious implications on social behaviour and social exchange in public space.

As a response to the following texts: - Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’ in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991.

ResArc – Philosophies, module 03 3

- N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere’ in Theory Culture Society 23; 159, 2006.

- Thomas Whalen (2000): A term coined by Thomas Whalen (2000) ‘Data Navigation, Architectures of Knowledge’, paper presented at the Banff Summit on Living Architectures: Designing for Immersion and Interaction, Banff New Media Institute, 23 Sept.

ResArc – Philosophies, module 03 2

Urban Collectives as Human-Material Assemblages

“What living together is. What is the collective? This question fascinates us now.”

(Serres, 2007 p.224)

People gather in certain locations to perform activities, consciously or unconsciously producing collectives. The collective spaces are to various degrees designed, transformed and equipped to produce and maintain specific collectives and their activities. The urban collective space is thus a socio-material assemblage in an urban setting. The collectives can be weak (serial collectives) or strong (group collectives), temporal and loosely organized or more durable and sometimes thoroughly structured. The weak (serial) collectives gather for example in a designated space to wait for a bus or in a market to buy fruit while others, the strong collectives (group), assembles for example to play boule or street basket. In this blogpost I will try to illuminate some aspects on the concept urban collective space, applying notions from the cluster texts.

In her book “Vibrant Matter” (2010) Jane Bennet draws on concepts produced by Spinoza (conative and affective bodies) and Deleuze/Guattari (assemblage, agency and adsorbsion) to form her primary notions on “thinking beyond the life-matter binary“. From these concepts Bennet develops her ideas on material agency.

Spinoza´s conative and affective bodies are “social bodies, in the sense that each is, by its very nature as a body, continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies.” (Bennett, 2010, p.21). Spinoza argues that the affective bodies (actors) “form alliances and enter assemblages” (Ibid p.22) and that the assemblages as well as their individual bodies are both conative and affective. Deleuze reaches a similar conclusion with his concept adsorbsion, which Bennet defines as “a gathering of elements in a way that both forms a coalition and yet preserves something of the agential impetus of each element.” (Ibid, p.35) Jane Bennet rephrases it “Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. (…), an assemblage is never a stolid block but an open-ended collective” (Ibid, p.24) The collective spaces are assemblages of human and non-human actants, all with separate and multiple agencies. The collective develop agencies of it´s own, without erasing the agencies of its individual members (actors) - in an adsorbion fashion. A market place, as a collective space, has exclusive agencies. The individual market stalls, being subordinated assemblages, have their own specific agencies as well as the visiting customers (members). ”This black category of collective, group, class, caste, whatever, is it a being in turn, or a cluster of relations?

(Serres, 2007, P.225)

In his text “Theory of the Quasi Object” (2007) Michel Serres examines the transgression from an “I” to a “We” and from “being” to “relation” when gathering or grouping, i.e. forming collectives. “It is rigorously the transsubstantiation of being into relation. Being is abolished for the relation. Collective ecstasy is the abandon of the "I"'s on the tissue of relations.” (Serres, p.228) Serres puts focus on the emergence of the assemblage, the transformation of individual subjects and objects into relational networks that reconstitute multiple “I”´s into a “We”. Serres perspective gives reasons to study how the networks transform the actors and what makes them enter collectives. A human actor is driven into the collective by various reasons and forces. In the collective the actor form (and is caught by) numerous tight and vibrant relations with other actors in the collective.

Spinoza advocates “that the more kinds of bodies with which a body can affiliate, the better” (Bennett, 2010, p.22). Spinozas´ words can be interpreted as the collective getting stronger the more actants entering it and thus supporting the assemblage. An illustration of this phenomenon could be two types of sport collectives. First example: a street basketball collective, gathering once a week in a parking ground. Due to the configuration of the parked cars they mount their mobile basketball system and agree about the territorial boundaries for the game. The collective is produced and maintained as a loose, temporal network of humans, a space and some specific material artefacts. Second example: in a schoolyard nearby we find a noticeably stronger collective. The schoolyard harbours a full size basketball court, with lines painted on the ground and permanent basketball boards. A group of children use the court everyday, on lunch breaks and in the afternoons. In this second example the collective is stabilised by extensive social, administrative, territorial and material supporting structures.

The weak collective (street basket) can be considered to be more public because of its openness for more forms territorial productions and appropriations. The stronger collective space (the schoolyard) is exclusively open for the children at the school and the rigidity of the space restrict the scope of possible forms of appropriations and uses. Therefore the schoolyard can be considered to be less public than the parking space.

The strong collective spaces seem to be generally less public because of their inherent restrictions in appropriability and access for strangers. Strong collective spaces, however, can facilitate more thorough social, political and cultural exchange because of the tighter relations between the collective members. Collective spaces, strong and weak, can thus be important civic arenas for societal change and progress.

As a response to the following texts: - Jane Bennett, ‘The Agency of Assemblages’, in Vibrant Matter, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010 - Michel Serres, ‘Theory of the Quasi Object’ in Parasite, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Conclusion “Philosophies� has expanded my scope of possible entrances to several fields of interest in my thesis and made explicit the importance of making individual theoretical choices. I got painfully aware of the difficulty to keep on a predetermined theoretical track. It is surprisingly easy to get carried away with new ideas and to be captivated by new concepts presented in the cluster texts, thus entering new theoretical and methodological terrains. I wish I could have stayed more focused on my key concepts and use the new perspectives presented in the course curriculum to deepen and expand on these concepts. Instead I observed a tendency to jump on new trains with no obvious destinations. I conclude, however, that these excursions into new fields of theory have been refreshing and very stimulating. One important lesson for me has been to realise the importance of positioning my own choice of theoretical terrain in relation to a wider field of possible approaches. Having said that, I also conclude that the exposure to a variety of philosophies and theories, applicable within the field of architectural research, has resulted in a better understanding and recognition of alternative points of departure.

Finally I can say that I think notions on urban collectives and collective space adds a partly new and different understanding of the production and formation of publics. My views on collective life and space have become more complex due to the course readings and writings.

The importance of entangling individual and collective agency with material and spatial agency stands even more clear to me now.