INCLUSION BY DESIGN
Finding Common Ground
Uncovering Spaces of Resistance and Negotiation in London
June 2023
Partners
Woman, Life, Freedom Collective
Woman, Life, Freedom Group are a community of academics, practitioners and students from the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment who have joined forces to create an informal network of activism, with the aim to establish a safe space for debate, conversation and exchange surrounding the Iranian revolutionary movement: Woman, Life, Freedom.
Date: 16th June 2023
Location: University College London, Serpentine Pavilion 2023
WLF Facilitators:
ASF-UK Facilitators:
Dorna Shafieioun Faiza Amin
Azadeh Zaferani
Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami
Rowan Mackay
Thomas Aquilina, Afterparti
Thomas Aquilina is an architect and academic dedicated to building communities of radical thought and progressive practice. His work spans different forms of practice to include advocacy, design, pedagogy, policy and research. He is a lecturer in Architecture at the Royal College of Art, a co-director of New Architecture Writers and a co-founder of publishing collective Afterparti. In 2021–22, Thomas was a Design Researcher in Residence at the Design Museum.
Date: 17th June 2023
Location: Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Royal College of Art
Facilitators:
Thomas Aquilina
Resolve Collective
ASF-UK Facilitators:
Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami
Rowan Mackay
Valentina Riverso
RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across Europe, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment.
Date: 2nd July 2023
Location: Turf Projects, Croydon
Resolve Collective Facilitators: ASF-UK Facilitators: Seth Scafe-Smith
Nina Jang
Jana Jardouk
Tahmineh Hooshyar Emami
Beatrice De Carli
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Introduction
The Inclusion By Design team at Architecture-Sans-Frontieres UK invited three London-based collectives, to co-deliver a series of three workshops in June and July 2023 as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2023.
Centered around the themes of subversion, dissent, space and power, the workshops aimed to address how acts of resistance and negotiation create spaces of common ground for people with lived experience of displacement, migration and exile in London today.
A legacy of the recently concluded DESINC Live project, this initiative was aimed to help situate our Inclusion by Design programme in the London context, and to grow our network of institutions, individuals and organisations who work on connected themes.
The workshop structure draws on ASF’s long running Challenging Practice programme, which is based on principles of active, dynamic, and action-based learning. Its pedagogical framework is grounded in theories of situated knowledge and reflective practice, and places a strong emphasis on the ethical component of engaged learning.
Each workshop combined situational explorations, led by each collaborator, together with reflexive tools and methods developed as part of the ASF-UK Inclusion by Design and Challenging Practice programmes. The aim of each workshop was to generate spaces for critical reflection on participants’ own practices and experiences of making and inhabiting spaces of resistance and negotiation in London, and asking what more could be done to support such spaces in the city.
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Day 1
Introductions
Introducing methodologies
Woman, Life, Freedom on Creative Activism & Film
Screening
Hussein Nassereddine*
Serpentine Pavilion
Collective Reflections
AM PM
Negotiated Writing
Personal experiences of resistance in the city (See image on previous page).
Overview of the Day
The workshop took place across two venues in London, the first part in UCL and the second in the newly opened Serpentine Pavilion 2023 in Hyde Park themed ‘A Table’.
The workshop was co-curated and organised in collaboration with Woman, Life, Freedom collective based at the Bartlett School of Architecutre, UCL. The workshop focused on resistance through creative practice, and formed part of a series of curated activist interventions coordinated by an anonymous group of staff, students and academics from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, centered on the woman, life, freedom movement in Iran.
Focusing on negotiated space (in this day interpreted as the space for resistance and space for solidarity) and the agency of the diaspora in this particular scenery, we looked to generate a starting point from which we explore personal journeys, resistances and negotiation with spaces in London. The workshop involved 6 participants who took part in critical discussions and collaborative activities throughout the day.
The first part of the day introduced methodologies through which the participants may reflect on their own actual or fictional journeys and experiences of resistance and tension in London. Each methodology was presented in a different medium, through film screening, reading, and oral presentation and was followed by a collective discussion and reflexive prompts.
The second part of the day engaged in forms of writing as modes of resistance and invited participants to engage in a collective writing process from the lens of personal experiences in a public setting. The culmination of the workshop was to be a series of readings, either private or public and interventions in space using the written material.
Acting in Space
Performing writing in public space
Closing Remarks
‘...I liked that we used words to express ourselves, experienced some conflict while writing, watched the narration of L letters, and listened to each other’s s stories. The fact that we used white roll to write our stories, a tool of resistance in Iran,...’
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Objectives
● Introduce creative methods for communicating personal experiences of resistance and negotiation in the city.
● Create space to explore participants’ associated experiences of resistance and negotiation (from another place or time) and how these influence their actions and experiences in London today.
● Develop and share ideas for how creative methods can be used to build solidarity with global/other local movements/struggles in London today
● Collaborative working and negotiated exchange
What can we take forward?
1. Introduced creative methodologies for engagement
● Creative writing as a method of capturing personal narratives around particular topics or through particular lenses. The writing from the participants was especially effective in weaving together physical and emotional experiences of resistance with/within the city.
● The two examples also demonstrated the value of the method in articulating experiences of living as part of diasporic communities and being connected to multiple geographies of ‘home’.
2. Stronger connections to other groups in london
Particularly an emerging relationship with the Woman, Life, Freedom collective at UCL.
3. Bigger presence in public spaces
It was refreshing for ASF-UK to engage with the city of London for the first time in a few years. The journey to the Serpentine Pavillion provided valuable time to reflect on the morning’s presentations and being in the pavillion itself raised interesting question/responses/ tensions/feelings around the nature of performance and action in public space.
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Day 2
AM
Introductions
Introducing the glossary
Walking tour of Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (Led by Thomas Aquilina)
Overview of the Day
The workshop was co-curated with Thomas Aquilina, an architect and academic dedicated to building communities of radical thought and progressive practice. His work spans different forms of practice to include advocacy, design, pedagogy, policy and research. Thomas is a co-founder of Afterparti Zine and New Architecture Writers.
The workshop took place in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and across the Royal College of Art White City campus and involved 10 participants who took part in critical discussions and collaborative activities throughout the day. The programme involved a collective walk starting from North Kensington and culminated in a workshop using drawing and writing to develop a collaborative and place-based definition of ‘common ground’. This workshop coincided with a significant anniversary for the Grenfell Tower disaster: 72 months since the fire. 72 lives lost. Located in North Kensington, Grenfell today is grappling with its memory, aiming for justice and restoration of something that will be forever broken by the city’s failures.
Collective Reflections
PM
Individual Drawings for a Collective Catalogue
Drawing experiences from the walking tour, reflections and recollections.
In this workshop, we thought of walking as methodology, a storytelling device, a means of critical observation, of unexpected encounter and of shared conversations. This workshop looked at the legacies of extraction in the city to explore the ways we hold and record language. In the first part of the day, participants were led on a tour of North Kensington, following part of the Grenfell silent march trail and exploring some of the key sites for activism, protest and regeneration.
In the second part of the day, which was hosted at the RCA Campus, a short debriefing session helped decode collective and individual experiences of walking during the morning. The methodology of reflection proposed and facilitated by Thomas Aquilina consisted of drawn observations or reflections on the spaces encountered along the walk, specifically through the lens of the word selected from the glossary at the outset of the day.
Reading a new glossary
Collecting a new glossary of terms born from the walking tour and in response to the original guiding glossary
Closing Remarks RCA
‘To walk through that history, reflect on how it evolved through time, and know about people’s struggles. working on words from Aquilina’s book was a good start, and continuing our journey expressing our choice of words was lovely, and then expressing it by drawing and suggesting new words was superb.’
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What can we take forward?
1. Intersecting narratives & multi-scalar approach
The walk provided an activity through which intersecting narratives, perspectives and scales of enquiry could be explored.
2. Walking as spatial practice
More formal guided elements provided insight into aspects of local history, while the connecting walk allowed space for reflection and discussion between participants.
3. Individual reflections through collective production
The drawing exercise then provided a space for reflections/ideas/ conversations to be synthesized and collated into a collective ‘picture’ of the area and the group’s experience.
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Day 3
Introductions
Resolve Collective Studios
Walking tour of Croydon City Center (Led by Seth Scafe-Smith)
Overview of the Day
The workshop took place in Resolve Collective’s studio in Turf Projects, which is Croydon’s homegrown artist space and the first entirely artist-run contemporary art space in the borough.
The workshop was co-curated and organised in collaboration with Resolve Collective who are an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. Much of Resolve’s work aims to provide platforms for the production of new knowledge and ideas, whilst collaborating and organising to help build resilience in communities. The final workshop explored themes of resistance and negotiation in Croydon using the methodology of thinking through making. The workshop involved 10 participants who took part in critical discussions and collaborative activities throughout the day.
Storyboarding future imaginations
Quick-fire design reviews & Group Discussion
AM PM
Collective Making
Consolidation of storyboards and ideas, thinking through making
An identifiable step in the spatial methodology employed by Resolve collective is their situated approach to spaces and communities. A walking tour in the first part of the day followed a trail organized around the spaces of resistance and negotiation in Croydon, with particular focus on the role of the council in the regeneration initiatives in the area, as well as the history of migration and its impact on the fabric of the borough. A key recurring theme during the walk was the concept of temporality. Time and the (im)permanence of the built fabric in Croydon is of key importance to how different groups use, transform and transfer (ownership of) spaces.
In the second part of the day, participants discussed some of the focal points of the walking tour and and were asked to select and reimagine one of the sites we visited in its future state, using cinematic storyboarding as a tool for this reimagination exercise.
Using the in-house workshop and found materials in Turf Projects, participants then translated these imaginary landscapes of Croydon into three crafted objects.
Dissemination
Collective discussion around the making process.
Closing Remarks
‘I loved that we designed and created something in the studio and that I was an essential part of creating the narrative and developing the movable home/office table concept. It was beautiful to know people’s power and defy a place’s traditional narrative.’
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Objectives
● A brief introduction to the contexts of Croydon
● A working experience of architecture and design as a means of asking questions
● Collaborative design and knowledge exchange
● Participant improved skills in design and build
What can we take forward?
1. Intersecting narratives & multi-scalar approach
Resolve Collective’s knowledge and experience in the local context provided insight into the history of Croydon and created a backdrop for future narratives.
2. Imaginary futures
The storyboarding of future narratives and imaginations of Croydon engaged the participants in critical discourse about the history of sites and creative ways of reactivating them
3. Thinking through making
The making exercise helped connect the narratives and consolidate these into quick exploratory installation pieces that link to broader spatial and imaginative narratives of space
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Reflections
One of the key shared reflections from ASF-UK has been to learn from participatory methods employed by other collectives/ groups who work in a similar field and to bring those methods forward as teaching methodologies. The series was an occasion / opportunity for ASF-UK to lean into other processes and share expertise/ knowledge within a situated network and locality.
Learnings are reflections for ASF-UK
1. Drawing organisational parallels
Parallels between the shorter term workshops and a longer term replication of the DESINC programme is important, but not vital.
2. The purpose of a short programme
Testing partnerships and creating new relationships in the city.
Shorter workshops generate a test-bed of ideas, relationships and partnerships. The theme of the workshop can develop more organically and be more specific, hence attracting a more targeted audience.
3. A situated network of collaborators
Potential to build an enriched network of collectives, organisations or groups who may prove pivotal to how we situate future ASF-UK programmes programme in London.
4. Diversity of approaches and methodologies
The richness of the experience has been accentuated by the difference of approach from each group, and the techniques used for engaging participants which created an experimental space facilitated by ASF-UK.
Learnings and reflections on impact
● The workshops form part of a wider conversation around scaling impact. A key outcome of the process is to retain a frequency of actions as part of the programme, while developing longer term goals and partnerships in parallel.
● Consider how the impact of the programme can be scaled by reaching the right audiences.
● There is a community of practice advocating for Diversity and inclusion on behalf of various groups. It is an area that we haven’t engaged with but this line of work could point towards a way of having a voice in this area.
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Next Steps
Thoughts on next steps
● There is a need to consider creating a spectrum of activity durations that can span between a short CPD up to a year-long academic module (1 day, 1 week, 1 month).
● Collaboration with a secondary network that has been generated from the workshops within disability studies and its interface with architecture.
● A more public facing event with collaborators to disseminate, share and discuss later in 2023.
‘Involving some of the community representatives in activities might lead to more diverse discussion instead of predominantly designers/architect background people.’
‘For the particular issue of Croydon Migration and Displacements I missed hearing the voice of local non architectural people, and other disciplines view on this like socially ,anthropology, economic , etc.... this is ambitious for the time we had.’
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Workshop Outputs: Day 1
Negotiated Writing in the 2023 Serpentine Pavilion, A Table
Workshop Outputs: Day 3
Thinking through Making, with Resolve Collective, Group 1
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Thinking through Making, with Resolve Collective, Group 2 16
Workshop Outputs: Day 2
created in Workshop 2, with Thomas Aquilina
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Catalogue
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