AGENCY
KPI
AGONISM
L ABOUR LOGISTICS
BORDER
METHOD
BUILDING
NATURE
BUSINESS
OWNERSHIP PR ACTICE
CARE
PROTOCOLS
COMMONS
PUBLIC
DIGITAL
QUESTIONS
돌연변이
RESEARCH
EDUCATION
SOLIDARIT Y
ארץ
TERRITORY
EUROPE
TR ANSL ATION
EXPERIMENT
URBAN
FLEXIBILIT Y
VALUE
FUTURE
VIRTUAL
GEOGR APHY
WASTE
HOME
乡
INTELLIGENCE
X-R AY
JUSTICE
YOUTH
KNOWLEDGE
ZODIAC
aa Files Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square London wc1b 3es t +44 (0)20 7887 4000 aaschool.ac.uk Publisher AA Publications, The Architectural Association Editor Maria Shéhérazade Giudici Advisory Board Eva Franch i Gilabert, Mark Cousins, Guillermo López Ibañez, Eyal Weizman Technical Editor Shumi Bose, Ryan Dillon, Julia Dawson Editorial Assistant Gili Merin, Rory Sherlock Design Boris Meister, Oliver Long Font digitization Jules Estèves
Thanks to the generous support of the Mike Davies Charitable Settlement, KPF, Ziba Ardalan and Pierre de Weck, Joanna Bacon, Deborah Berke, Norman Chang, Edward Cullinan, Drawing Matter Trust, Piers Gough, Kim Herforth Nielsen (3XN Architects), Hanif Kara (AKT II), Crispin Kelly, George L Legendre, John Pawson, Yana Peel, Patrik Schumacher, Richard Sennett, Benedetta Tagliabue, Nader Tehrani, Artur Walther. The contents of aa Files are derived from the activities of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Founded in 1847, the aa is the uk’s oldest independent school of architecture, offering undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees in architecture and related fields. In addition, the Architectural Association is an international membership organisation, open to anyone with an interest in architecture. For further information visit aaschool.ac.uk or contact the Admissions Office aa School of Architecture 36 Bedford Square London wc1b 3es
Printed by Die Keure, Belgium No 76, 2019 Contents © Architectural Association and the Authors issn 0261-6823 isbn 978-1-9996277-1-3
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The Architectural Association (Inc) is a Registered (Educational) Charity No 311083 and a Company limited by guarantee Registered in England No 171402 Registered office as above
AGENCY PUBLIC WORKS 8
AGONISM CRISTINA GOBERNA PESUDO 11
MOAD MUSBAHI 16
BORDER TATIANA BILBAO, AYESHA GHOSH, IWAN BAAN 24
BUILDING MARK COUSINS 30
BUSINESS JAMES VON KLEMPERER 32
SERGEY KUZNETSOV 34
CARE ELKE KR ASNY 38
COMMONS AMICA DALL, GILES SMITH 40
DIGITAL PATRIK SCHUMACHER 46
돌연변이 MINSUK CHO 53
EDUCATION PEGGY DEAMER 55
ארץ GILI MERIN 57
EUROPE LOVE DI MARCO, FLAVIEN MENU 68
EXPERIMENT THEODORE SPYROPOULOS 70
FLEXIBILIT Y OLIVER WAINWRIGHT 77
FUTURE ELIA ZENGHELIS 83
GEOGR APHY DAVID ADJAYE 85
HOME ANNA PUIGJANER, GUILLERMO LOPEZ 90
INTELLIGENCE LUCY STYLES, RYUE NISHIZAWA 96
JUSTICE JOANNE MARINER 98
KNOWLEDGE KIM COURREGES, FELIPE DE FERRARI, FRANCISCO JORDAN 100
KPI FINN WILLIAMS 106
L ABOUR ANDREAS RUMPFHUBER 110
LOGISTICS MARINA OTERO VERZIER 118
METHOD GILLES RETSIN 123
NATURE DAVID GISSEN 126
OWNERSHIP DAVID KIM 130
PR ACTICE DARK MATTER LABS 134
PROTOCOLS ARISTIDE ANTONAS, THANOS ZARTALOUDIS 139
PUBLIC JOSEP MARIA MONTANER 143
QUESTIONS 144
RESEARCH GIULIA FOSCARI 145
SOLIDARIT Y PLATON ISSAIAS 149
TERRITORY PIER VITTORIO AURELI 152
TR ANSL ATION PEDRO IGNACIO ALONSO 156
URBAN UMBERTO NAPOLITANO, CYRILLE WEINER 162
VALUE MARIANA MAZZUCATO, RAINER KATTEL 172
VIRTUAL SPACE POPULAR 176
WASTE DK OSSEO-ASARE, YASMINE ABBAS 179 YOUTH PNYX, DUE 198
乡 JINGRU CYAN CHENG 184 AA FILES 76
X-R AY BEATRIZ COLOMINA 189 ZODIAC ESLWHERE 201
WASTE
DK OSSEO -ASARE & YASMINE ABBAS
Waste is a construct. Masquerading variously as refuse, rubbish, trash, litter, garbage, junk, dreck, dregs, dross, slag, slop, recrement, offal, rubble, debris – terms that are similar, but also not – waste shifts meanings according to scale, degree, type, quality and how it comes to be. More specifically, waste in architecture is simultaneously the interhuman fabrication of the absence of value, a misreading of the laws of nature, and a condition which denotes worth, isomorphically, by means of both its own existence and nonoccurrence. The idea that something can be worthless is a modern concept, inscribed via semiologics of modernisation that span global trade and industrialisation regimes. Expansive modes of economic development prioritise optimisation linked to efficiency targets, in order to meet productivity goals and thereby achieve profit gains. Making productivity paramount – by placing efficiency at the centre of production – orients reference frames around value-creation; hence people (in the globalised ‘West’) talk about things being a ‘waste of time’, 'waste of money’ or 'waste material’ and even describe an unproductive person as a ‘waste of space’. Because waste manifests through the collective supposition that materials, space, entities or design content can have no value, waste is a form of binder. Operating from below, waste constitutes a vast array of binding agents that connect people to each other and their environment, together with systems of belief, perception, memory and translation that jointly delimit (in) significance. But although waste demands a system out of which to emerge in order to demonstrate an apparent lack of value – the unique status of negligibility afforded waste by this selfsame system offers possibilities for emancipation. To the extent that waste is a human construct – nothing can be entirely exempt of value since, in actuality, everything offers some measure of utility to something else – how can we make sense of the time, space and materials that people classify according to waste nomenclatures? How can we (re)evaluate, reformat, relocate and restructure our (mis)conceptions of waste, in order to reframe design futures globally? Scrap yields value. Infiltrating the Korle Lagoon in central Accra, capital city of Ghana, the Agbogbloshie scrapyard is a contested territory located not in Agbogbloshie – an area named for a god that lives in the Odaw River – but in Old Fadama, a slum community occupying reclaimed land, adjacent to Agbogbloshie Market (the city’s wholesale vegetable market), the Onion Market and, until recently, the now-relocated Yam Market. At a number of stations scattered nearby, close to Accra’s industrial area, intercity buses arrive from Tamale, the capital city of Ghana’s Northern Region that many people living and working in Agbogbloshie call home.1
Rendered as a blank and undefined zone on city maps, potential prime real estate but prone to flooding, planned as part of Accra’s central park but instead infamous for unregulated e-waste processing that threatens environment and human health, the Agbogbloshie scrapyard is a vibrant shifting landscape of informal sector scrapping and recycling activities coupled with micro-manufacturing.2 Across the site, stockpiles of scrap, flows of materials and money perform complexity in collaboration with a transnational web of masters and apprentices, buyers and sellers, middlemen, consumers, repair technicians and grassroots makers, bankers, microlenders and mobile money agents, customs officers, cartel bosses and import/export companies, scaling up and down the value chain. Scrap dealers based out of Agbogbloshie mine the city and the West African subregion for a wide range of obsolete equipment types – from automobiles, airplanes, buildings, heavy machines and telecommunications infrastructure to household waste and all kinds of e-waste (end-of-life electrical and electronic equipment). Subsequent conveyance back to Agbogbloshie allows for dismantling and disassembly to extract parts and components that can be repaired, refurbished or recombined, as well as to recover materials – from glass to plastics to metals and printed circuit boards, or PCBs – that can be shredded, pelletised, otherwise recycled or transformed into affordable commercial products by cottage industries and artisanal workshops located within the vicinity of the scrapyard. Industrial ontologies distinguish waste (materials that have monetary worth approaching magnitude of zero, because they resist ready exploitation) from scrap (materials that yield value given their recyclability). Across the spectrum of industrial production and product lifecycle mapping, waste consists of byproducts of manufacturing processes that are unfit for reuse or portions of post-consumer products that are considered either undesirable or unusable. Conversely, scrap bears commercial market value due to its immanent capacity for recycling into feedstock for new manufacturing. To decolonise waste has now become an urgent challenge. Despite rising rates and distribution of ecocide at the planetary scale, the pernicious business strategy of planned obsolescence 3 – whereby products are designed to fail prematurely and preclude affordable repair, in order to drive market demand – has become standard practice. Viewed against global society’s technology fetish, waste is the fallout of contemporary culture of consumption and the Agbogbloshie scrapyard has become the symbol of its failure: Notwithstanding that is neither, the Agbogbloshie scrapyard frequently features in environmental reporting and investigative news exposés as ‘the most toxic place on earth’4 and ‘the world’s largest e-waste dump’.5
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The insistence of NGOs and international media organisations on recirculating these mischaracterisations stems from a multiplicity of motivations. Some seek to instrumentalise Agbogbloshie as an apocalyptic call to environmental action – before it is ‘too late’ to ‘save the planet’. 6 Others exhibit fascination with ‘discovering’ dark and ‘unknown’ territories that represent waste maximums. These epic wastelands – typically found faraway in exotic locales of the Global South – engender data, text and images that digitally represent a ultimate perversion of techno-society.7 By association, the preponderant narrative of rich countries dumping e-waste in poor countries, thereby contributing to proliferation of informal sector scrapyards in peripheral territories, mirrors the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) in economic geography. PHH
From an ecological point of view Agbogbloshie is a paradox – the scrapyard is a highly polluted landscape that also displays agency, collectively, as a synergistic hub 8 in a larger network of informal waste processing sites. While the PHH correlates the duality of production and pollution with low costs and regulation, spaces such as the Agbogbloshie scrapyard emerge equally through confluence – the nonrandom coincidence of ambiguous land rights and ownership, interrelations of waste and scrap, proximate and flexible mobility circuits, and agglomeration effects of resilient hyperlocal clusters of knowledge, expertise and capacity 9 that perceive, bestow and manipulate value in spaces and materials where otherwise it would remain latent, invisible and intangible. Contrasted against highly structured systems of control that re-project resource exploitation
proposes that industries from more developed countries tend to transfer or remotely deploy their polluting activities into less-developed countries because minimal levels of environmental regulation and enforcement combined with cheap labour create an attractive business environment. However, such portrayals of informal recycling hubs and the grassroots maker ecosystems they support, perpetuate North-South asymmetries of power and production. The binary opposition of the West as both originator of technology and its primary market, versus the rest of the world as secondary users and recipients of its waste risks reinscribing the geopolitical dogma of colonialism and concomitant legacies of alienation.
and throwaway lifestyles into masscult, entangling architecture and the production of the city within a global economic apparatus geared for self-destruction, Agbogbloshie is a place where waste takes on new meaning. In Agbogbloshie, making is a process that encompasses remaking and unmaking. More than a situation or a scenario – and not unique to Agbogbloshie – this approach to circular economy represents a paradigm that precludes waste and references vernacular modes of technology production and material culture. Ways in which grassroots artisans and technicians manipulate elements and materials drawn from the urban waste stream at Agbogbloshie – to repair
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devices and refurbish equipment according to self-made design logics that prioritise ‘making do’ over following (externally-defined) conventions or protocols – create a system of remanufacturing that does not follow the rules. The phenomenon of adaptive reuse of technology across industrialising countries of the Global South, overlapping with much of the non-aligned territories of the Third World,10 enfolds the concept of bricolage put forward by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss as counterpoint to the productions of the craftsman and the engineer.11 Whereas the latter convert natural and raw materials into artefacts by means of comprehensive design, the bricoleur works with waste, improvisationally. Thus bricolage means to ‘remix’ reality using the tools and resources that are readily available. In this sense, bricolage is both a form of limitation and an exploit that liberates matter from prescribed purpose and design from original intent. Throughout these spaces of nonalignment, a range of terms refashion bricolage in their own language and image – creative bottom-up design and maker practices for locally-responsive innovation that border on the transgressive: ‘jugaad’ in Hindi;12 ‘jua kali’ in Swahili;13 ‘kanju’ in Yoruba,14 ‘Système D’ from the French débrouiller (‘to make do’) used as a catchall phrase to describe tactical mechanics of informal economies globally.15 Operationally, what all these modes of doing and making have in common is that they discover, recover and recirculate marginal value by means of ingenuity. The paradox of paucity is that scarcity in tandem with indeterminacy inspires novel strategies for survival. ‘To make do with whatever is at hand’ 16 in the context of a scrapyard systematically degenerates waste ontologies, subsuming all forms of waste into scrap. In the Agbogbloshie scrapyard – a site notorious for informal sector e-waste processing – such processes of transformation extend to a form of ‘techno-bricolage’ that prefigures the ‘impossibility of pollution’ by remapping the meaning of waste while offering potential to challenge the ‘northsouth technology divide’. 17 Analysis of African maker communities suggests that precedents of ‘generative justice’ exist in indigenous African conceptual frameworks, understood as ‘self-generating or recursive flow of unalienated value.’ 18 With respect to the Agbogbloshie scrapyard in particular, the participatory transdisciplinary co-design initiative the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) amplifies the agency of makers regarding the value they create, by coupling informal recursive maker processes with formal interclass strategic design.19 AMP demonstrates ‘generative waste’ 20 as an alternative and emancipatory framework to extricate ‘closed loop’ material flows from existing systems of economic exploitation. Splicing together strategy and tactics through cooperative design thinking and making, insurgent techno-aesthetic practices out of Agbogbloshie become more than bricolage. Today grassroots makers working in and around the scrapyard transform aluminium from the radiators of refrigerators and air conditioners into cooking pots, discarded roofing sheets into cookstoves, car parts into dumbbells, and carbon steel from old transformers into welding machines. But the more that they individually participate to convert waste into material, tools and currency, the more they collectively repurpose
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waste into scrap, and in so doing unlock a new set of opportunities and constraints. Freeform but not unstructured, fluid but not without order, Agbogbloshie scrapyard exists as a highly polluted ‘electronic landscape’ that doubles as an hypervisible alternate reality, a counter-space or ‘heterotopia’ 21 that both denies and decries the hegemony of contemporary waste regimes. Hakim Bey depicts the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) as a sort of ‘pirate utopia’, a meta-typology of human settlement resonant with how ‘sea-rovers and corsairs’ lived on islands in networked ‘intentional communities, whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if for a short and merry life’. 22 Ever on the verge of demolition and delegitimisation, the Agbogbloshie scrapyard evinces the value of waste by placing it at the centre of hands-on and heuristic approaches to learning-bydoing. Leveraging the ‘art of African micro-politics’, 23 emergent practices of remaking on the ground in Agbogbloshie create a radically open space for both outlaws and citizens of the city to ‘hack back’. Working in this realm to empower people from different backgrounds to crowdsource the reinvention of waste – part of the movement marking a shift from Do-It-Yourself (DIY) to Do-It-Together (DIT) and Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) – the AMP project 24 obliquely serves Saskia Sassen’s call for ‘urbanising technologies’ that seek to materialise the operability of the city’s physical and digital mechanics so as to render the constellation of activities, attitudes and accidents of human and non-human agents simultaneously visible, tangible and comprehensible. In this manner, the city ‘talks back’ 25 and can engender new forms of engagement, whereby citizens of the city can collaboratively retrofit urban spaces, infrastructures and protocols. As scientific and military communities team up to address the threat of ‘space junk’ (human-made debris in orbit around the earth, endangering satellites and space travel), citizens and architects alike nevertheless rely on ever more technology to solve problems generated by technology. Meanwhile, the digital space race for the soul of the city – a global project, led by private corporations, to distribute ‘smartness’ across all architecture through a manifold of digital surveillance – ensures that technology infrastructure continues to grow unchecked. The rise of the global and globalising smart city portends the convergence of architecture and electronics, and extends the ¥€$ regime beyond the physical into the digital domain.26 Consistent with the artifice of social media, which homogenises identity and self-expression even as it polarises positionality, architecture in the current climate of mobility devolves into generic ‘junkspace’.27 Recognising that waste is a non-real aberration from the cyclical nature of design and continuously integrated processes of making, unmaking and remaking, opens up opportunity for its contravention. Emerging practices in architecture factor transformation into the design and fabrication of things to come, synthesising fixer culture and the right to repair, design for disassembly, upcycling, ecology and bio-design methods into transdisciplinary models of making that subvert obsolete conceptualisations of waste. Realising open and inclusive architectures for crafting futures beyond waste demands alternative spaces – spacecraft – that operate as portals to possibility. Launching these mobile nodes across a network of autonomous scrapyards – innovation ecosystems powered by grassroots makers – can interlink human potential with the agency of materials to make, and remake anew.
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DK Osseo-Asare and Yasmine Abbas co-founded Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform. AMP has exhibited at the Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism, Afropixel, and ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. DK is the founder of Low Design Office and Assistant Professor at Penn State University, where he directs Humanitarian Materials Lab. Yasmine is a Faculty Member at Penn State University.
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1 For a general introduction to the Agbogbloshie scrapyard and its urban context, listen to the podcast: africanurbanism.net/conversations-agbogbloshie 2 To learn about the global scrap industry, read: Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). 3 For a starter on planned obsolescence, watch the documentary by Cosima Dannoritzer, The Light Bulb Conspiracy, 2010. 4 Pure Earth [originally published by the Blacksmith Institute and Green Cross Switzerland]. 2013. Top Ten Toxic Threats: Agbogbloshie Dumpsite, Ghana. worstpolluted.org/projects_reports/display/107. 5 February 27, 2014. Agbogbloshie: The World’s Largest E-waste Dump in Pictures. The Guardian [Online]: theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2014/feb/27/ agbogbloshie-worlds-largest-e-waste-dump-in-pictures. 6 Greenpeace. 2008. Poisoning the Poor: Electronic Waste in Ghana. greenpeace.org/archive-international/Global/ international/planet-2/report/2008/9/poisoning-thepoor-electonic.pdf. 7 For an example of this, watch the beginning of this documentary: Vice Video. 2011. The Sakawa Boys. video.vice.com/en_us/video/internet-scamming-inghana/56afa217b579bc97037237f3. 8 See Richard Grant and Martin Oteng-Ababio, ‘Mapping the Invisible and Real ‘African’ Economy: Urban E-Waste Circuitry’ in Urban Geography, vol 33, no 1, pp 1–21. 9 John-Michael Davis, Grace Akese and Yaakov Garb, ‘Beyond the Pollution Haven Hypothesis: Where and why do e-waste hubs emerge and what does this mean for policies and interventions?’ in Geoforum, vol 98, pp 36–45. 10 The ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ (NAM) is a coalition of 120 member countries established in 1961 after the ‘Afro-Asian' Bandung Conference of 1955, initially formed in response to post-colonial exigencies as a consensus-based platform for advancing anti-imperialist multilateralism. During the Cold War era, Third World referred to the majority of the global human population that rejected political alignment with the First World (NATO) or Second World (Soviet Union). In this sense, the term ‘Third World’ is fundamentally about empowerment and self-determination, not deficiency or inadequacy (i.e. being ‘third rate’). See: mnoal.org/ nam-history (last accessed 5-20-2019). 11 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1966), pp 1–33. 12 Navi Radjou, Prabhu Jaideep and Simone Ahuja, Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
13 Steve Daniels, Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Sector (self-published 2010). 14 Dayo Olopade, The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa (Mariner Books, 2015). 15 Robert Neuwirth, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy (New York: Pantheon, 2011) 16 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), p 17. 17 Ginger Nolan, ‘Bricolage…or the Impossibility of Pollution’ in E-flux Architecture: e-flux.com/ architecture/structural-instability/208705/ bricolage-or-the-impossibility-of-pollution. 18 Ron Eglash and Ellen Foster, ‘On the Politics of Generative Justice: African Traditions and Maker Communities’ in What Do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?, (ed) Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Clapperton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2017), pp 117–135. 19 DK Osseo-Asare and Yasmine Abbas, ‘Investigating 3E-materials at Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana’, Paper presented at Raising Awareness for the Societal and Environmental Role of Engineering and (Re) Training Engineers for Participatory Design, Engineering4Society 2015 Conference, Leuven, Belgium. 20 Ron Eglash Ellen Foster (2017), p 132. 21 Michel Foucault, ‘Le corps utopique/les hétérotopies’ in Nouvelles Editions Lignes. foucault.info/documents/ heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en. 22 Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), p 95. 23 David Hetch and Timothy Simone Maliqalim, Invisible Governance: The Art of African Micropolitics (New York: Autonomedia, 1995). 24 See the case study on AMP: Potter, Cher, Osseo-Asare, DK and Mugendi K. M’Rithaa. 2019. Crafting Spaces Between Design and Futures: The Case of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform, Journal of Future Studies, 23(3): 39–56. 25 Saskia Sassen, ‘Open-source Urbanism’ in Domus: domusweb.it/en/opinion/2011/06/29/open-sourceurbanism.html. 26 Rem Koolhaas. Edited transcript of a talk given at the High Level Group meeting on Smart Cities, Brussels, 24 September 2014: ec.europa.eu/archives/ commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/my-thoughtssmart-city-rem-koolhaas.html. 27 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’ in October, vol 100 (2002), pp 175–190.
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