Heterotopia of the commoning: a brief conceptual analysis to frame the design on accessibility and public space.
Space and Mobilities Studies 76-450/850 Professor Marian Aguiar Student Paúl Moscoso Riofrío
Introduction
This research paper is the result of a semester-long study around the topics of space and mobility. Although these topics are very broad, it has been possible to obtain a general revision throughout the semester and each student has been able to choose a distinct topic. Besides the scope of this class, for me focusing on a topic of space has resulted unusual attractive because I have been able to parallel my own thesis proposal, as a master of urban design candidate, with a promising subject inside the Space and Mobilities Studies course. Such topic is heterotopias, Michel Foucault`s idea of space within space, or as he described; “worlds within worlds, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside” (Johnson 2017).
Attempting to discover and understand such concept has entangled with my research work on spaces of commoning. Such spaces, usually located in contested areas, have been identified in urban history for many generations, nonetheless is not until the recent crisis where society starts to appreciate the act of commoning as a valid outcome. As such, common space is “… space produced and used as common, people do not simply use an area given by an authority (local state, state, public institution, etc.). People
actually mold this kind of space according to their collective needs and aspirations (…) Whereas public space necessarily has the mark of an identity, common space tends to be constantly redefined: commons space HAPPENS and is shaped through collective action.” (Stavrides 2016).
Thus, I see ideal for my subsequently work to focus on researching these concepts and validate with my ideas of use of public space. The peculiarity that my interests bisect both courses, give me the opportunity to explore different approaches to focus on different aspects. This can later clarify my ideas for a further develop of the thesis project.
In that way, I am validating my research related to the commoning and hetererotopias with a start point to look at our human conditions and urbanity. Then I will gravitate around the very concepts and attempt to extract enough evidences from authors like Foucault and others to make us think of the access of public space as a Heterotopias of the Commoning. Finally, I will try to explain my thesis briefly, where I can fit the previous ideas to understand better the space I intend to design, and concluding with a set of reflections and thoughts that I have learned and will continue for the sake of the final work.
Contested urban spaces and the question of accessibility in a global crisis.
“While one-fifth of the world’s population is migrating to cyberspace and access relationships, the rest of humanity is still caught up in the world of physical scarcity.” Jeremy Rifkin
Talking about incompatible spaces as one of the principles of Foucault`s Heterotopias makes me think about the notion of space in contemporary cities. Public and private realms dominate the control and development of space in urban areas since the growth of cities in the First Industrial Revolution. It was during the nineteenth and first half of the twenty centuries when urban areas all over the globe developed extensive networks of transportation systems that enabled the space to accommodate the needs of dwelling, working, and leisure for millions of newly arrived workers. At the same time advances in public health and education created the conditions for a thriving middle-class which feed the engines of production and consumption societies. Arriving at a different stage, this "development" entered the confines of the planet via commercial routes and means of mass consumption. By the end of the century, the world is profoundly altered and connected in a time defined as the Anthropocene. Nevertheless, since the late 1990s and especially throughout the twenty-first century there has been commotional successive of crisis events that in many ways have shaken our social, political, economic, cultural spaces. There is a sensation that our generation and probably the successive ones will be living in a state of crisis endlessly. This condition has challenged our perception of space in the urban areas and confronts ourselves in highly contested public and private spaces.
From the Global North where political instability has created exceptional indifference among constitutes not seeing their main problems solved. At the street level, there are no structural answers to issues like affordable housing or the privatization of public space, while a pantomimic spectacle of political scandals covering the first pages of newspapers and prime time of news shows produces at the end of the day no real solutions. The economic sector is currently amalgamating different industrial areas into
enormous conglomerates that convey power affecting the lives of millions with zero or marginal control of the state. The inequality conditions between very wealthy groups and the rest of citizens are increasing. Public spaces in the Global North countries, especially in the U.S., have experienced the redefinition of what constitutes to be open space. One of the most infamous sights is the restrictions on public spaces or private owned public space (P.O.P.S). Limitations like for example hours of operation and countless sets of rules in parks condition to behave according to norms that not necessarily represent the ideology or personality of the individual or group. In another stage of measuring, to be more sinister, public space is handed over to society until the state or entity decides otherwise, that is, its power or influence is threatened.
The public response to the alteration of space in cities constitutes what David Harvey called the Right to the City. He said, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.� (Harvey 2012)
In today's cities, there is the condition that altering urban spaces for the common good represent the willingness of citizens to fight for the right to the city. Either in a protesting fashion or pursuing a formal attitude, people can be empowered to legitimize their space. But the results have several nuances, from the real ideological driven proposals to alternative ones. Some groups capture the critical momentum to break the inequality in cities labeling themselves as alternatives, i.e., "yuppies," "hippies," "artists," "greens,�
“LGBTs” “millennials.” They declare similar principles as Harvey's yet adheres to the same dividing system of space and power of the status quo. None to forget, not every group has resulted equally successful, and there are people that have fewer opportunities to obtain these rights over in the urban realm. They become depended on charity foundations and the welfare state system to survive. Homeless, mentally ill, drug addicts, refugees, and illegal immigrants are all part of this second group, but ultimately low-income residents that have seen their condition of living become unstable as the dismantling of the social welfare system becomes shattered. Eventually, these series of problems have developed what real estate agents, urban planners, and politics called gentrification and displacement of these groups. Urban space is tremendously affected by these last issues.
To the Global South where similar problems affect the public space from another perspective. The ruling political groups have become part or closely linked with the interested economic groups. Either by legal or illegal mechanisms, the political and economic power is privileged and benefited at the expense of the rest. An outcome of this tendency is the restricted access to public space by a smaller number of people who has the privilege of controlling, owning, and occupying prime patches of urban spaces while impeding the entrance to other. The restrictive access generates a biased judging system of accepting or not who enters through, using instruments like membership, social affinity or in worst cases the color of skin or the way to dress. Urban sprawl and suburbanization models have been widely exported from the U.S. and have produced gated communities, private commercial complexes and country clubs and other amenities perceived as a fashionable way of living, working and enjoying a new lifestyle. These areas have confined spaces with excellent infrastructure and security benefits,
while the state has to seek to provide some level of decent conditions for other communities. It could be said that city centers or all developed areas inside cities have suffered lesser extended this situation. Nevertheless, the reality that the majority of the population confront in respect of access to public space is that any general area suitable to offer some decent open space is scarce and heterogeneous.
The reality of the small middle-class group and the ever-growing low-income group is subversive and degrading. Therefore, space is not necessarily the primary problem to solve, when there are inequalities like essential access to energy, drinking water, waste collection, education or adequate health care. Besides the long list of basic needs, access to digital information or new technologies is likewise inaccessible in these areas. This has created a significant social gap between hyper-connected regions in cities and others that cannot equally connect. The conflicted over physical space, exceed the accessibility since access to the public space is not only controlled by the state or groups of power, but its advantage over the rest of people create a dispossession of the space itself by those who cannot access regular channels of demarcation of the territory. People encounter this issue in the urban space are commonly associated with slums and illegal possession of land. Massive evictions can happen at any time when economic interests overlap where people live or work, or worse when a new urban master plan omit intentionally parts of cities.
In this way, a third space has emerged apart from the public-private dichotomy, and this space is acting as an opportunity to counterbalance the aggressive over-control of space and the dismantling of the welfare state in the Global North. While also represent an alternative in the Global South as a form of sharing and togetherness in communities
where the state apparatus or the rampant privatization of land and resources don`t benefit the vast majority and put many in a condition of having to fight for survival and self-protection.
If urban design is asked to resolve the contemporary issues affecting cities. What could it be the role of design to deliver proper responses to the occupation and accessibility of spaces? For an in-depth analysis of the endeavor, the following section aims to define heterotopia and the act of commoning concepts to demonstrate the alternative of such space.
Defining Heterotopia and Commoning
“Heterotopias are capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible.” Michel Foucault
The emancipation from the public-private spaces in the act of commoning creates the conditions to declare the commoning as a sort of heterotopic space. By Michel Foucault seminal definition, Heterotopia is the kind of space that overlay different sites into one (Foucault 1967). In 1967 Michel Foucault delivered the lecture ‘Des espaces autres’ (‘Of other spaces’) to the Cercle d’études architecturales in Paris. Calling for a spatial analytics, he labeled ‘hétérotopologie’ and described six principles that distinguish heterotopic spaces from all others.
These principles have been synthesis by Peter Johnson, leading authority on Foucault’s heterotopia:
1. Become established in all cultures but in diverse forms (especially as sites of ‘crisis’ or later ‘deviation’). 2. Mutate and have specific operations at different points in history. 3. Juxtapose in a single space several incompatible spatial elements. 4. Encapsulate spatiotemporal discontinuities or intensities. 5. Presuppose an ambivalent system of opening/closing, entry/ exit, distance/penetration. 6. Have a specific operation in relation to other spaces as, for example, illusion or compensation. (Johnson 2017)
Heterotopia has been used in the architectural discourse as a theoretical tool to suggest and propose new conditions or situations happening in the public realm. Christine Boyer describes the ability to change that heterotopia represented for the architecture profession. She announced such prominence here: “Foucault’s voice was accepted eagerly for it paralleled architects’ new interest in the spatial composition of contemporary cities and their desire to leave behind the abstract spaces of modernism with their distribution of autonomous land uses and tower in the park schemes” (Boyer 2008). The notions of Foucault`s heterotopia connect with initial ideas of architects and planner in the late 1960s that the model used to act over city might not be the adequate.
As in the 1960s leading figures and movements helped reshape the way cities were threatened. It is perhaps coincidental (as Boyer suggested) that Foucault`s capitular
concept of heterotopia permeated in the way of architects and planners thinking about space. Speculative speaking or not, fifty years later another group of activists is raising their voices to declare the inability of the status quo to provide adequate urban spaces for humans and even non-humans living beings. Groups have become rebels or radicals denouncing the problems in our cities. Coincidentally the topic of commoning and heterotopia resonate in the contemporary discourse as it did in the past.
As part of the current studio project, my definition of the commons or the act of commoning is the process of negotiating collective resources. These resources can be either physical and tangible like a place in the neighborhood or a forest, but also a monetary or a digital resource. Regarding space in commoning, it can be seen not precisely just as a physical space but a threshold space that emerges from the process of negotiation.
A result of this process can become an alternative to living in our contemporary world, in this way, commoning the space also represents a form of active living in a contested space. As such, it offers an option beyond the distinction between private and public spaces in which the hegemonic division of power and social structures are concerned with preserving the dominance of who mandates the rules and how a citizen behaves in it. There are various circumstances where communities negotiate their resources and even challenge our perception of how space should be used.
The commoning definition as an overlapping of the public and private space, and an act of collective shared space where communities govern themselves and support each other, in a way encompasses the idea of heterotopic space where contemporary space is
a place that exists for itself and is close to itself. The commoning far from being fully developed and rooted can represent the effort of our generation of practitioners and thinkers to give a resolution to the question of access to contested spaces that see architecture not only as a commodity but an exchange of values. This condition can be broadly interpreted in the principles of heterotopic spaces.
For example, the garden analogy of Foucault´s concept; “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world, and then it is the totality of the world.� (Foucault 1967). What for the author represent an allegoric superimposing symbolism over a physical space, could also be a commoning space where a garden can turn into a platform for emancipatory power and education, or a place to fight for affordable housing while squatting a piece of public land. Even though it might sound romantic, this concept represents a conceptual appreciation of the notion of heterotopia in the commoning which can have various practical outcomes to study.
From the case studies I have research, one of this heterotopic spaces could be Prinzessinen Garten. This space is a temporary community garden in the district of Kreuzberg, Berlin. It is a place run by a group of volunteer neighbors and activists. Since 2009 they have transformed a state-owned brownfield into a green oasis, in which residents grow local, organic and healthy food, biodiversity thrives, and the community can meet and engage in a more sustainable life in common. This urban garden has proved that hands-on activities and a self-organized platform can turn a community for an emancipatory power determination. Plus, the site offers everyone the chance to interpret their way to achieve the idea of food production and gardening. Finally, the Laube, which is a wooden structure inside the garden, it becomes a beacon in the process as a built
element that invites everyone in the community to question about social and ecological issues in their territory.
Image 1: The community inside Prinzessinen Garten have a common space to get food and other services. Image credit: Paúl Mossoro Riofrío
Image 2: Prinzessinen Garten offer itself as a educational platform where anyone can negotiate the space and develop a project around food. Image credit: Paúl Mossoro Riofrío
Image 3: The Laube constitutes an architectural space where anyone can access and use it at their whim. Image credit: Paúl Mossoro Riofrío
Understanding these multivalence perspectives in the space can demonstrate the opportunities and challenges that a heterotopic space for commoning potentially has. The ability of a contested urban site to be reactivated and disrupt the current inequality and oppressed conditions could represent the next task.
To acknowledge the heterotopic spaces in the commoning, there is the opportunity to see the future thesis project as an entry point in the notion of Foucault`s central idea; to be analytical of the space. An important contemporary theoretical figure that has developed this notion is Andres Jaque, a Spanish architect who define the public space as “a space constituted by collective performance, made so by the way it is experienced, and it is always in transition” (Jaque 2017). For Jaque as for Foucault, public space could always be in transition. It is essential to understand these ideas for the development of the thesis because, as an urban designer, the ability to analyze and envision a project sensible for
the community and with the ability to resist dominant powers should be a decision made by the very start of the process.
Architects and urban planners can have the political resolution to see contemporary spaces as a form of heterotopic space able to produce empowered people and foster their big ideas. As Jaque in the same article “Politics do Not Happen in Squares” proclaims that: “the distinction between the spaces of publicness and the spaces of autonomy has made us accept the possibility of architecture as a neutral provider of space, able to host whatever ideology humans happen to produce. But architecture is never neutral, and there is no space apart from constellations of material dependencies... it is in the empowerment of these constellations that architecture can still be a champion of publicness” (Jaque 2017).
Going further empowered by ideas of Foucault and others, the design idea for the thesis aims to learn from the commoning practices and give a response to a contested space in the Global South. For that, I will continue to demonstrate the thesis proposal as a tool opening the discussion for a proper outcome of the previous chain of thinking.
Thesis proposal: Public spaces in contested spaces: Tying loosed ends in the Estero Salado to access the waterfront.
“The street is more than a spatial support of the circulation of people and goods. Yet, as stands, these increasingly privatized and exclusionary spaces serve very little other than producing and consuming.� Stavros Stavrides
Per the previous part, the following section is the result of thinking in the way to give a proper answer to various questions. These are:
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How to design space rethinking the boundaries of common-public / commonprivate space?
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How to adapt know-how practices into distinct contested spaces where realities and conditions change?
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How to design, in the urban realm, thinking in the ability to access to produce a trigger in how society recognizes space as a game changer equation?
These questions are intrinsically related to the idea of commoning as an alternative third space to the public and private realms. No to forget that this idea, the commoning, could also be related as a heterotopic space, I have begun to return to these questions by providing a specific milieu and its challenges to confront the potential designed space.
The milieu chosen is located in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. This city is the largest and chief port of the country. Situated in a low-lying settlement with a hot and humid climate, west of the Guayas River Estuary, nowadays the metropolitan area has become a place for industrial and commercial development and population growth. Consequences of these conditions are; land appropriation for further development agro-industrial businesses, wealth accumulation, and urban sprawl has privatized significant areas of the city, while large-scale immigration of rural workers confronts the operation of the city with growing slum areas. The city is also the third most vulnerable in the world to the effects of climate change regarding damages and costs (Duc 2013). As seen in the first part of the paper, Guayaquil meet the condition of a contested space affected by external and internal forces.
In order to recognize the problem of space and accessibility, the scope of the study is reduced to the Estero Salado canal. This is a natural canal part of the estuarine system of the Guayas River. It is composed of branches crossing the city center and is divided into three segments. Upstream; where there are several middle and high-income residential areas, and institutions like universities. A center section; which contains lower-income residential areas or slums and some green remnants. Finally, downstream; where the port logistics and industrial complexes are located along by the natural landscape of the river. There are severe social and environmental problems, and efforts to recover the site has proved to be inconsistent with the context or expensive and practically unrealistic. The questions and the milieu have constructed the possibility to envision a design approach. However, to take it to a thesis project, the following four main challenges are fundamental issues understand first.
1. Isolation: A global trend to privatized and developed gated communities is disconnecting patches of the city from the rest. This situation has transformed areas in a successive assemble of fences and security controls. While affluent people walled themselves inside residential developments, malls and office towers; the city lose its ability to offer retail and dwell in an egalitarian matter. The city as a port for goods and people have ample external access necessary for the economy, yet areas inside the proper city lack of accessibility, besides problems of transportation and links needed for an efficient connection. Hills and swampy areas are notable exposing this physical nonaccessibility. Other forms of access are evident in slum communities.
2. Delusional planning: The state observing the lack of private investment thinks that the ideal development to overcome the necessity of deprived areas must come from a topdown approach. A much advertisement propaganda and a political agenda made any intervention more a display of fanfare, and ultimately an illusion than a concrete project. People living in settlements where these changes are supposed to happen, face the instability to confront a plan that doesn´t consider their basic needs or even threat to evict their homes for the renovation to start taking place.
3. Vulnerability: As a coastal city, Guayaquil faces a set of uncertainties in the near future because of sea level rise, change in weather patterns and other environmental issues that scare to put in risk thousands of lives. The majority of these lives are located in the most impoverished sectors where rapid urbanization has pushed thousands into unsafe conditions.
4. Informality and scarcity: The very poor are the group to experience the worst of all challenges. People who have few options to find a meal or a roof to sleep are people who barely can occupy their daily life seeking an ideal occupation of the space. For them, any informal way of life represents their only income, and their routine is marked by a deficiency of all kinds of essential services.
Once identify the thesis questions, milieu and challenges, the idea is to continue next semester proposing a proper design for the area. I am conscious of the necessity to understand how to operate in a particular context that will settle down my inquiries and open a broad discussion although always reminder the concrete, practical application.
This thesis could lead to an intervention over space with the possibility to create a proposal where people negotiate its resources. A contested space that through design can be adapted and be resilient to external and internal forces. Finally, I can demonstrate that using the proposal as a staging site to be critical in the right of the city.
Conclusions
As in Foucault original thinking, the idea of a place without a place is stimulating the range of possibilities of a thesis project. By analyzing the commoning under his principle, heterotopia, there is the interest to take the theoretical framework and deepen in the reflection of the application in a contemporary contested space. The issue of commoning and heterotopia are not just latent but indicate a valid outcome to the oppression of the conditions that affect almost every space in the Global North and the Global South. As others thinkers identified in this paper, like Stavrides or Jaque, I have validated the ideas
of heterotopic spaces as a condition of practice in the commons that challenge the perception of space in the traditional architectural debate and appears as an opportunity for acting in a negotiation process.
I can reflect extracting from Foucault’s principles the adequate ideas around the commoning as an initial approach that will link next to the other sources and finally my thesis project. I think two goals can be possible; a practical response to a specific milieu and a starting point to reflect the attitude for prosperous living conditions in the cities of our era by adequate accessing the public realm. Taking a milieu in the Global South is to be conscious of the necessity to act over the access of space in a particular complexity position. Nevertheless, as the practice of commoning has demonstrated in other parts of the world, the shared resources and negotiation of the space can reactivate valuable areas in cities for the ones who most needed no matter the impediments or constraints. Using these cases as lessons learned and tools, I can begin to think in the power of a proved process that could potentially lead to an intervention in a specific space.
Foucault describes heterotopias as “localizable utopias” or “actually realized utopias” (Johnson 2017), he said; “I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror.” (Foucault 1967). Operating to imaging a project in a contested space give me the opportunity to think in such condition. To believe in the potential of an equalitarian and truly open space where individuals or a whole community can access the scarce public space without the superimposition of controls either from the public or the private sector. To consider this "in-between" space as a heterotopia and the process inside as a commoning, I can take the opportunity to presume the future space as a benchmark in
reacting positively to our trouble conditions and uncertainties relating our political, social and economic reality.
Same as in other examples of Foucault`s heterotopia like the Puritan community in North America or the Jesuit colonies in South America, once a form of original utopias turned into reality gave the opportunity to realize a practical exercise of an idea that tried to create a better space. In the same way, I expect to emulate conditions that I have identified in the case studies of the present studio to put in practice in the contested space for the thesis project. Finally, I have learned from researching this paper that the spatial analyze needed to happen to understand heterotopias and the act of commoning represent an effective intentional approach to an architectural question over accessibility and space. I have been able to examine the future project, but above all, I have been able to consolidate my intentions and ideas to convey in the appropriate validity of design in cities.
Bibliography
Boyer, M. Christine. 2008. "The many mirrors of Foucault and their architectural reflections." In Heterotopia and the City: public space in a postcivil society, by Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter, 53 -73. New York: Routledge. Duc, Tran Viet. 2013. "Which Coastal Cities Are at Highest Risk of Damaging Floods? New Study Crunches the Numbers." World Bank. 08 19. Accessed 12 12, 2017. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/08/19/coastal-cities-at-highestrisk-floods. Foucault, Michel. 1967. Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Paris.
Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. New York: Verso. Jaque, Andres. 2017. "Politics do not happen in squares." In Public Space? Lost and Found, by Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman Gediminas Urbonas. Boston: MIT Press. Johnson, Peter. 2017. "Michel Foucault’s ideas on heterotopia." Heterotopian Studies. Accessed 12 13, 2017. http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/. Stavrides, Stavros. 2016. Common Space: The City as Commons. London: ZED Books.