ARQUITECTURA SIN ARQUITECTOS Architectures without architects have rarely been so popular among…architects. From Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to Caracas’s Torre David, without forgetting the historical example of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, we can currently see an important amount of researches and projects targeting iconic architectures whose immanent construction never necessitated an architect’s intervention. Like for every political problem, we are facing simultaneously a question of positioning, and one of production. This fascination for the “architecture without architects” – I am using Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 exhibition’s terms here – almost always exercise itself from outside the object it attempts to describe. Such positioning is however not problematic by definition, but it can become as such when we romanticize the other through a mythical narrative dramatizing what separates us from this otherness. An experience of reality lived from within these architectures would easily dissipate most parts of this mythical narrative. Nevertheless, this experience is often prevented by the myth itself that tends to criminalize populations living in them. The question of the production of such projects and researches is also fundamental. What do we produce? Why do we produce it? For whom do we produce it? The fact that many of these researches integrate numerous architectural drawings of architectures that did not necessitate them to be built, indicates how architects seems to more or less consciously retroactively claim the ownership of these architectures. Similarly, we cannot help but notice that rewards, awards, and salaries attributed to these researches and projects are always distributed to authors and architects and not the populations living within their objects of fascination, despite the fact that the latter’s inhabitants’ political and economic situations are fundamentally precarious. Does that mean that architects should turn their back to architectures that did not need them, in order to focus on their architecture, their stars, and their annual Pritzker Price? Absolutely not. Slums’ and other squats’ architectures can teach us a lot insofar that we are willing to acknowledge both our ignorance and our own responsibility within a political and economic system that forces entire population into a precariousness that is materialized architecturally. Acknowledging that we take more part in the problem than in its solution invites us not to think of our intervention as thaumaturgic or divine. What immanent architectures teach us is that architecture is a political weapon. They do not have the arrogance of thinking of themselves as solutions to a problem: they incarnate simultaneously a cry for political
existence and a spatial and communitarian negotiation. When these architectures are destroyed by local authorities to leave room for new capitalist and/or ideological, the violence exercised on them is also exercised on their inhabitants and their very existence within the city and, by extension, their existence within society. Each day of existence of these architectures therefore expresses the right to the city for their inhabitants in opposition to the spatial domination exercised by the so-called “law of markets” associated to national and municipal governances. It is rare that architects also place themselves in opposition to such domination. The architecture that we contribute to build crystalize too often the dominant relations of economic and political power within the city. The fascination that we have for immanent architectures thus correspond to a creative process contrary to the one with which we are familiar. The humility that we propose is not a renunciation or a useless corporative selfflagellation, but it rather is a learning desire regarding the crucial political implications that architecture – that go much beyond the expertise domain of architects – develops within a given society.
PRECARIOUS ROMA VILLAGE OF ARQUITECTURA SIN ARQUITECTOS NORTHERN PARIS: A FEW CAUTIOUS CONSIDERATIONS Informal Roma village of the Porte des Poissonniers in Paris (December 20, 2015) / Photograph by Léopold Lambert (all rights reserved) So far, the totality of my photographs on this blog were licensed in creative commons, letting anyone use and share them, providing that they mentioned their author and do not financially profit from them. For the first time however, I feel the necessity to keep the copyrights of the ones presented here (above and below), in order to manually check the discourse that they would illustrate on other platforms. This technicality indicates the cautious tone of the following article, the latter being more about how we should speak about the new forms of informality that emerge in some European cities than about these neighborhoods themselves. Sunday morning is the moment of the week when I undertake my research about the spatial politics of the Paris banlieues. This morning, I simply went at the limit of Paris municipality, not far from Saint Ouen, in order to visit the informal village that currently exists on the tracks of the Petite Ceinture between the gates — to enter Paris proper, one has to go through gates (see past article) — that constitute Porte de Clignancourt and Porte des Poissonniers. The Petite Ceinture is a 32-kilometer long railway that surrounds Paris, adding one more “belt” (that is the meaning of ceinture) to the two already existing ones surrounding “Fortress Paris”: the boulevards maréchaux and the boulevard périphérique (highway ring, see past article). The Petite Ceinture does not belong to the city of Paris but to the national railway company (SNCF) that used to transport goods
around Paris between 1852 and 1934. It is now abandoned, and despite the interdiction to walk on it, many Parisians regularly enjoy its relative wilderness inside a highly controlled city. For people who regularly follow the work of architecture or urban planning students, seeing it as a chosen site for one of their projects is never a surprise. No later than two months ago, I gave a tour to Rhode Island architecture students who were going to design fictitious projects on it and, a few weeks later attended a thesis project investigating its Eastern parts. In the recent municipal study to refurbish the Petite Ceinture in the near future (some short portions have been recently open to the public in the South and West), the Northern part where the informal village is setup is considered as a non-interesting “sequence.” The romantic wilderness that seduces architecture students and photographers — for good and bad reasons; this is not the topic here — is indeed not present here. On the following photographs, one can see a Eurostar train starting its trip to London, contrasting already in its comfortable migration with the surrounding makeshift habitat that echo those of migrants in Calais and Dunkerque, not far from the Channel Tunnel, where some of them are arrested every day trying to cross. The people who live in the precarious village of the Petite Ceinture are however not trying to go anywhere else than Paris. Most of them are Roma or Romani, although we should be cautious as this specific ethnic group became a discursive category that applies to all people from Eastern Europe living in a state of great precariousness. Politicians and demagogic journalists/intellectuals want us to believe that, coming from a nomadic culture, it is for their own good that the police regularly evict them from their dwellings and demolish them in a form of self-realizing prophecy — “see how they need to move regularly!”. Hierarchizing racisms is not only a risky exercise, it is also useless, but the impunity with which administrative, police and discursive racism deploys itself upon this population is simply terrifying. Let’s recall that this racism is not new and, in its most extreme form, led to the Porajmos (the Romani Holocaust), which saw the industrial death of half-a-million people by the Nazis during WWII. In this regard, the more recent use of a RATP (Paris public transportation company) tramway in 2011 to evict another Roma camp recalled other forms of misappropriation of French transportation facilities to deport hundreds of thousands of Jews to the camps of the Holocaust. If we now address the question of the precarious village as an architectural formation, here again we have to be cautious in our description. We should neither fetishized it in the way some academics and architects currently do with the various slums of the globe, nor should we deny it a sense of home, however precarious it might be. Fetishizing it would consist in completely disregarding the urgency and duress experienced by its inhabitants. Denying it a sense of home, on the other hand, would suggest the innocuousness of its eviction. In my opinion, the way we should look at it is as a symptom of a radically unequal (and racist, since the criteria of differentiation are based on ethnicity) mode of sovereignty or, rather, in the application of a fundamentally different mode of sovereignty. In this case, the biopolitical regime that controls, surveys and regulates the very lives of its subjects and about which our critique usually focus, does not even apply. This architecture is the result of a sovereignty that only manifests itself through the regular displacing violence deployed by the state institution in charge of such violence: the police. On the contrary of the situation often described on this blog of the banlieues, where the state has often illegitimately renounced to provide the services it provides in other parts of the city but is still present (however
sordidly) in the very walls of social housing buildings, schools, bus stops, etc., the only relation that this informal village will have with the state will be the (violent) end of it. Saying “it’s a shame to see shantytowns reemerging in Europe!” like we often hear, is not only insufficient, it can even legitimize the political discourses that order their demolitions in the name of public health (whose health?). But defending the collective appropriation of an abandoned terrain as a means of survival, although constituting an important short-term political objective, cannot go without the implacable critique of different modes of sovereignty simultaneously applied on a given territory. As the state of emergency is still operative in France (see past article), and, through it, an even greater discriminate police violence than in “normal” times, we can already foresee the violent eviction of the informal village by the police, despite the legal protection of the “winter break” that theoretically protect anyone to be evicted from a privately owned land during the winter months. As my research often examines how the spatial formations of neighborhoods facilitate or not potential militarized suppression within them, I can only fear of the conditions of this eviction: the Petite Ceinture constitutes a urban canyon with no entry/exit (in this case, two of them and their makeshift stairs have been produced by the inhabitants), and whose linearity would allow the police forces to intervene with the implacable zeal that they often enjoy manifesting. Through the following photos, I hope that giving the informal village a visibility — I have seen very little written about it — would sensitivities a political impetus to be formed, but I have to admit that producing such documents can prove risky and also serve opposite objectives. This text therefore finishes in the same way than it started, with the conscience of cautiousness that our discourses and actions should embrace when the precariousness of lives is involved. Further reading can involve a past article about the administrativization of eviction in “Considering that It Is Plausible that Such Events Could Occur Again” (October 2014) All photographs by Léopold Lambert (2015, all rights reserved): No hay qui venir al Perú para observar estos testimonios de precariedad a los que se han acostumbrado a ningunear los propios arquitectos por una indudable posición de intolerancia por un lado y de prepotencia social por el otro. Es evidente que esta situación es producto de las condiciones objetivas del poder que la condicionan y determinan y no son necesariamente producto de la arquitectura en si como diseño de objetos físicos sino de la valoración que se hace de ella y de lo que implica.
LATEST ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE
Dear readers of The Funambulist, The high frequency of publication of the magazine continues with, today, the release of the tenth issue of The Funambulist (March-April 2017) dedicated to Architecture & Colonialism (see description below). As usual, you can purchase the issue in its digital or print+digital form, or decide to support the editorial project in a sustained manner through a monthly or annual subscription — all subscribers have access to the magazine’s full online archives. Sales and subscriptions to the magazine constitute 70% of the project’s incomes (i.e., means of existence); your support is very important!
THE FUNAMBULIST 10 (MARCH-APRIL 2017) ARCHITECTURE & COLONIALISM: The tenth issue of The Funambulist operates somehow in continuity with issue 9 Islands (January-February 2017), which offered the words of indigenous and anticolonial struggles from various islands of the world. Voices from Kanaky, Mayotte, Hawai’i, and Puerto Rico resonate therefore here with those from Libya, Kenya, Palestine, and Java, in the colonial situations they all describe. While the last issue was dedicated to the seminal work of Édouard Glissant, inscribed throughout the pages of this present one is the influence of another Martiniquais: Frantz Fanon.
The two editorial arguments of this issue are simple: colonialism is not an era, it is a system of military/police, legal, administrative, social, and cultural system of domination; and, architecture is not (only) an aesthetic vessel, it is an apparatus organizing and hierarchizing bodies in space. Editor-in-Chief: Léopold Lambert Part-time assistant: Noelle Geller Contributors: Kelsen Caldwell, Mawena Yehouessi, Jess Myers, Fabien Sacriste, Mia Fuller, Mahy Mourad, Jawad Dukhgan, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Samaneh Moafi, Ann Laura Stoler, Sophia Azeb, Bruno Fert, Adele Jarrar, Haneen Odetalla, Méria Faïdi, Stefan van Biljon, Kelechi Anabaraonye. Contributing copyeditor: Maxwell Donnewald