FRIDAY LECTURE SERIES

“Re-establishing Identities” Mackintosh School of Architecture's Lecture Series

Why do we need to re-establish Identities in Architecture? Identity expression has been illustrated physically by many art forms throughout generations, for instance artists like Diane Arbus in the 1960’s, whose compassionate photographic lens included those otherwise excluded from mainstream physical and economic norms, and more recently Lubaina Himid whose work foregrounds black people and black identities within the context of white history or in contrast to cultural stereotyping. This same expression is not often found in Architecture, and in this Lecture series we wanted to focus on people who have been denied the opportunity to articulate their needs, voices, feelings in the spaces they reside in.

Architects, urban designers and city planners are starting to realise that our cities have been, and continue to be, built largely for a single identity, White men. Feminist geographer Kim England notes that ideas men have about the city are “fossilised into the concrete appearance of space. Hence the location of residential areas, work-places, transportation networks, and the overall layout of cities in general reflect a patriarchal capitalist society’s expectations of what types of activities take place where, when and by whom.” This approach has caused architecture and urban environments to be exclusionary and representative of a very singular way of thinking and being. There is an understanding that the lack of diversity in our built environment professions is partly to blame, researchers quoting that ''architecture is the creative industry where it' s least likely to find working-class people as well as having only 9% people of colour involved'' . Academics are making headway in articulating inequalities in lived experiences within built environment, Leslie Kern chews over many of these issues in her book Feminist City in 2020, but cities are hugely diverse, with shifting needs and populations, as well as, different degrees of privilege, barriers, and social assets, so there is still a considerable task ahead. A good way to combat this is broadening out the profession, but if we are going to address these imbalances in the city, our Friday lecture series highlighted that to truly re-establish

Identities in architecture and urbanism we need to go one step further, we need citizen participation.

Contemporary academics are illustrating the need for listening to a much broader range of people, In the book, Complaint! Sarah Ahmed introduces us to a term that she calls a ‘feminist ear ’, she describes this as “to hear with a feminist ear is to hear who is not heard, how we are not heard.” It is the process of retraining our ears to pay attention to people or experiences we haven't listened to before, and unpacking how they have been previously silenced. In the built environment, How do we ‘hear who is not heard’?

Sherry Arnstein in her journal ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ suggests that participatory decision making could be this answer. She provides a ‘ladder’ that is a guide to levels of citizen involvement, rating it from ‘ nonparticipation’ (no involvement at all) all the way to ‘citizen control’ (full power to the community) This can be related to the development of a built project, with degrees of community and user involvement from no consultation at all, to tokenistic informing, to co-design and vetoing powers given to communities.

Identity expression in architecture has been very limited. In Feminist City, Leslie Kern writes ‘All forms of urban planning draw on a cluster of assumptions about the ‘typical’ urban citizen: their daily travel plans, needs, desires, and values. Shockingly, this citizen is a man. ’ This assumption created a lot of inappropriate housing, infrastructure and public spaces. Expressing Identities in Architecture is slowly improving, but not drastically. Laws like the Equalities act in 2010, do set out 9 protected characteristics, but its impact on de facto equality within the architecture profession and the wider built environment has been limited. New construction in urban or suburban areas in the UK also continues to be poor, with the majority of suburban new build housing has been described as “soulless” by Richard Vize in 2019. Large quantities of bland boxes that developers have assumed people want to live in, often based on old-fashioned attitudes to the nuclear family, which are at least 50 years out of date. The lack of reflection or appreciation of the local and diverse lived experience is what makes so much speculative development feel cold and alienating. The bland, identikit tower blocks filling up central London and Manchester seem to be designed with only one customer in mind - affluent young professionals. The new development at Battersea Power Station in London is a particularly potent example, Olly Wainwright called the new starchitect housing a “characterless playground for the super rich”

Some developers are starting to recognise the importance of engaging with communities to create a more appropriate and valid identity, developers websites claiming they are consulting with ‘key community stakeholders’, but many just treat it as a tick box exercise, organising tokenistic events. A recent survey found that only a shocking 2 percent of the population in the UK said they trusted developers. The overall state of a plural expression of Identities in our built environment is generally poor. There is a definite need for more genuine participation to inject life into future projects.

There is a growing number of practitioners who are making headway in this area, however. We invited Dr Joshua Mardell, Resolve Collective, Austris Mailitis, Dr Adele Patrick, In The Making and Nick Newman to speak as part of the 2023 Mackintosh School of Architecture Friday Lecture Series. They Illustrated how they’ve better established Identities and brought a much broader diversity of voices forward through participatory architecture.

Joshua Mardell spoke to his experience of writing “Queer Spaces” published in 2022, a book co-edited by Adam Nathanial Furman, which attempted to reconcile the absence of queer Identities in architecture across the globe. Joshua’s work focuses on historiographical reflection. Reflecting on the way architectural history has been written, what has been chosen and by who, critiquing authors, and finding the missing sections in order to reconcile specifically queer and feminist absences. Specifically in this case, rediscovering undocumented queer identities. To find these absences, it's a key part of Mardell’s process to turn to collaborators to co-author missing histories. In his lecture he quotes Brown and Nash, who describe the research of queerness as “fluid, unstable, and perpetually becoming”

Queer identities are constantly evolving, so having a single person ’s definition will miss a whole host of voices. In turn suggesting that if you want to get a truer, more holistic picture of these Identities, there is a need for multiple authors from multiple viewpoints to capture the truest sense of this evolving narrative.

Instead of curating the book with queer spaces they knew about, and writing from their own personal experiences, Joshua and Adam reached out to collaborators from across the globe. Joshua told us they “Left it to the authors, there are 55 of them, to decide what constitutes a queer space, we ’ve honoured their definitions. Thus we hope to be sensitive to a whole host of cultural traditions.” By writing the entries in this way, commissioning ‘experts’ (people who lived, worked, visited, heavily researched) to write the extracts, they gave the atlas even more truth and identity. This resulted in a variety of voices and short pieces of over 90 ‘ queer ’ spaces.

A Participatory process can also be applied to more traditional architecture projects, another one of our invited guests, Resolve Collective, Illustrate this, who practice what they call ‘Community Mining’. They were invited by Southwark council to take on an engagement role alongside DSDHA who were creating options for the masterplan for Tustin Estate in South London. Their approach manifested in both general engagement events, to ‘mine’ community knowledge, feelings and opinions, as well as series of more tailored events. The general engagement consisted of pulling up in front of the school on the estate with coffee and food, giving information about the redevelopment process, when and where important meetings were, and starting the conversation. The second approach which was to expand the ‘community mining’ beyond the set brief, they began to work on projects that used the newly tapped resource to create projects that were unrelated to the redevelopment, but enabled the residents to have more autonomy over their space. These events included a Youth workshop which was a knowledge exchange; the kids that attended were taught the basics of a design process, and then tasked with designing a small light hearted intervention they felt their neighbourhood needed. They also collaborated with residents on the estate to design and deliver a community Garden that any resident could use, once completed the organisation of the garden would be handed over to a resident steering group, which would give them full autonomy.

This project illustrates how Resolve took a deep dive into helping residents have their identities heard. It's interesting how they acted in two ways, one by plugging people into the decision-making process, but also by taking the funding they had to create third spaces for residents that they would have more autonomy over. Unfortunately, the project was halted by the outbreak of Covid19, so its had to discuss the long term impact, but after presenting a lecture for the Architecture Foundation, residents and a senior councillor from Southwark praised the project because the architect and council team had consistently shown that they’d taken on resident' s feedback and adjusted the scheme accordingly. This is an important part of the process, as without this the engagement would not have instilled the project with any more of an identity, the cross collaboration and listening with a ‘feminist ear ’ is key.

These are just two examples of how beneficial citizen participation can be to establish Identities. Our speakers and many more practitioners like Glasgow’s own New Practice and Green party’s Holly Bruce are paving the way to a much more collective expression of architecture and urbanism. All of this term's Lectures are accessible to students on GSA’s planet E Stream.

Stage Leader

Luca Brunelli

Co-Pilot

Neil Mochrie

Tutors

Graeme Armet

Jonny Fisher

Colin Glover

Alan Hooper