The impossible city: short reflections on urbanism, architecture and violence

This contribution aims to offer some reflections around the notion of contested urbanism that characterize the contemporary process of making and inhabiting cities, discussing the intricate relation between architecture and violence at different scales. Grounding in previous international research and in the work of scholars like Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre and Eyal Weizman, the text wish to reposition contestation at the centre of an architectural and urban research, addressing the intersection of spatial and temporal aspects of conflicts in the production of the city, where intellectual and spatial categories are able to construct new epistemologies, cities and space in a paradoxical tension

Urbanism of exception: camps and inhabitation

This paper can be considered an attempt to think on what a camp does rather than on what it is. Camps seem to arrest, fix in time and space lives, stripping political agency away from bodies and render bare lives; materialise principle of exclusions, control and spatial precepts of modernism through its heavily loaded political semantics. Camps explicitly determines the other, the unknown and the uncontrolled, the monstrous and the needed. Following what Mezzadra and Neilson, called “the different assemblages of power and the different forces of capital” that shape territories and spaces to answer the question I wish to use somehow playfully the concept of ‘dispossession’ developed by Butler and Athanasiou and the one of inhabitation by Agamben to reflect on the camp as a site, inextricably intertwined with the promise of death, police and disappearance regularly and invariably fulfilled and the incomplete, unfinished possibility of inhabiting. The paper try to suggest that camps are sites where one asks what it means to inhabit in the abyssal ambivalence of resisting death––exhausting and holding onto life

Forms of (Collective) Life: The Ontoethics of Inhabitation

Is there space for an ontological urban design? Or better still, following the words of Elisabeth Grosz, is there space for an “ontoethics” of the urban? While contributing to the reflection on the role of ethics as a relational practice, this paper is digging back into the notion of forms-of-life in Giorgio Agamben’s political reflections, aiming to foreground a possible ethics of the city. This aims to highlight the implications that ontology and ethics have in constructing a politics of life as they bring differences in how we live, act, what we value and how we produce and design. Particularly, to substantiate such ethics, three key characteristics of an affirmative life are put forward: the capacity to care and to connect; the capacity to repair, endure and hold together; as well as to imagine and experiment alternative life-forces to oppose politics of oppression and capitalist extraction of values

Beyond violence. Toward the politics of inhabitation

Violence challenges any analytical focus due its ubiquity and multifarious forms. From the intimate to the global, from the colonial to the capitalist, from the racial to the epistemic and from the personal to the societal. At the time of writing the COVID-19 epidemic violence has covered the entire planet in a deadly way. We are witnessing the violence of the rising medico-techno-scientific state that has emerged strongly in discourses and policies; the physical violence resurrected in places such as Myanmar, Lebanon, Palestine and Colombia, to cite few, and the violence of any direct engagement with living creatures and earth preservation that keep erupting under the camouflage of pro transition and technoeconomic recovery processes. It seems we are left with the question Giorgio Agamben (2020) asked in the mist of the pandemic: “what is a society that has no value other than survival?” A provocative question, as usual, that recalls a sort of vita minima, a bare life, as well some sort of grand universal planetary schema. Taking this lead, let me start to reflect for a moment on the city that I have engaged with most recently – Beirut – on violence and its beyond as inhabitation

Border towns: humanitarian assistance in peri-urban areas

Over the last decade, NGO practitioners, policy-makers and scholars have been encouraging humanitarian agencies to recognise the importance of including local authorities and integrating urban infrastructure into humanitarian programming when intervening in crisis-affected settings. Donor investments and scholarly literature have focused on enhancing what we know about responses to urban crises. With the increasing focus on urban areas, the humanitarian sector must develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding and analysis of the urban context: its infrastructure, services and systems, segregation and fragmentation, informal and community-based networks and the broader relationship between transient humanitarian actors and the population at large. This article looks at some of the consequences of the increasing urbanisation of humanitarian response, with a focus on border regions neighbouring Syria. Towns in these areas retain a rural character despite rapid growth, accelerated by the arrival of large numbers of refugees, and rural livelihoods are still at the centre of their economies. We argue that humanitarians should not approach areas such as these in the same way as they might much larger cities. These settings cannot be fully categorised as ‘urban’, but nor are they rural; rather, they are undergoing a complex spatial transition along a continuum between the two. Humanitarian actors must take this into account when designing interventions

Checkpoint urbanism: Violent infrastructures and border stigmas in the Juarez border region

As Popitz (2017) argues, violence is one component of the great economy of world history, an option permanently open to human activity. In Ciudad Juárez, right at the border between the United States and Mexico, this notion explains the fundamental incongruity that characterises the region: a booming industrial productive model operating in parallel with an international crime and violence hotspot that is also a coveted criminal passageway. This paper will argue that official and criminal checkpoints designed for border-crossing, have had a transformative spatial role when considered across the dimensions of infrastructure and stigma, triggering a material/symbolic tension. We argue that their location and accessibility determine the exposure of nearby communities to economic growth but also violent entrepreneurship – the illegal crossing of goods and people still remains a constant characteristic of the region, not only as part of a criminal enterprise but as a viable livelihood. The ways in which the region of Juárez develops and grows also determines how trafficking and illegal practices are established; rules and regulations that provide territorial parameters for what is open and transparent are equally referential to what is clandestine and devious. The tensions brought by the border’s geopolitical value have amplified the value of infrastructure and its practical ownership. The international border operates as a line that is barrier, social divider, landmark, policy-bridge, filtering mechanism and trafficking obstacle. Under this permanent state of tension, the checkpoints provide a physical structure to the transit flows and a sovereign interruption. Across this urbanism, the checkpoint surroundings acquire a magnetic significance, due to the resulting transit dynamics and the surveillance deterrents at the core of their function. Furthermore, their dual nature – official and criminal – has branded the region as a criminal outpost, stigmatising the people inhabiting it, and perpetuating the idea that Juárez is defined by its violent infrastructures

Informal Urbanism, city building processes and design responsibility

In the face of multiple, complex and contradictory urban phenomena, and the impossibility to define one kind of city/one urbanism, the present short contribution aims to reposition informal urbanism as one of the many existing legitimate processes that are contributing to city building. Over 1 billion people now live in ‘slums’ or ‘informal settlements’, a number expected to double by 2030, making what can be labelled ‘informal urbanism’ globally into the dominant expression of urban form. In our view, architects should formulate appropriate answers in the form of a responsive architecture, an architecture of engagement that has the capacity to reconsider and recalibrate design process within this contemporary urban condition, which could be called ‘un-designed’ or even ‘un-designable’. The text uses two vignettes of projects that greatly contributed to the legitimisation of informality as urbanism. The first, Favela-Bairro programme in Rio de Janeiro (1994-2006), and the second, PREVI plan in Lima (1965-75). They entertain a reverse relation with informality. The first aims at formalising the informal, while the second at ‘informalising’ the formal. The PREVI, although conceived as a formal plan, is not detached from the overall logic of informal urbanism; it rather opens a dialogue between self-organisation and architectural discourse. Although different, both narratives embraced informality as a sine qua non condition to work with and learn from

Violent infrastructures and structural stigma in the Juárez border region: Framing a checkpoint urbanism

As Popitz (2017) argues, violence is one component of the great economy of world history, an option permanently open to human activity. In Ciudad Juárez, right at the border between the United States and Mexico, this notion explains the fundamental incongruity that characterises the region: a booming industrial productive model operating in parallel with an international crime and violence hotspot that is also a coveted criminal passageway. This paper will argue that official and criminal checkpoints designed for border-crossing, have had a transformative spatial role when considered across the dimensions of infrastructure and stigma, triggering a material/symbolic tension. We argue that their location and accessibility determine the exposure of nearby communities to economic growth but also violent entrepreneurship – the illegal crossing of goods and people still remains a constant characteristic of the region, not only as part of a criminal enterprise but as a viable livelihood. The ways in which the region of Juárez develops and grows also determines how trafficking and illegal practices are established; rules and regulations that provide territorial parameters for what is open and transparent are equally referential to what is clandestine and devious. The tensions brought by the border’s geopolitical value have amplified the value of infrastructure and its practical ownership. The international border operates as a line that is barrier, social divider, landmark, policy-bridge, filtering mechanism and trafficking obstacle. Under this permanent state of tension, the checkpoints provide a physical structure to the transit flows and a sovereign interruption. Across this urbanism, the checkpoint surroundings acquire a magnetic significance, due to the resulting transit dynamics and the surveillance deterrents at the core of their function. Furthermore, their dual nature – official and criminal – has branded the region as a criminal outpost, stigmatising the people inhabiting it, and perpetuating the idea that Juárez is defined by its violent infrastructures