Introduction: Anticipating feminist futures of spatial practice

Attentive to the spatiality of social struggles, this book can be understood within a critical feminist tradition examining how power, in the form of political hegemonies and social injustice has been resisted and reconstructed through spatial practice. Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice wants to contribute to developing new forms of activism, expanding dialogues, engaging materialisms, transforming pedagogies, and projecting alternatives. Contributing authors trace experiences and examples, theoretical dimensions and practical tools. We enquire generally and collectively: What knowledges and imaginaries are necessary for engendering social change? How do we develop and mediate these to create more gender sensitive, just and environments? What are implications for what we learn and teach in architecture and academia, what roles can education have in questions of difference and equality? How can we direct our future spatial practices to meet challenges posed by climate change, economic crises and uneven global development? Such questions require rethinking our basic assumptions and concepts as well as our practical skills and projects. We do not want to defer this necessary task to an indefinite future nor to sit back and ‘wait for the revolution’. We are concerned with exploring and shaping feminist futures in the here and now. Contributions in the book query the presence, temporalities, emergence, histories, events, durations – and futures – of feminist spatial practices. 40 established and emerging voices have contributed here, writing critically from within their institutions, professions, and their activist, political and personal practices

Imagining the organic city

This thesis examines three 'organic tropes' of modern architecture and urban design, addressing different crucial moments of change within modernist discourse. Attention is focused on the institutionalization of 'town planning' at the turn of the last century; the shift during the post-war years; and the beginning of urban debate in Japan during the early 1960s. The study builds upon the thesis that 'the organic' constitutes a basic trope of a modernism that reinvents the term over and over again. In its ambivalent relationship to modernity, which it both embraces and rejects, the organic hovers between progressivist and nostalgic imaginations. There has been relatively little enquiry into 'the organic' as part of the larger system of modernism in architecture and urbanism. This is because of its unclear identity. Historically, urban organic rhetoric emerged in times of change, revision, or when a debate about basic principles of planning practice was at stake, in times that were experienced as crisis. The rhetoric of the organic springs from the desire or need to reconcile conflicting parts into a coherent whole. The urban schemes discussed here, such as Patrick Geddes’ vision of an organic city, or the megastructures of the metabolists, are based on contradictions taking in aspects of individual agency and collectivity, or fragmentation and totality. Attempting to take a holistic perspective on urban processes and city change, they opened up for a range of political issues concerning authority in city planning and the status of the citizens in this procedure. Beside formal questions we find organizational concerns that go beyond static plans in envisioning sustainable futures through the thinking in processes and the proposal of programs. This text explores discursive and theoretical works with a distinct programmatic character, which have primarily taken place at the level of visions rather than through actual materializations in the city fabric. These works are considered in the context of their projective model character, and their relevance for the discourse on cities and citizens, the nature of planning, and urban design

The Architecture of Metabolism : Inventing a Culture of Resilience

The Metabolist movement, with its radical and visionary urban and architectural schemes, drew the attention of an international architecture community to Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Seen from a contemporary perspective, the movement’s foremost concern was cultural resilience as a notion of national identity. Metabolism responded to the human and environmental catastrophe that followed the atomic bombing of Japan and vulnerability to natural disasters such as earthquakes, with architecture envisioning the complete transformation of Japan as a system of political, social, and physical structures into resilient spatial and organizational patterns adaptable to change. Projecting a utopia of resilience, Metabolism employed biological metaphors and recalled technoscientific images which, together with the vernacular, evoked the notion of a genetic architecture able to be recreated again and again. A specific concern was to mediate between an urbanism of large, technical and institutional infrastructures and the freedom of the individual. My aim is to critically examine the notion of sustainable architecture by rereading Metabolist theories and products, such as terms, models, projects, and buildings. For a better understanding of the present discourse, this text searches for a possible history of sustainable architecture, a subject mostly presented ahistorically.QC 20150206</p

Shared Framework : Sharing Knowledge and Practice

The project ProSHARE: Enhancing Diversity, Inclusion and Social Cohesion through Practices of Sharing in Housing and Public Space is concerned with the practice of sharing in ‘socially mixed' neighbourhoods in Europe between actors that are identified as diverse with regards to their status ‘immigrant’ or newcomer (first and second generation) and what could be called mainstream residents. More precisely, the project has examined 1) forms and conditions in which practices of sharing in the field of housing and public space take place in heterogeneous neighbourhoods in different European cities and 2) the potential and limits of these conditions and practices for encouraging participation and collaboration between diverse populations. ProSHARE considers seven locations in five countries: Nordstadt/Kassel, Wrangelkiez and Reichenberger Kiez/Berlin, and Heusteigviertel/Stuttgart in Germany; Ottakring/Vienna in Austria; Bagneux/Paris in France; Poplar/London in the UK; and Gottsunda/Uppsala in Sweden. It includes seven partners from the University of Kassel Department of Urban Sociology (UKS); the University of Applied Sciences of Berlin (HTW); the State Academy of Art and Design, Stuttgart; the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH School architecture, Stockholm (KTH); the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University(IBF); the University of Sheffield School of Architecture (US); and the Vienna University of TechnologyInstitute of Spatial Planning (TUW).The project responded to a call by JPI Urban Europe and was financed by Formas.QC 20221227ProSHARE - Enhancing Diversity, Inclusion and Social Cohesion through Practices of Sharing in Housing and Public Spac