Envisioning urban futures: What can urban design learn from how political activists imagine and enact urban change?

How do we envision the future of cities? This question is particularly relevant when doing research in (and about) cities today. We currently live in a context where traditional politics and policies struggle to cope with increasing urbanisation rates and growing inequalities. Meanwhile, social movements and political activists are rising up and inhabiting cities as sites of contestation. However, activists don’t just occupy space; they contest spatial manifestations of power and fundamentally transform cities. This paper will interrogate the meaning of envisioning urban futures in practices of political activism to argue for an understanding of them as a form of urban design practice. It will do so by comparing how activist practices transformed entire neighbourhoods in Bogotá (Potosí) and Berlin (Kreuzberg) between the 1970s and 1990s. Both cases illustrate how visions of urban change can be critically placed within a tension between utopian thinking and prefigurative politics. In Potosí, a community-based pedagogical project quickly evolved into a wider mobilisation to address the lack of health facilities, infrastructure and services in Bogotá’s informal settlements. This involved various discussions on how to achieve their desired societal change by: enacting in the present the society they wanted to create or engaging with the governance structures they criticised so heavily. Similarly in Kreuzberg, a critique of housing renewal policies triggered a cycle of mass mobilisation which encompassed wider discussions about squatting as an alternative development practice. Political activists in both cities deployed tactics and strategies that embraced the complexity of their urban context and raised questions about the means they needed for the ends sought. By arguing for an understanding of political activism as a form of urban design practice, the paper outlines the potential of (re)locating activism within design discourses and rethinking how we, as designers, envision and enact urban futures

Can political activism (re)design cities?

Architects and urban designers today face a context in which traditional politics and cities are struggling to cope with increasing urbanisation rates and rising inequalities (UN-Habitat, 2016; World Bank, 2018). Meanwhile, social movements and political activists are rising up and inhabiting urban spaces as sites of contestation. This paper will explore how, beyond occupations, political activism actually shapes – designs – the city at different scales; it will argue that political activism drives process of urban change and as such can be understood as an alternative mode of urban design practice. Although activism in the city has gained much attention in recent research in the fields of Geography (Wood, 2017), Sociology (Bayat, 2013) and Planning (Miraftab, 2009, 2014, 2015), among others, the design agency embedded in these practices has not been sufficiently explored so far, and this is the area where this paper aims to contribute. Political activists operate in a realm between legality and illegality, where they deal with - and contest - spatial manifestations of power in their everyday lives. Through the exploration of two case studies - the Seven Sisters market in London, U.K., and the Ciudad Bolivar district in Bogota, Colombia - this paper will demonstrate how a city can be shaped by direct action. Both cases, although contextually different, exemplify how issues of resistance, oppression and violence can be instrumental in city-making processes at different scales. In Seven Sisters, an organised community contests a local development plan to evict them, while in Ciudad Bolivar, it is unorganised families that collectively build most of the urban fabric through a contestation of local planning ordinances. Following these cases, the paper will call for architects and urban designers to rethink current practices in a way that engages with such processes of political activism and voices rising up from below

Correction: Rare predicted loss-of-function variants of type I IFN immunity genes are associated with life-threatening COVID-19

International audienc

Rare predicted loss-of-function variants of type I IFN immunity genes are associated with life-threatening COVID-19

BackgroundWe previously reported that impaired type I IFN activity, due to inborn errors of TLR3- and TLR7-dependent type I interferon (IFN) immunity or to autoantibodies against type I IFN, account for 15-20% of cases of life-threatening COVID-19 in unvaccinated patients. Therefore, the determinants of life-threatening COVID-19 remain to be identified in similar to 80% of cases.MethodsWe report here a genome-wide rare variant burden association analysis in 3269 unvaccinated patients with life-threatening COVID-19, and 1373 unvaccinated SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals without pneumonia. Among the 928 patients tested for autoantibodies against type I IFN, a quarter (234) were positive and were excluded.ResultsNo gene reached genome-wide significance. Under a recessive model, the most significant gene with at-risk variants was TLR7, with an OR of 27.68 (95%CI 1.5-528.7, P=1.1x10(-4)) for biochemically loss-of-function (bLOF) variants. We replicated the enrichment in rare predicted LOF (pLOF) variants at 13 influenza susceptibility loci involved in TLR3-dependent type I IFN immunity (OR=3.70[95%CI 1.3-8.2], P=2.1x10(-4)). This enrichment was further strengthened by (1) adding the recently reported TYK2 and TLR7 COVID-19 loci, particularly under a recessive model (OR=19.65[95%CI 2.1-2635.4], P=3.4x10(-3)), and (2) considering as pLOF branchpoint variants with potentially strong impacts on splicing among the 15 loci (OR=4.40[9%CI 2.3-8.4], P=7.7x10(-8)). Finally, the patients with pLOF/bLOF variants at these 15 loci were significantly younger (mean age [SD]=43.3 [20.3] years) than the other patients (56.0 [17.3] years; P=1.68x10(-5)).ConclusionsRare variants of TLR3- and TLR7-dependent type I IFN immunity genes can underlie life-threatening COVID-19, particularly with recessive inheritance, in patients under 60 years old