Infrastructural Communities

Image from Engineering Comes Home, taken by Kat Austen.

The scale of the climate crisis requires radical rethinking of urban life. As an anthropologist working on the relationship between the built environment and resource consumption, my approach is to focus on everyday practices of care and alternative forms of exchange. I draw on the recent turn to material politics to look in particular how infrastructural connections enable alternative interpretations, forms of value and action.   The drive to retrofit the city with less resource intense living often includes a rescaling of infrastructure as policy makers hope to better align demand with locally available resources. This delineates groups of people who share key parts of the system, such as a secondary electricity substation or a drainage network. These urban neighbours may not know one another or hold values in common and yet their individual actions can be aggregated to provide system-level services. Thinking of these groups as residents who share a material connection that may or may not align with how they identify with location or interest-based groups provides a useful lens for both critique and intervention. In this talk, I discus a number of interdisciplinary projects that have worked with these ‘infrastructural communities’ to understand the possibilities for action on resource consumption through the built environment. 

Charlotte Johnson is a Senior Research Associate in Urban resources & communities, Bartlett School for Environment, Energy & Resources (UCL). She is an anthropologist specialising in urban sustainability, with a focus on decentralised infrastructure and how it can produce transformative social action.  She is currently working with community energy groups trialling Peer-2-Peer electricity markets, and leads community co-design of water infrastructure on the NERC funded Community Water Management for a Liveable London (CAMELLIA) project.

‘Architects for Social Housing: For a Sustainable Architecture’

The urban conditions that we have been witnessing and responding to in London over the past 5 years are a direct result of the global phenomenon of the privatisation, marketisation and financialisation of housing, the neo-liberalisation of our processes of development, and the consequent decimation and destruction of our urban communities, environments and cultures in favour of short-term financial gain and increasing inequality. Simultaneously, the issue of sustainable cities, or more accurately ‘how we can develop sustainability’, is one of the most urgent issues of our time, and one in which architects and fellow built-environment professionals have both the opportunity and the duty to take a leading role. To be genuinely sustainable, just and equitable development must go far beyond the simplistic notions of the environment characterising so-called ‘green’ architecture. Architectural approaches must not only improve the physical, built and ‘natural’ environments in which we live, but also be socially beneficial and financially viable if we are to call them truly sustainable. Very few architectural treatises on the environment talk about the relationship of the environment to the economy, to the social dimension of the environment, or its relationship to the political sphere. The work of ASH pushes all these constituent contexts to the forefront of the architectural debate.

Geraldine Dening is the co-founder and Director of Architects for Social Housing (ASH), and a qualified architect with her own practice based in London. She is also a senior lecturer at the Leicester School of Architecture, where she lectures on professional practice and ethics, as well as running a design studio. In 2018 Geraldine was named by the Evening Standard newspaper as one of London’s 30 most influential architects. and with ASH co-founder Simon Elmer she is working on a book titled ‘For a Socialist Architecture’. Recent projects with Architects for Social Housing include designs and feasibility studies for additional housing and improvements to 6 council and social housing estates in London threatened with demolition. These include proposals to increase the housing capacity on Central Hill Estate in South London by up to 50% with no demolition, and on West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estate, as part of the community’s application for the Right to Transfer the estate into community ownership. She also devised and co-ordinated Open Garden Estates, a series of events hosted by estates threatened with demolition. As ASH’s lead architect she is also currently working with a number of housing co-operatives to explore new forms of community-led development.

Radical Daily Practices

The lecture will describe the relation between the development process of LaBorda, the first housing cooperative built in Barcelona, and its architectural definition. Once the property is at stake and the focus is on use, the requests for the architecture change. In the case of LaBorda, the housing need motivation was also challenged by the transition towards sustainability, in the broadest way possible: political, social, economic and environmental.

Cristina Gamboa – Lacol arquitectura cooperativa Barcelona

Cristina is a chartered architect and teacher. She Is currently a Studio Master at Projective Cities, MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design. She studied at the Barcelona School of Architecture ETSAB / UPC, and the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning / University of Stuttgart. Cristina is co-founder of Lacol, a cooperative of architects established in 2014 in Barcelona, where she has focused on researching participative approaches to design and developing cooperative housing and housing policies, tested in on-going projects.

Lacol works from architecture towards social transformation, using architecture as a tool to intervene critically in the local environments. The activity is based on a horizontal system of labor, acting alongside society with the motivation and challenge to achieve a transition towards sustainability in the broadest way possible: political, social, economic and environmental. Lacol’s practice embrace Architecture, Urbanism, Housing policies and Participatory processes, blurring the limits of the different disciplines to define a cross-sectional and participative approach. She has focused on researching participative approaches to design and developing cooperative housing and housing policies, tested in on-going projects.

Spaces of Negotiation

Date: 26/05/2020
Time: 10:00-11:30
Venue: AA Lecture Hall Microsoft Team

What if architecture does not solve conflicts or tries to organize them by assignments?

What if architecture enhanced conflicts to activate their inherent potentials for action and negotiation?

Insights into actual projects of the Berlin based architectural group ifau regarding urban housing development processes in Hamburg and Berlin. According to two projects the participatory planning processes are strongly connected with and controlled by the local communities and the political-administrative municipalities. Developments and participatory planning processes for a new mixed residential and non-residential quarter with sub-cultural forms of use providing a mix of live and work units meeting the needs of artists, producers and creative professionals. The starting point for the spatial layout and design is a collaborative and socially mixed concept of use. Moreover, the comparatively low land prices allow the cross financing of co-operative living and studio spaces within the project.

Create situations for conflicts to be negotiated by the users!

ifau – institute for applied urbanism, Berlin

ifau is a Berlin-based working group of architects with a focus on interrelated, interdisciplinary projects in the field of architecture and urban design. Their flexible methodology extends from research projects to interventions in the urban realm. All of their work aims to involve contextual processes, difference and diversity to create space for negotiation in design development. They are particularly interested in process-oriented strategies and participative design methods. They realised several projects for arts institutions. Their works and texts have been published in numerous books and architectural magazines. References include Palais Thinnfeld in Graz, Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht, The Showroom in London, Artists Space and Goethe Institute – Wyoming Building in New York, R50-cohousing, Residential and studio building at the former Berlin flower market (IBeB) in Berlin

Christoph Schmidt is a founding member of ifau (institute for applied urbanism, 1998). He studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen University of Technology and the University College of Portsmouth. He worked as a freelance architect in Cologne and Berlin. He has been teaching architecture as assistant professor at the Technical University of Berlin where his research and taught courses where focused on innovative design methods, process-oriented design strategies and cooperative housing projects. Currently he teaches as professor at the department of urban context design at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf.

Global Tools 1973-1975

When Education Coincides with Life

Date: 12/05/2020
Time: 10:00-11:30
Venue: AA Lecture Hall Microsoft Team

Silvia Franceschini will critically retrace the experience of Radical Design Global Tools and its multidisciplinary school program “without students or teachers.” The Global Tools was founded in 1973 by groups and figures drawn from Italian Radical Architecture (Archizoom, Superstudio, UFO, Mendini, La Pietra, Pettena, Dalisi, and Sottsass among others), Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art (including Davide Mosconi and Franco Vaccari), and ended in 1975 after three years of intense experimentation. Departing from her book on the subject (co-authored with Valerio Borgonuovo and published by Nero Editions), Franceschini will recontextualize the experience of Global Tools among a vast network of historical references and experiences of critical pedagogy and environmental activism.

Silvia Franceschini is a Curator at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture in Hasselt (BE) and a visual culture scholar whose work focuses on different critiques of modernity. She is a co-author of Global Tools 1973–1975. When Education Coincides With Life (Nero Publishing, 2018) and editor of Curator Without a System (Sternberg Press, Upcoming). Her selected curatorial projects include the research program The Politics of Affinity. Experiments in Art, Education and the Social Sphere, Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella (2016–18); the participation in the curatorial team of The School of Kyiv—Kyiv Biennial 2015; the exhibition and public program Global Tools 1973–1975: Towards an Ecology of Design, SALT, Istanbul (2014) and the exhibition The Way of Enthusiasts, Venice Biennial 2012. Since 2009 she has been involved in the curation of exhibitions in various institutions including V-A-C Foundation, Moscow—Venice; The Moscow Biennale for Young Art; Futura—Center for Contemporary Art, Prague; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Franceschini holds a PhD in Design and Visual Cultures from the Polytechnic University of Milan and she was a research fellow at the Exhibition Research Lab of the Liverpool John Moores University and at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. She has lectured at numerous places such as The Sharjah Biennial, The Istanbul Design Biennial, The Triennale Milano, MAXXI Museum and Konstfack University, among others.

Post-Socialist City and Its Negative Casts

Date: 10/03/2020
Time: 10:00-13:00
Venue: 37 Bedford Square, 1st Floor, Front Room.

This lecture will compare cities from two communist countries which at first glance, could be seen as the exact opposite from one another. Ex-Yugoslavia which tends to be seen as the most open and least communist, will be juxtaposed with the most defiantly secretive and closed country in the world – North Korea.

Taking Lebbeus Woods’ Sarajevo project in 1993 which dealt with Yugoslavia’s tragic disintegration as a point of departure, we will explore the history, secrets and speculation behind some of the most intriguing architecture in ex-Yugoslavia – including numerous gigantic abstract monuments and hidden military structures.

Counter-posed will be the still officially communist figurative monuments of Pyongyang. The premise behind taking two such different regimes is that by looking at the margins, important traits of the communist architecture as a whole, could be uncovered. Pyongyang’s figurative monuments offer no ambiguity, instead we are confronted with very clear literal meaning. One of the many contradictions of its monumental architecture built on a massive scale with incredible speed, is that even when newly completed most structures appear already out-dated.

There has been a recent surge of interest in both countries lead by photographers. This lecture will seek to redress this imbalance between the large quantities of visual information, which often comes with little explanation of the meaning, history or context.

The concluding parts will seek to define further what could be behind our insatiable yearning for this type of imagery, and argue that, at least in part, it could be attributed to collective nostalgia towards more naïve, simple and innocent times. Towards times when communism appeared to function and even inspire architecture with a true social purpose and responsibility.

Nerma Prnjavorac Cridge grew up in Sarajevo and completed her education in architecture at Birmingham, the Bartlett and the Architectural Association. Since qualifying, she worked for a number of distinguished practitioners including Thomas Heatherwick and art2architecture. Her first monograph Drawing the Unbuildable, based on her PhD thesis at the Architectural Association (supervised by dr Marina Lathouri and Mark Cousins) on the Soviet avant-garde, was published by Routledge in 2015. Nerma currently teaches at the  AA as well as running her small art and design practice Drawing Agency. Forthcoming publications include Restless: Drawn by Zaha Hadid, in Routledge Companion on Women in Architecture edited by Anna Sokolina, and The Politics of Abstraction, Nerma’s second monograph.

Home: A Project of Rural China

Date: 03/03/2020
Time: 10:00-13:00
Venue: 37 Bedford Square, 1st Floor, Front Room.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng obtained both PhD by Design (2018) and M.Phil Projective Cities (2014) at the Architectural Association (AA) and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School 2015-17. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Royal College of Art. Her research interests lie in the intersections between disciplines, especially shared ideas and methods by architecture, anthropology and sociology, with a focus on socio-spatial models in China. Employing the design research method, her PhD thesis focuses on rurality as a spatial question at levels of territory, settlement and household. Cyan’s research on Care and Rebellion: The Dissolved Household in Contemporary Rural China received a commendation from RIBA President’s Awards for Research 2018. 

Archipelagos of Noises: exploring convolutions of city as island and city as theatre

Date: 21/01/2020
Time: 14:00-16:00
Venue: 38 Bedford Street, Ground Floor Front.

Image credit: Sohei Nishino, i-Land, http://soheinishino.net/i-land

This guest seminar will be co-led by Teresa Stoppani, author of Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice(Routledge, 2010) and Unorthodox Ways to Think the City (Routledge, 2018), and Braden Engel who recently completed his PhD on Colin Rowe’s historiography and pedagogy, with an expert reinterpretation of Rowe’s seminal Collage City. 
Presentations and discussions will consider the possibility of the city as an island ‘in relation’ with shifting and ambiguous edges to the point of incremental saturation and endless interiority, in convergence with the possibility of the city as theatre, and vice versa, theatre as city, that address questions of construction and curation. The idea of city as island is instrumental to the condition of openness and remote networks, which ‘make archipelago’ of island narratives that, far from closed and isolated, are always ‘full of noises’ (William Shakespeare, The Tempest, III. II. 140-41). From political utopia to continental geophilosophy, complex urban archipelagos are formed through convulsing nomotop, as mythical impossibility, or as personal or sci-fi constructions. These will be linked to moments in Colin Rowe’s unpublished lecture at Cornell University that critically explored the city, from design process to lived experience, as a collective theatre that transgress possibilities of the tragic, the satiric, and the comic. 

Teresa Stoppani is an architect, architectural theorist and critic based in London, where she lectures in History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association in London. She studied architecture in Venice and Florence, and has taught architectural design and theory in Italy (IUAV Venice), Australia (UT Sydney, RMIT Melbourne) and the UK (Architectural Association, Greenwich, Brighton, Leeds Beckett). Teresa’s research explores the relationship between architecture theory and the design process in the urban environment, and the influence on the specifically architectural of other spatial and critical practices. Teresa is the author of Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice(Routledge, 2010) and of Unorthodox Ways to Think the City (Routledge, 2018), and editor, with Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous, of This Thing Called Theory(Routledge 2016). She is the instigator of the architecture research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, and an editor of (RIBA/Routledge). She is currently working on her next book Architecture Dust.

Braden R. Engel (BS Philosophy and MArch, North Dakota St; MA Histories & Theories, Architectural Association) has been teaching architecture and design history and theory courses for ten years between London and California. He is currently Undergraduate History + Theory Coordinator at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Braden’s writing has been published in Architecture and Culture, The Journal of Architecture, AA Files, the Journal of Art Historiography, PLAT, and Planning Perspectives.

New Investigations in Collective Form

Date: 09/12/2019
Time: 18:30
Venue: 36 Bedford Square, Front Members Room.

More than fifty years have passed since the publication of Fumihiko Maki’s seminal text, Investigations in Collective Form, which argued for collective form as an organizing device to address the increasingly fragmented city and public realm. Today, we continue to face urban challenges – from economic inequality to a progressively fragile natural environment – that, in order to be addressed, require us to come together in a moment when what we collectively value is increasingly difficult to locate. Working within the fluctuating and indeterminate conditions of the urban realm, its public sphere, and its ecological context, this publication examines how collectivity can be formed today. Neeraj Bhatia (the principle of founder of The Open Workshop) will discuss a group of design experiments presented in his book, New Investigations in Collective Form, testing how architecture can empower the diverse voices that make up the public realm and the environments in which they exist.

The book launch will be followed by a conversation with Maria S. Giudici, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Hamed Khosravi, and Platon Issaias.

for more information, visit: https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=4183

Radical Care

Date: 01/11/2019
Time: 14:00-16:00
Venue: 38 Bedford Street, Ground Floor Front.

Caption: Gianna Bottema, Housing & Care Cooperatives in the Netherlands: Spatial Diagrams of Cluster Living, detail, 2019.

Gianna Bottema studied architecture at Delft University of Technology and ETH Zurich. After her Master’s degree in Delft she pursued a Taught MPhil (Projective Cities) at the Architectural Association which was focused on the emergence of housing and care cooperatives in the Netherlands. Currently she is working on the research project Collective Home Ownership: New Protocols for Architecture in collaboration with the municipality of Amsterdam.

Caption: EDIT Collective, Act 1, GDP, 2019.

EDIT is an all-female design collective. Formed about a year ago, from RCA graduates, the group shares common interests in issues of social equality, gender biases, environmental activism and the creation of equitable institutional forms. At the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019, EDIT presented ‘Honey, I’m Home’, a project that explores the domestic realm as a space of performance, in which objects and furniture are props that further enforce heteronormative habits. In an attempt to disrupt these domestic rituals, the project suggests the alteration of the domestic props. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for example, is a fictional, provocative prototype for collectivising domestic labour. As an alternative to the capitalist assumption that housework is most efficient when performed individually, the GDP is a device best used by three people. The collective’s aim is to challenge some of our archetypal spaces and structures by suggesting more equitable scenarios.

Caption: Julian Siravo, Stavros Oikonomidis, Care Centres in Vanencia, 2019.

Julian Siravo is an architect and urban designer working in the policy and think tank world. Originally from Rome, Italy, he is a graduate of both the Bartlett and the Royal College of Art. Julian is part of Common Wealth think tank and head of urban research at Autonomy, where he focuses on the spatial implications of new welfare and employment policies, on ageing populations and sustainable forms of leisure.

Perverting the Power Vertical:

Shapes and Styles of Subversion in the (Trans-Socialist) Global East

Date: 24/04/2019
Time: 10:00-13:00
Venue: 4 Morwell Street, First Floor Back, Projective Cities Studio.

This talk draws its core ethnographic material from fieldwork on architectural aesthetics and contemporary art in Warsaw and Moscow. It deploys the notion of the Power Vertical – a term used by political scientists to refer to Vladimir Putin’s brand of post-Soviet authoritarian governance – as a conceptual pivot. What are the aesthetics of the Power Vertical? Are they resolutely upright and ostentatious, like Moscow’s proliferating neo-Stalinist skyscrapers and turbo-charged Victory Day Parades? Or are they happy-go-lucky, dissipate and chaotic, like Putin’s villainous trickster wink (or Trump’s insomniac Twitter sessions)? Moreover, in the era of resurgent populisms, re-militarization and the oligarchization of capital, are the styles, shapes and affects of the Power Vertical making a mark on the planetary political-aesthetic New Normal?

While seeking to make sense of the Power Vertical, this paper also looks beyond it, exploring the heterodox shapes, styles and ideologies populating the “Global East” – a loosely-sketched zone encompassing the (post-)socialist world and its transnational entanglements. Moreover, it probes ways in which scholars can collaborate with artists, architects and activists from across the Global East: not only to analyse the Power Vertical (not only to take the Power Vertical seriously), but also to develop tactics, strategies and imaginaries to ridicule, trick, twist, undercut, queer, resist and pervert it.

With this in mind, this paper also seeks to highlight the powerful (and subversive) legacies of Actually-existing State Socialism (AeSS) – and its multiple “still-socialist” (Murawski 2018) afterlives – in the Global East and beyond; and it sketches some ideas towards a concept of trans-socialism: a radical and intersectional mode of socialist aesthetics, urbanism and political economy. Trans-socialism theorizes AeSS’s many actual and imagined migrations through space and time (beyond the “socialist block”, as well as beyond the notorious expiry date of 1989-1991); and it mines the Global East for progressive dimensions of the AeSS legacy – in the realms of urbanism, aesthetics, class, gender, race and ecology – which can be re-harnessed to exert a defamiliarizing and destabilizing effect on our late capitalist present and future.

Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and art based at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where he is Lecturer in Critical Area Studies. His book, The Palace Complex: A Stalinist Skyscraper, Capitalist Warsaw and a City Transfixed, was published by Indiana University Press in 2019; and, in Polish, by the Museum of Warsaw in 2015. During 2017-2018, while a Visiting Scholar at the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, he carried out fieldwork for a new book project on architectural aesthetics and politics in Putin-era Moscow. With Jane Rendell, he co-edited A Century of the Social Condenser, 1917- 2017, a special issue of The Journal of Architecture (2017), and he has published in scholarly and media outlets including Third Text: Critical Studies in Contemporary Art and Culture, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropology Today, Social Text, Laboratorium, Focaal, The Calvert Journal, Strelka Magazine, Forbes and The Architectural Review. In 2018, he co-curated the exhibition Portal Zaryadye – featuring 18 new works by Russian artists exploring the relationship between architecture, politics and ecology in contemporary Russia – at the State Shchusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow.

Caption: Zofia Kulik, Human Motif, 1989. Foto-dywan 240cm x 480cm (24 panels 80 x 60cm).

REPRESENTATIONS/INVESTIGATIONS:

MEDIA IN ARCHITECTURE, THE TERRITORY AND THE URBAN

Date: 26/04/2019
Time: 13:30-18:00
Venue: 36 Bedford Square, AA Lecture Hall.

The event brings together researchers, architects and artists to explore the use of media and representation of space as a form of multiscalar investigation, from architecture to the territory and the urban. From analogue tools to advanced computation, speakers will discuss key projects from their practice that use media beyond the pure representation of architecture but instead as a systematic form of enquiry.

This is the first of a series of public events by the MPhil Projective Cities to foster a transversal conversation and a creative dialogue across different parts and research in the AA.

Organisers: Sam Jacoby, Platon Issaias
Keynote speakers: David Burns, Eva le Roi
Participants: Gili Merin, Samaneh Moafi, Jingru (Cyan) Chen, Hamed Khosravi, Xristina Argyros, Maria S. Giudici, Clara Oloriz, Christina Varvia. 

more information about the event and speakers bios at: https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=4026

Caption: Eva Le Roi, Canal St-Martin. ink on paper, 37 x 56 cm.

David Burns, Tufi 1, 2018.

Radical Daily Practices

Date: 27/02/2019
Time: 13:00-17:00
Venue: 4 Morwell Street, Second Floor, Housing and Urbanism Studio Space.

The lecture will describe the relation between the development process of LaBorda, the first housing cooperative built in Barcelona, and its architectural definition. Once the property is at stake and the focus is on use, the requests for the architecture change. In the case of La Borda, the housing need motivation was also challenged by the transition towards sustainability, in the broadest way possible: political, social, economic and environmental.

Cristina Gamboa Masdevall is a chartered architect and teacher. She studied at the Barcelona School of Architecture ETSAB / UPC, and the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning / University of Stuttgart. Cristina is co-founder of Lacol, a cooperative of architects established in 2014 in Barcelona, where she has focused on researching participative approaches to design and developing cooperative housing and housing policies, tested in on-going projects.

Home: A Project for Rural China

Date: 22/02/2019
Time: 10:00-13:00
Venue: 4 Morwell Street, First Floor, Projective Cities Studio Space.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng obtained both PhD by Design (2018) and M.Phil Projective Cities (2014) at the Architectural Association (AA) and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School 2015-17. She is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Royal College of Art. Her research interests lie in the intersections between disciplines, especially shared ideas and methods by architecture, anthropology and sociology, with a focus on socio-spatial models in China. Employing the design research method, her PhD thesis focuses on rurality as a spatial question at levels of territory, settlement and household. Cyan’s research on Care and Rebellion: The Dissolved Household in Contemporary Rural China received a commendation from RIBA President’s Awards for Research 2018. 

Caption: The Yard in Liu Brothers’ Family House, Shigushan Village, 2016 (Photo & Collage by Jingru Cyan Cheng). 

Date: 06/02/2019
Time: 10:00-13:00
Venue: 32 Bedford Square, First Floor Back.

Elia Zenghelis studied and taught at the AA from 1956 to 1987. Co-founder of OMA with Rem Koolhaas in 1975 and partner until 1987, when he established Gigantes Zenghelis Architects in Athens. He has taught Advanced Studio at Yale School of Architecture from 2013 to the present. Recipient of the Annie Spink Award for excellence in education in 2000.

Caption: Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis. Hotel Sphinx Project, New York, New York (Axonometric), 1975-76. Synthetic Polymer paint and ink on paper, (46.7 x 55.9 cm). MoMA.  

Organised by the Royal College of Art, St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust, Haringey, The Architecture Foundation, Baylight Foundation and Projective Cities

Dates: Friday 13th and Saturday 14th April 2018
Venue: Lecture Theatre One, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU (entrance via Jay Mews)        

The objective of these series of events over two days is to pull apart and question alternate models of affordable and community-led housing projects for the UK. Using global exemplars – from Swiss projects based on nineteenth century co-operative legal structures such as Kraftwerk I and Mehr als Wohnen in Zurich, new Spanish co-operatives addressing community ageing (La Borda), to the Nightingale structure developed within the specific legal and financial constraints of Australian law – this event will ask what, within the context of the UK, is possible? What works and why, and how do we learn from other places, recognizing the specificity of our legal jurisdiction, financial structures, and cultural limitations?

Future Homes for London: Alternate Models will discuss: case studies and precedents; the consequences of different legal frameworks; co-operative models and land tenure systems in relationship to participation, ongoing management, and governance; the financing of housing projects – patient capital and the perception of risk; procurement structures; and the role of architecture, especially in negotiating difference productively through design.

Participants will hear from those developing, building, designing, leading and living in new projects globally and learn from their experience of delivering alternate housing.

Day 1: Global Precedents of Community-led and -owned Housing

Date: 13th April 2018

Often policy makers and developers see ‘community led’ as no more than glorified consultation, or as a way to navigate the planning process. Communities often talk of ‘community led’, but really mean full community control of housing and amenities. This can include the design process, full ownership of the property on completion, who lives in the development, rental and sales prices fixed in perpetuity by covenants in ownership contracts, and ongoing management. To make it more than just a place where people live, can community groups actively build communities as well as housing – where we might replace the term housing with the notion of civil society? This is not uncommon in other parts of the world. Why do we continue to wait for someone’s permission to do it here in the UK?

Common to many of the international projects that will be discussed is the role of the design process in the negotiation of difference amongst co-operative members and the coming into form of the project. Here, co-operative members navigating competing desires and ambitions for a project are innovating the shared spaces and amenities of multi-residential housing projects, moving away from the usual one two and three bedroom apartments sent to market by developers. These are projects either led by architects, or that involve co-op members who are architects.

The series of presentations are from architects and housing activists operating globally. They will deal with processes, give stories and accounts of specific projects, and speak about experiments in new, shared amenity at the scale of the building block and the dwelling unit.

9:30 Welcome by Adrian Lahoud (Dean, School of Architecture, RCA)
9:35 Introduction by Tony Wood (StART)
9:45 Introduction to Day 1 Tarsha Finney (RCA)
10:00-13.00: International Case Studies Part 1
    – Cristina Gamboa (Lacol), La Borda, Barcelona
    – Jeremy McLeod (Breathe Architecture), The Commons, Melbourne
    – Silvia Carpaneto (Carpaneto Schöningh Architekten), Coop Housing, Berlin (tbc)
    – Christoph Schmidt (ifau), R50, Berlin (tbc)
    – Christian Roth (Zanderroth Architekten), BIGyard, Berlin (tbc)
    – Claudia Thiesen (Mehr Als Wohnen), Kraftwerk I, Zurich
13:00-14:00 Lunch break
14.00-15.30:  International Case Studies Part 2
     – Jeremy McLeod: The Nightingale Principle, Melbourne.
    – Paul Karakusevic: Camden/New York
16.00-18.00: Panel Discussion 
    Discussion of participation, conflict, negotiation, and constituting community. 
    Clarifying relationships and terms between community and housing development and national contexts.
– Tony Wood (StART)
– Paul Karakusevic (Karakusevic Carson Architects)
– Catherine Harrington (Director, National CLT Network)
– Jeremy McLeod
– Claudia Thiesen
– Cristina Gamboa
– Stephen Hill (National CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network)
Chaired by Tarsha Finney (RCA)

Day 2: The UK Context: Community Control and Financing of Housing

Date: Saturday 14th April 2018

Until recently the general narrative has been ‘the market will provide’ when it comes to house building but this strategy is a failure for most people. Recently, the delivery of genuinely affordable and community-led housing has risen up the political agenda and raises a series of questions: What is genuinely affordable and who should housing be owned and managed by? What constitutes and legitimises a community to take control of housing projects? How are alternate models of housing to be scaled up to match the UK housing demand and what financing and procurement models are needed? Can public and private capital work with community organisations and philanthropy to achieve this?

The second day will be framed by StART, a group of local residents and workers who have initiated a community-led and transparent process for a 800-unit housing development in Haringey that puts local people in control, with the aim to provide genuinely affordable housing.

10:00: Welcome by Adrian Lahoud (Dean, School of Architecture, RCA)
10.05: Introduction by Tony Wood (StART)
10:15-12:45: Community Control: What Could It Look Like?
    – Vanessa Rickett (StART)
    – Sphen Hill (National CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network)
    – Dinah Roake (Atlas, Homes and Communities Agency)
    Chaired by Adrian Lahoud (RCA)
12:45-13:30: Lunch
13:30-16:00: How Do We Fund Affordable Housing?
    – Marlene Barrett (StART)                       
    – Stephen Hill  (Director, C20 futureplanners) tbc
    – Frances Northrop (Consultant, NEF/Co-ops UK Community Economic Development Programme)
    – Pete Gladwell (Head of Public Sector Partnerships, Legal & General Investment Management)  
    Chaired by Paul Karakusevic (Karakusevic Carson Architects)
16:30-18:30 The Future of Community-led Housing
    Hosted by The Architecture Foundation
    – Annabel Kennedy (StART)
    – Chris Brown (Executive Chair, igloo Regeneration)
    – Jeremy McLeod (Breathe Architecture)
    – Claudia Thiesen (Mehr Als Wohnen)
    – Cristina Gamboa (Lacol)
    Chaired by Phineas Harper (Architecture Foundation)

Congratulations to Alvaro Arancibia, former Projective Cities student, for winning the inaugural AA Graduate School Prize for Research for his PhD Thesis ‘The Social Re-Signification of Housing: A Design Guide for Santiago de Chile (2017). The PhD developed from his MPhil studies in Projective Cities.  

Date: 24/01/2017
Time: 14:00
Venue: 32FFB

Charles Rice joined Projective Cities for a seminar on his new book Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America

Vast interior spaces have become ubiquitous in the contemporary city. The soaring atriums and concourses of mega-hotels, shopping malls and transport interchanges define an increasingly normal experience of being ‘inside’ in a city. Yet such spaces are also subject to intense criticism and claims that they can destroy the quality of a city’s authentic life ‘on the outside’.

Interior Urbanism explores the roots of this contemporary tension between inside and outside, identifying and analysing the concept of interior urbanism and tracing its history back to the works of John Portman and Associates in 1960s and 70s America. Portman – increasingly recognised as an influential yet understudied figure – was responsible for projects such as Peachtree Center in Atlanta and the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel, developments that employed vast internal atriums to define a world of possibilities not just for hotels and commercial spaces, but for the future of the American downtown amid the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s.

The book analyses Portman’s architecture in order to reconsider major contexts of debate in architecture and urbanism in this period, including the massive expansion of a commercial imperative in architecture, shifts in the governance and development of cities amid social and economic instability, the rise of postmodernism and critical urban studies, and the defence of the street and public space amid the continual upheavals of urban development.

In this way the book reconsiders the American city at a crucial time in its development, identifying lessons for how we consider the forces at work, and the spaces produced, in cities in the present.