Overview

For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing. Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data. This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.

Full Product Details

Author:   Nikolina Bobic (Plymouth University, UK) ,  Farzaneh Haghighi
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   1.324kg
ISBN:  

9780367629175

ISBN 10:   0367629178
Pages:   610
Publication Date:   30 November 2022
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

PART I: Introduction 1. Spatialization of oppression: Contemporary politics of architecture and the urban NIKOLINA BOBIC & FARZANEH HAGHIGHI PART II: Violence and War Machines 2. Introduction to violence and war machines WILLIAM M. TAYLOR 3. The rise of zoöpolitics: On urbanism and warfare LIEVEN DE CAUTER 4. 2015 Paris Terrorist Attack: A threat to urban life and territorial integrity JOHN HANNA 5. Whose vision, which city? Planning and unseeing in urban Asia REDENTO B. RECIO, ISHITA CHATTERJEE, LUFTUN NAHAR LATA & NEERAJ DANGOL 6. Architecture as Infrastructure: The spatial politics of extractivism HÉLÈNE FRICHOT & SEPIDEH KARAMI 7. Manus prison: The brutality of offshore detention DANIEL GRINCERI PART III: Security and Borders 8. Introduction to security and borders ANOMA PIERIS 9. Dialogic dilemmas: Citizen participation in built environment alterations in Malmö, Sweden GUNNAR SANDIN 10. Regenerating Shanghai through urban spatial design? The limits to experimentalism and participation YUNPENG ZHANG & WEILUN ZHANG 11. The city and the camp: Destabilizing a spatial-political dichotomy IRIT KATZ 12. Architectures of motion at the US Mexico border THOMAS NAIL 13. Belfast’s ‘peace walls’: How the politics and policy of 1969-1971 shaped the city’s contemporary ‘interface areas’ JAMES O'LEARY PART IV: Race, Identity and Ideology 14. Introduction to race, identity and ideology STEPHEN F. GRAY & ANNE LIN 15. The Space of Labor – Racialization and ethnicization of Port Kembla, Australia MIRJANA LOZANOVSKA 16. The Audit: Perils and possibilities for contesting oppression in the heritage landscape CATHERINE D'IGNAZIO, WONYOUNG SO & NICOLE NTIM-ADDAE 17. The Persistent design-politics of race: Power and ideology in American public housing redevelopment LAWRENCE VALE 18. The Socialist past is a foreign country: Mass housing and uses of heritage in contemporary Eastern Europe MAROŠ KRIVÝ 19. Collectivity and privacy in housing: Path dependencies and limited choices TAHL KAMINER PART V: Spectacle and the Screen 20. Introduction to spectacle and the screen FRANCESCO PROTO 21. A ‘Crisis’ of indeterminacy in the architectural photograph: Architectural spectacle and everyday life in the photography of Lacaton & Vassal’s Coutras House ROBIN WILSON 22. Mediated spectacles: Urban representation and far-right propaganda in crisis Athens AIKATERINI ANTONOPOULOU 23. Street protest and its representations: Urban dissidence in Iran FARZANEH HAGHIGHI 24. Western fantasy and tropical nightmare: Spectacular architecture and urban warfare in Rio PEDRO FIORI ARANTES & CLÁUDIO REZENDE RIBEIRO 25. The political construction of Medellín’s global image: Strategies of replacement, erasure and disconnection via urban and architectural interventions CHRISTINA DELUCHI PART VI: Mapping Landscapes and Big Data 26. Introduction to mapping landscapes and big data ATE POORTHUIS 27. The socio-cultural construction of urban wasteland: Mapping of the Antwerp Southside CECILIA FURLAN & MANOLA COLABIANCHI 28. Brownfields as climate colonialism: Land reuse and development divides SHILOH KRUPAR 29. The bomb, the circle and the drawing undone ENDRIANA AUDISHO & FRANCESCA HUGHES 30. Infrastructures of urban simulation: Digital twins, virtual humans and synthetic populations FARZIN LOTFI-JAM 31. Posthuman urbanism: datafication, algorithmic governance, and Covid-19 IGNAS KALPOKAS PART VII: CONCLUSION 32. Intermission: Critical mapping of spatial politics and aesthetics STEPHEN WALKER

Reviews

This volume offers a cutting-edge, valuable, and critical perspectives on how power - in its different forms and scales - shapes architecture and urban space. Importantly this unique book presents a wide and rich collection of chapters and case studies that support an important intellectual agenda, arguing that the built landscape itself should be understood as a political force, rather than a background to power and politics, especially in the current global human-made crises. Critical discussion around borders and bordering, state violence, coloniality and political ecology in both Global South and Global North are critically theoretically debated throughout this must-read collection. The multidisciplinary approach of this book will attract scholars and students from different fields including architecture, urbanism, political science, sociology, and political philosophy. Prof Haim Yacobi, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit. University College London

This volume offers a cutting-edge, valuable, and critical perspectives on how power - in its different forms and scales - shapes architecture and urban space. Importantly this unique book presents a wide and rich collection of chapters and case studies that support an important intellectual agenda, arguing that the built landscape itself should be understood as a political force, rather than a background to power and politics, especially in the current global human-made crises. Critical discussion around borders and bordering, state violence, coloniality and political ecology in both Global South and Global North are critically theoretically debated throughout this must-read collection. The multidisciplinary approach of this book will attract scholars and students from different fields including architecture, urbanism, political science, sociology, and political philosophy. Prof Haim Yacobi, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, UK With amazing erudition this comprehensive volume provides a state of the art treatment of the complex connections between architecture, violence and the politics of urban space. Theoretically incisive and empirically wide-ranging it will be essential reading for scholars and activist seeking to come to terms with all aspects of the politicisation of urban space in the contemporary world. Prof Stephen Graham, Professor of Cities and Society, Newcastle University, UK We learn through these contributions that architecture and the management of space are implicated in segregation, inequity and authoritarianism. The volume is an urgent call to think of architectural planning as an instrument of economic, political and structural violence. While this is not the only volume to tackle this point, it is definitely the first interdisciplinary work to cover a wide range of themes, theories, methods, geographies of space as politics and for it is a trailblazer. Prof Aomar Boum, UCLA Department of Anthropology, US It is commendable that architecture as a profession should strive to offer viable solutions to the problems of reliability, affordability, and sustainability. Yet it also requires that architecture as a discipline is not only solution-oriented. The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume I: Violence, Spectacle and Data offers a necessary departure from the proverbial architectural complacency with politics by posing new problems politically, i.e., through maximum inclusion and minimal identification. The contributors differ in the degree of their allegiance to the concepts of responsibility and response-ability, respectively. While the former appeals to the moral sense of duty, the latter is attuned to ethics as a mode of existence. Framed this way, ethology becomes a problem of power and not of a priori rights and messianism. Andrej Radman, Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands Bobic and Haghighi have provided us with a handbook that grapples incisively with the relationship between architecture, urbanism and politics. Its multi-disciplinary array of contributors offer up a comprehensive range of insights and analysis essential to our age of borders and barricades. Landscapes of big data are mapped, questions of race and identity are reckoned with, and security is scrutinized. The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics is a vital tool in coming to terms with how the power and violence of resurgent nationalisms, proliferating wars, ubiquitous surveillance and social struggle are made manifest in architecture and urbanism. Douglas C Spencer, Director of Graduate Education, Pickard Chilton Professor in Architecture, Department of Architecture, Iowa State University, US This is an exciting and diverse set of reflections on the politics of urban space. It breaks new ground in outlining novel perspectives on the way war, borders, race, identity, representation, and data shape urban spaces. This handbook will shape future conversations on the way architecture is both target and tool of violence as well as the oppressive spatialities of planetary urbanisation. Dr Martin Coward, Reader in International Politics, Lead Editor, Review of International Studies, The University of Manchester, UK The volume of Bobic and Haghighi presents a timely and rich overview of contemporary treatments of the multidimensional nexus between politics and architecture. It offers a much-needed rethinking of the political dimensions of architectural and urban process as they relate to the topical issues of climate change, racism, inequality, the refugee crises, colonization and surveillance. As an insightful treatment of the ability of spatial practices to inform, retain or sustain agency, the book can be a useful addition to courses in urban studies, architecture, urban design and geography. Prof Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester, UK

Author Information

Nikolina Bobic is an academic and an architect. After completing her PhD in Architecture at the University of Sydney (Australia), she moved to the UK and is now based at the University of Plymouth. Apart from her extensive experience in teaching in Australia, Hong Kong and the UK, Bobic has also given lectures in the Netherlands and New Zealand. Engaging with the two disciplines in which she is trained, architecture and sociology, her research addresses the intersections of power, politics, and space in their oppressive and liberatory mechanisms. Bobic is the author of Balkanization and Global Politics: Remaking Cities and Architecture (Routledge, 2019), and in 2020 she coedited Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts thematic issue 20 ‘Political Matters’. Farzaneh Haghighi is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Architecture from The University of Sydney, Australia. Her research is concerned with the intersection of political philosophy, architecture and urbanism, and her first book, Is the Tehran Bazaar Dead? Foucault, Politics, and Architecture, was published in 2018. Her research seeks new avenues to enrich our creative analysis of complex built environments through investigating the implications of critical and cultural theory for architectural knowledge.

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