ABSTRACT
This book explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and practice of architecture, planning and urban design. It aims to sketch out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can effect change in current architectural and design discourses. The main objective is to highlight the substantial possibilities that Agamben’s work holds for a renewed – radical and emancipatory – architectural and design practice in a time of neo-liberal consensus and uncritical acceptance of the nature of life and society. This work sits within the current debate over the need to reclaim a political, emancipatory project of architecture against a technocratic and biopolitical one. An emancipatory project that is able to reclaim the much-too-early abandoned critique of contemporary capitalism and its production of urban space, without getting trapped in discursive practices that are simply camouflaged as radical, overly disciplinary and constructed specifically to be expert-oriented.
