ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|26 pages
Introduction
part II|100 pages
Violence and war machines
part III|94 pages
Security and borders
chapter 9|15 pages
Dialogic dilemmas
chapter 10|16 pages
Regenerating Shanghai through urban spatial design?
chapter 13|18 pages
Belfast's ‘peace walls'
part IV|96 pages
Race, identity and ideology
chapter 16|17 pages
The audit
chapter 17|18 pages
The persistent design-politics of race
chapter 18|16 pages
The socialist past is a foreign country
part V|98 pages
Spectacle and the screen
chapter 21|16 pages
A ‘crisis' of indeterminacy in the architectural photograph
chapter 22|15 pages
Mediated spectacles
chapter 24|16 pages
Western fantasy and tropical nightmare
chapter 25|20 pages
The political construction of Medellín's global image
part VI|94 pages
Mapping landscapes and big data
chapter 27|19 pages
The sociocultural construction of urban wasteland
chapter 30|17 pages
Infrastructures of urban simulation
part VII|18 pages
Conclusion