Appropriating architecture: owning, commoning, and curating
Lead: Christoph Lueder and Debapriya Chakrabarti
By highlighting culturally bound concepts of belonging, this thematic collection challenges the politics of commodification and makes space for discourse about emergent architectures and multiplayer ecologies of owning, commoning and curating.
The seemingly unstoppable momentum of global neoliberal politics and commodification transforming buildings, places and cities into assets for financial exploitation obscures the fact that property is as much a cultural concept as it has legal and economical dimensions. The words and concepts describing relationships of control, mythical and feudal bonds, or emotional belonging between people and things have co-evolved with architectural and urban typologies along distinct paths in each culture. Likewise, continual rethinking of communal resources as commons, socialist state property, council estates, patronage, societal and co-operative ownership is manifest in distinct spaces, places and architectural opportunities. What alternative spatial imaginaries emerge when inhabitants, activists, citizens and architects collaboratively design new relationships between people and architecture? What paths to inclusive and equitable futures are being unlocked by housing co-operatives, by planning for appropriation over time, by informalisation and informal settlements?
Call for Papers: What does it mean to co-design alternative models of ownership? How can historical and emergent, culturally rooted notions of owning, curating and commoning inform shared imaginaries and shape urban and architectural space? This thematic collection seeks scholarly work that critically examines architecture’s entanglements with politics, economics, regimes, geographies and cultures of belonging. We are also interested in architectural practice and case studies that demonstrate the spatial potential of sharing, commoning and designing for time.
We seek contributions that examine what it means to appropriate architecture, including but not limited to:
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The architect as enabler and/or the inhabitant as curator within hybrid ecologies of spatial production.
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Multiplayer cities, urban ecologies constituted through heterogenous models of ownership, curating and commoning, their spatial manifestations, their resilience, and the transformative potential of tactics such as meanwhile programming.
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The spatialisation of co-operative models of ownership and their architectural potential.
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Learning from culturally and historically rooted practices of commoning and communal curation in the Global South, learning from tactics of resistance against neoliberal spatial politics.
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Themed towns (e.g. China’s Simulacra Cities), constructing identity, hybrid identities, and reclaiming authenticity as a sense of belonging to a place.
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The emergent shift from financial markets to techno-oligarchies, its threats, opportunities and spatial manifestations (e.g. Google, Meta, and Tesla’s corporation-controlled towns).