Inoperative design

Abstract

This paper presents a renewed critical reflection of the position and role of architecture in the current social turn of the practice. By thinking through a ‘resistant’ lens, taken from Giorgio Agamben’s spatial political aesthetics, this paper proposes that architectural design practice can reclaim its social agency. These reflections are grounded in the practice of community architecture as it has recently emerged out of the intensifying experience of informality and associated slum settlements in the rapidly growing cities of South-East Asia. Born out of the decade-long experience of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, the Community Architects Network (CAN) was founded in 2010 and now connects practitioners in 19 countries. Based on a five-year-long engagement between the authors and CAN, the paper reflects on the critical possibilities of CAN’s practice, discussing propositions, ambitions, challenges, and opportunities, and the political potential of architecture. Additionally, it presents its limitations, questioning to what extent such practices can be considered a kind of ‘negligence’, that is, a resistance against the status quo as a way of effectively strengthening new subjectivities and voices.

Key words:

• Agamben
• Community Architects Network
• ‘inoperative practice’
• architecture
• social turn
• Asian Coalition for Housing Rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The Baan Mankong (secure housing) programme in Thailand constitutes a large-scale precedent to CAN’s practices (Boonyabancha 2005).

2 Since May 2011 the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development (at UCL) has organised yearly field-trip projects partnering with the CAN and the ACHR. The co-creation of field trips as strategic learning moments for the various actors involved have focused on community-driven upgrading of urban poor settlements in Thailand and Cambodia.

3 Bartleby, the scrivener protagonist of Herman Melville’s novel (Melville 2007) becomes for Agamben the paradigm of such inoperative praxis: his ‘I would prefer not to’ is ‘the strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, 48), coming to represent is not only refusal of unacceptable conditions, not only civil disobedience, but also potentiality.

4 The upgrading of the settlement of Boeung Chhoeuk Meanchey in Chbar Ampov, Phnom Penh, started in May 2015, in the framework of a workshop held in collaboration between Development Planning Unit (DPU), Community Development Foundation, CAN, ACHR and the Ministry of Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction. Both authors attended and played an active role during the workshop along with the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development’s students.

5 Attended by Giorgio Talocci as representative of the DPU.

6 The site development plan is de facto the first document to be submitted (after land tenure has got regularised) in order to start any process of upgrading.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Camillo Boano

Camillo Boano is Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London.

Giorgio Talocci

Giorgio Talocci is a Teaching Fellow at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Email: [email protected]