{"title":"From Gentrification to Sterilization? Building on Big Capital","authors":"A. Minton","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2105573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2105573","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In a period of extreme inequalities, the speed and scale of capital flows into London constitutes a new economic process qualitatively different from that of gentrification. It is underpinned by the financialization of housing introduced in the 1980s, the policy of Quantitative Easing, the influx of corrupt money into the city and the growing role of private equity in real estate markets. Since the 2008 financial crash the “trickle-down” of land and property price rises has built on the existing shortage of affordable housing to create an acute crisis. Combined with the commercialization of housing benefit, inflationary pressures both top-down and bottom-up are the consequence. While the current influx of capital shares key characteristics with economic gentrification, its speed and scale is unprecedented. I propose that, since the 2008 crash, we have been witnessing a new phenomenon, which I liken to sterilization rather than gentrification.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47334785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between Fengshui and Neighbors: Case Studies of Participant-Led House-Making in Rural East China","authors":"Youcao Ren, J. Woudstra","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2110779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2110779","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract China’s ongoing rural transition has led to dramatic infrastructural improvements in rural areas, yet local culture continues to decline. In rural east China fengshui has traditionally informed local building practice and has been revived since the “Reform and Opening” policy of 1978. It is practiced in those regions that have not yet been subjected to wholesale demolition and renewal, where residents are able to express a distinct connection to their homes. Adhering to fengshui enables an everyday placemaking process of engagement involving both practitioner and villagers. Through ethnographic field studies in rural Zhejiang province, this paper reveals how in a period of rapid rural transition the engagement with and (re)interpretation of fengshui contribute to the preservation of local building culture and community spirit. We argue that the findings indicate a need for much greater resident involvement in rural regeneration projects.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43757167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The “Prison House” and Normalization. Between the Reassertion of Privacy and the Risk of Collectiveness","authors":"S. Puddu","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2106535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2106535","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The principle of “normalization” in penology maintains that the life of people in captivity should resemble as far as possible the positive aspects of “normal” life in free society. To critically understand how the theories and practices of normalization impact our discourses about space within and beyond detention institutions, this essay considers the “prison house,” a genre that includes a range of homely, small-scale carceral facilities. The “prison house” attempts to normalize life, often through a process of “home-ification.” In doing so, it sublimates the notion of privacy – in its double modern connotation, as defined by Robin Evans, of solitude and domesticity – and re-introduces collectiveness as a choreographed practice hailed as a tool for reform and as guarantor of a daily social order. This article asks: does the “prison house” mimic or anticipate how free people live together in the residential architecture of the city?","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43201185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Downstairs, Upstairs: The Division of Domestic Space Between Domestic Workers and Super-Rich Employers in London","authors":"Mattie Reynolds","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2104523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2104523","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract London’s affluent neighborhoods are often reported as places where employers infringe migrant domestic workers’ rights. Much has been written on both the wealthy’s influence on cities and on domestic workers’ lack of rights, yet few have connected these literatures. In this article, I explore one of the UK’s most expensive addresses, Eaton Square, through contemporary and historical planning documents, to unearth a legacy of segregation masked by tactics to avoid public scrutiny. Through interviewing staff at Kalayaan, a charity that supports and advocates for domestic workers, and analyzing their survey data, I find that explicit segregation is being replaced by boundary erasure, with workers sleeping in communal areas and family members’ bedrooms, with little or no access to the city outside. The article questions the conflation of the physical house and social home that is regularly assumed, and argues for domestic workers’ human right to privacy to be enabled, rather than restricted, by spatial and legislative means.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42946376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Urgent Minor Matters: Re-Activating Archival Documents for Social Housing Futures","authors":"Heidi Svenningsen Kajita","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2093603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2093603","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Architectural archives of large-scale housing projects are usually ordered with construction in mind, but can they also function in support of the social in housing? This article reveals how particular notions of inhabitation were inscribed in documents used in the design processes of a post-World War II housing estate, the Byker Redevelopment in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (1968-83). From their site office, Ralph Erskine’s Arkitektkontor AB experimented with communicative processes with residents, some of which were kept on record and stored. Scribbles on furnished drawings point to particular imaginaries involving sometimes just one household; residents’ voices are noted in lists, in a local newspaper and in evaluative reports. Re-activating the office archive ethnographically, I stitch together episodic accounts from these scant scraps. The aim is not an all-embracing representation of historical events, but instead the possibility to attend to small truths of the social – urgent minor matters – in mainstream housing futures.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48631076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Holes in Architecture: A Queer Eye on a Design Method","authors":"Charles Drożyński","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2062658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2062658","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article analyzes the formation of a conceptual persona in a narrative which some architects use in the design process. It focuses on a description of such a persona borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What is Philosophy? It presents the work of three architects who explore how this persona can express a corporeal, public and emotional presence; elaborating on relations which extend beyond the design task and engage with their cultural context. The task all three were given is to design a glory hole that links divided lovers. The actuality of this configuration asks the inhabitants to imagine the presence of the other much like the architects would in the design process. The research is novel allowing architects to truly indulge in exploring the presence of sexual desire and longing in public space.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43976684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Students’ Park: A Poetic Dispatch as Placemaking Methodology","authors":"N. Kumari","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2057009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2057009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This piece is a creative intervention in the trope of research article writing. This ‘Poetic Dispatch’ is a response to be sent to the readers of this scholarly journal. It transgresses and extends the limit of its readership and genre by employing the ode form of poetic expression. It stresses Doreen Massey’s proposition that space is an incomplete event, always in becoming. The author takes the liberty of transitioning between voices; changing places as observer and observed, cataloguing and producing the space simultaneously. The photographs assert authentic presences. Situated in a students’ park in an Indian university campus, this text uses what Jacques Derrida calls the absence of the center to refer to the reader’s equal power to produce and ascribe meaning to the space. This students’ park acts like a Derridaean heterotopia where there is the coexistence of various orders of local and global without the prevalence of any.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45132451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foucault’s Relation With Architecture: The Interest of His Disinterest","authors":"André Patrão","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2046395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2046395","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For over half a century, the works of Michel Foucault have famously exerted tremendous influence upon practicing architects and theoreticians alike. But what of the role architecture played for the French philosopher, who rarely addressed architecture exclusively or primarily as a topic in itself? The following pages assemble a coherent outline of Foucault’s understanding and utilization of architecture, based on his fragmented dealings with and remarks on the subject in what may be considered his three most well-known writings among architectural audiences: a lecture to architects, “Of Other Spaces” (1967); an interview for an architecture magazine, “Space, Knowledge, and Power” (1982); and a book that rendered an old architectural typology famous, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975).","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47349332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dismantling the Face: Faciality and Architectural Space in the Age of “Control Societies”","authors":"G. Themistokleous","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2022.2059908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2059908","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the age of “control societies” there is a need to re-situate understandings of the face in architecture. Historical readings of the face in architecture remain rooted in an anthropomorphism that fails to consider current forms of “simulated surveillance” and the emerging non-human visualities that ensue from such a surveillance apparatus. The article considers the change from disciplinary surveillance, as observed in the Larkin Building, to today’s simulated surveillance. Referring to readings of the face by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Mark Cousins, the article traces alternative readings of facial codification. Toward this end, the “Eyes of the City” exhibition (2020) and the media installation, the diplorasis, are used to consider affective readings of the face that enable yet-to-be determined relations between human and non-human visualities. The aim of this article is to speculate on reversing the one-way visual control of space and the ensuing overdetermined architectural programming of the human.","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48838021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}