Fluid Territories: On Property & Risk
From the invention of perspective to the advent of satellite imagery, measurement and surveying techniques have long been employed to reduce the ecological, cultural and social spaces of human and non-human existence to mere economic parameters. Eventually, such forms of abstraction – legal, conceptual and aesthetic – commodified the land and alienated its subjects, turning spaces into assets and disintegrating communities through excessive processes of individualisation. The advent of colonialism marked the beginning of a perpetual global struggle for space and its attendant resources and rights. Unsurprisingly, the enclosure of the commons and the appropriation of the English landscape developed almost in parallel to the expansion of the colonies, with experimentations in the latter feeding back into the development of common law. Both processes were founded upon the principle of ‘private property’ and facilitated the transition towards global capitalism – imposing a new spatial order through marking, dividing and distributing spaces and rights.
Contemporary forms of coloniality and capitalist development are no different. If such forces operated in the past through aggressive class, gender and racial exclusions, today they discriminate individuals, communities and spaces as much based on credit score, liability and risk. In this process, architecture is both a means and subject of possession and dispossession. From insurance reinstatement and mortgage valuations to conservation protocols, privatised parks and nature reserves, and contemporary colonial forestry, architecture is instrumentalised to enforce property rights. It does so through uneven distribution of risks and vulnerabilities, and through multiple forms of physical, bodily and mental exclusion. The same spatial frameworks could, however, resist these forms of delimitation and division.
Architecture in this context can be seen as a device that mediates power relations, redistributes rights, negotiates forms of belonging, choreographs rituals, collectivises use and establishes forms of care and co-operation. In DIP7, we investigate architectural propositions that react to these spatio-juridical conditions and which perform on multiple scales. We create frames that capture, forces that trigger, lines that appropriate and lenses that make visible the conflicts between space, rights and subjects.
From the invention of perspective to the advent of satellite imagery, measurement and surveying techniques have long been employed to reduce the ecological, cultural and social spaces of human and non-human existence to mere economic parameters. Eventually, such forms of abstraction – legal, conceptual and aesthetic – commodified the land and alienated its subjects, turning spaces into assets and disintegrating communities through excessive processes of individualisation. The advent of colonialism marked the beginning of a perpetual global struggle for space and its attendant resources and rights. Unsurprisingly, the enclosure of the commons and the appropriation of the English landscape developed almost in parallel to the expansion of the colonies, with experimentations in the latter feeding back into the development of common law. Both processes were founded upon the principle of ‘private property’ and facilitated the transition towards global capitalism – imposing a new spatial order through marking, dividing and distributing spaces and rights.
Contemporary forms of coloniality and capitalist development are no different. If such forces operated in the past through aggressive class, gender and racial exclusions, today they discriminate individuals, communities and spaces as much based on credit score, liability and risk. In this process, architecture is both a means and subject of possession and dispossession. From insurance reinstatement and mortgage valuations to conservation protocols, privatised parks and nature reserves, and contemporary colonial forestry, architecture is instrumentalised to enforce property rights. It does so through uneven distribution of risks and vulnerabilities, and through multiple forms of physical, bodily and mental exclusion. The same spatial frameworks could, however, resist these forms of delimitation and division.
Architecture in this context can be seen as a device that mediates power relations, redistributes rights, negotiates forms of belonging, choreographs rituals, collectivises use and establishes forms of care and co-operation. In DIP7, we investigate architectural propositions that react to these spatio-juridical conditions and which perform on multiple scales. We create frames that capture, forces that trigger, lines that appropriate and lenses that make visible the conflicts between space, rights and subjects.
Unit
Masters:
Hamed Khosravi, Georgia Hablützel,
Platon Issaias
Students:
Eric Chen
Puze Huang
Kuan-Yu Lai
Alice Mohan
Amalia Pantazopoulou
Ksenia Slutskaya
Oska Smith
Aude Tollo
Sacha Trouiller
Lola Wright
Yang Yang
Seong Kee Yeap
Hamed Khosravi, Georgia Hablützel,
Platon Issaias
Students:
Eric Chen
Puze Huang
Kuan-Yu Lai
Alice Mohan
Amalia Pantazopoulou
Ksenia Slutskaya
Oska Smith
Aude Tollo
Sacha Trouiller
Lola Wright
Yang Yang
Seong Kee Yeap