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Figures of Thought and the Socius: Design, Creative Mapping, & Education
Get PDFStarting from a faculty wide discussion on teaching architecture and urbanism in the nineties at the TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture, I develop a brief historical overview of more recent planning and mapping techniques. During the many meetings at the faculty, discussions swept from ‘architectural’ approaches, to ‘computational’, to ‘urban’, and ‘scientific’. Although more professional experts were involved, coming from Maastricht University where new teaching models were introduced earlier on, the meetings never ended in a consensus on how to teach urbanism. What seemed to be lacking was a more historically informed approach. I use James Corner’s four approaches to mapping techniques to show not merely a ‘technique’, but the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of a particular approach. Every planning technique creates its own ‘social field’ in which it operates: the socius
Cultural Appropriation, Design, and Gender in Calendar Posters in China (1912-1949)
Get PDFThis three image-essay looks at how depictions of modern woman were central in advertising designs and imported products in the context of gender, identity, and design in early twentieth-century China. The adaptation of Euro- American concepts, linked to modernisation in local contexts resulted in both the production of hybrid poster designs to promote merchandise, they embody gender fluid design. This essay uses three specific images to situate objects, image and context, before highlighting specific elements contained wihtin each as examples of mid-century gender narratives
Gender as Spatial Identity Gender strategizing in postcolonial and neocolonial Hong Kong
Get PDFA photo essay exploring the how gender identity is deliberately constructed through social positioning within the urban landscape of Hong Kong. Hong Kong has always had a binary identity, which continues through from the postcolonial to the neocolonial. This creates layers of additional complexity around gender identity, which is explored in terms of performativity and authenticity through both the heterosexual fluidity of foreign domestic workers and through homosexual tactics of local men, within a public park in Hong Kong. By rejecting the past through a politics of disappearance, previous boundaries around fluidity, repression, and suppression continue to influence the present in a volatile neocolonial context opening questions around what is an authentic performance of self
Body-Guard Design: Gender, Violence and Agency
Get PDFThis essay focuses on one of the numerous aspects in design that illustrates the necessity of including gender. It discusses gender identities between subjection and agency within the broad realm of matters, textiles, and fashion. The article exemplarily wanders through various forms of social oppression and exploitation of women in history as well as today, but also offers perspectives of resilience and resistance. Although totally different from each other, they have one phenomenon in common: it is both the body and the material that matters. In the end, the possibility of transforming the social making of objectified and subjectified bodies into fluid identities is discussed
#WomenSpatialActivism: Designing for the re-appropriation of public spaces by women in New Delhi, India
Get PDFThe first attempt to reinvent the public spaces, #WomenSpatialActivism, reclaims the women’s right to the city in India. Women Spatial Activism (WSA) proposes a gender-sensitive approach to urban design in the neighbourhood of Malviya Nagar in Delhi in India, that inspires the reappropriation of the front door by an old woman, the street by a working girl and the public park by mothers. The proposal is to reclaim women’s right to the city through the recontextualisation of their public spaces which have been lost or need to be developed in urbanised India. The project has three main components: bottom-up strategic spatial interventions, the creation of a strong coalition of local stakeholders, and the use of digital technology. The hashtag #WomenSpatialActivism or #WSA aims to spread this movement through social media. The Women Spatial Activism project calls for a spatial gender agenda for an inclusive urban future for all
Adventurous Upcrafting Ventures
Get PDFSince 2015, the Research Institute of Organic Treasures (R.I.O.T.) has combined fermentation practices and social experimentation in Hong Kong to give biological byproducts from human and urban metabolisms a regenerative purpose. Here putrescible wastes emitted from our kitchens, toilets, and bodies are considered our most foundational design material that contributes to a “world of eaters” (DuPuis 2015). In this applied design work, the concept of upcycling is socio-materially extended into shared forms of upskilling, and therefore referred to as upcrafting. In an effort to combine practical outcomes with long-term welfare creation, R.I.O.T. brings together laypersons, natural scientists, and artists, into open-ended explorations of alternative knowledge and change making, or what Melanie DuPuis calls “extended peer communities” (ibid. 155)
Drawing the Impossible: the Role of Architectural Drawing in the Production of Meaning in Social Space
Get PDFThis pictorial essay reflects on a unique category of architectural drawing that depicts spaces that cannot physically exist. It suggests that this specific mode of drawing plays a significant role in the production of meaning in social space through depicting ephemeral characteristics of our social relations. This argument is discussed in relation to Michel Foucault’s theoretical allegory of the heterotopic mirror, and illustrated through accompanying images of the drawing project The Virtual Relations (2009). This project used the methodology of “drawing the impossible” with Henri Lefebvre’s theory for the production of space to explore ephemeral conditions of social interaction in the domestic interior as five spatial descriptions
Designing Space for the Majority: Urban Displacements of the Human
Get PDFSocial, historical and architectural research on urbanization processes in the Global South have increasingly valorized the contributions of an “urban majority” — a heuristic composite of working poor, working and lower middle class residents — to the formation of intricate repertoires of built forms, economic practices, infrastructures of affect, and collective sensibilities. Despite oscillating registers of structural violence, colonial residue, geopolitical instability, and systematic dispossession, metropolitan landscapes of the South are replete with an incessantly recalibrated intensity of working with and through uncertainty to deliver ways of life that skirt precarity. The auto-construction of the majority is usually associated with particular forms and practices. If the territories of operation usually associated with this urban majority may find themselves increasingly hemmed in by countervailing forces, is it possible to imagine new forms through which the “archives” of their capacities might be expressed? By intervening into the increasingly formatted, homogenized venues of residential and commercial space, it is possible to conceive new possibilities of the ways in which “majority life” can be re-enacted, but in a manner that strategically modulates the very ways in which that life is made visible
The Social and the Spatial, Urban Models as Morphologies for a ‘Lived’ Approach to Planning
Get PDFHow and in what manner has the social been instrumental in formulating planning policies, and does Hong Kong ascribe to any social concept that facilitates its current spatial planning framework? The legacy of the social in planning originally came to fruition within the Chicago School of Social Sciences during the early 1920s. Since then, the understanding of the social and how planning responds to the social has been wide and varied. This paper examines the social’s application in spatial notions in addition to its context within Hong Kong. At its core this argument outlines the consequences of a social notion within planning and the spatial modes of recourse. Issues of scaling are brought into question when addressing planning as well as economic focus, in both the local as well as regional governance levels, which further emphasises the dynamic proxies of social and spatial factors for territorial planning. Having neither of these, the argument then highlights the realities of economic asymmetries in the disempowerment of a local populous through land speculation and housing shortages
Creating Affective Social Design: An Ethical and Ontological Discussion
Get PDFThe ethics of designing has often been organised according to moral imperatives, and social design not only aligns with such moralities, but perpetuates them without providing a clear critique of the systems to which they adhere. To rid itself of such reactive ideologies, and so to create other conditions for the possibility of its creativity, social design might occupy itself with a different account of ethics altogether. This paper will seek to elucidate such a different ethics along the lines Baruch Spinoza proposed and Gilles Deleuze championed. That is, it will therefore call for an affective designing that operates by creating ethical ontologies. This article will bring an affective, ethical, ontological design to bear on a social entity that emerges from the relations affectivity requires, insofar as it is one that is designed