Spatializing Justice Building Blocks Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman /anglais

by CRUZ TEDDY/FORMAN FO

A manifesto calling for a new kind of architecture that confronts social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth.Spatializing Justice calls for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Architects should take a position against inequality and practice accordingly. With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture— Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions. These building blocks call for expanded modes of practice, through which architects can imagine new spatial procedures, political and economic strategies, and modalities of sociability. Challenging existing exclusionary policies can advance a more experimental architecture not bound by formal parameters. Architects must think of themselves as designers not only of things but of civic processes, complicate the ideas of ownership and property, and imagine new sites of research, pedagogy, and intervention. As one of the texts advises, “The questions must be different questions if we want different answers.” Copublished with Hatje Cantz Verlag

Genres: Architecture

Paperback

Published October 17, 2022

Reviews

[lu]

Hard to rate bc the ideas were so solid but the wording (along w/ the bright neon pages) almost made my eyes bleed at times. The language was a little frustrating bc it makes it inaccessible for people not in the field to read with any ease— but I guess that wasn’t what this book was trying to do— these are experts trying to reach experts. There are a LOT of cool ideas here that the authors are actually working towards employing and challenging in their work. As a lover of rhetorical questions & diagrams, this was a REALLY interesting read.

Ideas that stick with me: recognition of contested histories in architectural and urban design projects “urban territories of amnesia”, radicalizing the local— the idea that we need to move beyond the abstraction of “global” to engage local conflict, transgressing borders, temporalizing infrastructure “while architecture freezes and spatializes time, infrastructures activate and temporalize space”, supporting immigrant communities by building for non-conforming economies and density (made me not ever want to be a planner), density as the intensity of social and economic exchanges instead of # of objects, re-tooling co-ownership (co-op cities and community land trusts) mobilizing neighborhoods as political units, re-collectivizing the kitchen

[Lily Keefauver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provocations and ideas fascinating and brings important points of reconstructing the way our current systems should be structured. Heavy emphasis on bottom up community based solutions as well as provides interesting case studies of migrants and informal communities mobilizing to achieve their goals. While interesting the graphics aren't the most intuitive and the book likely should be read in conjunction with other literature to find more details on how to specifically enact the actions it calls for.

[Drew Tiedeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primarily a graphic design/data visualization case study for me. Content is good but the language is sometimes inaccessible !