Architectural Anthropology: Exploring Lived Space 9780367555757, 9781003094142, 9780367555795

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Architectural Anthropology

This book prompts architects and anthropologists to think and act together. In order to fully grasp the relationship between human beings and their built environments and design more liveable and sustainable buildings and cities in the future, we need new cross-disciplinary approaches combining anthropology and architecture. This is neither anthropology of architecture, nor ethnography for architects, but a new approach beyond these positions: Architectural Anthropology. The anthology gathers contributions from leading researchers from various Nordic universities, architectural schools, and architectural firms as well as prominent international scholars like Tim Ingold, Albena Yaneva, and Sarah Pink – all exploring, developing, and innovating the cross-disciplinary field between anthropology and architecture. Several contributions are co-written by architects and anthropologists, merging approaches from the two disciplines in order to fully explore the dynamics of lived space. Through a broad range of empirical examples, methodological approaches, and theoretical reflections, the anthology provides inspiration and tools for scholars, students, and practitioners working with lived space. The first part focusses on homes, walls, and boundaries, the second on urban space and public life, and the third on processes of creativity, participation, and design. Marie Stender is an anthropologist and senior researcher at the Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University, Denmark. Claus Bech-Danielsen is an architect and professor at the Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University, Denmark. Aina Landsverk Hagen is an anthropologist and senior researcher at the Work Research Institute at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.

Routledge Research in Architecture

The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, monographs of architects, interior design and much more. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research. Kenosis, Creativity, and Architecture Appearance through Emptying Randall S. Lindstrom Affect, Architecture and Practice Toward a Disruptive Temporality of Practice Akari Nakai Kidd Architectural Anthropology Exploring Lived Space Edited by Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, and Aina Landsverk Hagen Writing the Materialities of the Past Cities and the Architectural Topography of Historical Imagination Sam Griffiths Louis I. Kahn in Rome and Venice Tangible Forms Elisabetta Barizza Cybernetic Architectures Informational Thinking and Digital Design Camilo Andrés Cifuentes Quin For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Architecture/book-series/RRARCH

Architectural Anthropology Exploring Lived Space

Edited by Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, and Aina Landsverk Hagen

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, and Aina Landsverk Hagen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, and Aina Landsverk Hagen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Part I: edited by Claus Bech-Danielsen and Marie Stender Part II: edited by Sten Gromark, Aina Landsverk Hagen, and Marie Stender Part III: edited by Eli Støa and Aina Landsverk Hagen All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stender, Marie, 1978- editor. | Bech-Danielsen, Claus, editor. | Hagen, Aina Landsverk, editor. Title: Architectural anthropology : exploring lived space / edited by Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen and Aina Landsverk Hagen. Other titles: Architectural anthropology (Routledge (Firm)) Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge research in architecture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020056660 (print) | LCCN 2020056661 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367555757 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003094142 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and anthropology. Classification: LCC NA2543.A58 A735 2021 (print) | LCC NA2543.A58 (ebook) | DDC 720.1/03‐‐dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056660 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056661 ISBN: 978-0-367-55575-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-55579-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09414-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

List of contributors Foreword by Tim Ingold Acknowledgements Introduction to architectural anthropology

viii xiii xviii 1

M ARIE ST END E R, C L A US B E CH - D AN I EL S EN , A ND AINA L ANDS VE RK H AG E N

The method of architectural anthropology: six suggestions

13

AL BE NA YANE V A

PART I

Home, walls, and boundaries

31

EDITED BY CLAUS BECH-DANIELSEN AND MARIE STENDER

1 The viscous porosity of walls and people

35

S AND RA L ORI PE TE R S E N

2 An outdoor living room: balconies and blurring boundaries

48

M ARIE ST END E R A N D M A R IE B LO M G R EN J EPSEN

3 Mould, microbes, and microscales of architecture: an anthropological approach to indoor environments

62

TURID B ORGE S TRA N D Ø I EN A N D M IA K R US E RASM USSEN

4 Homelessness and homeliness: collage technique as a research method L AURA HE L EN E HØ J R I N G AN D C LA U S BEC H - DAN I ELSEN

76

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Contents

5 Walls and islands: exploring perpetual configurations of carcerality through architectural anthropology

90

RUNA JOHA N N E SSE N AN D T O M A S M AX M A RTI N

PART II

Urban space and public life

105

EDITED BY STEN GROMARK, AINA LANDSVERK HAGEN, AND MARIE STENDER

6 Interdisciplinarity on site: exploring the urban interventions ‘Unidades de Vida Articulada’ in Medellín

109

L ISB ET HAR B O E AN D HA N N E CE C ILI E G EI RBO

7 Engaging with mixed-use design: the case of the urban library in Oslo

122

CICILIE FA GE R L I D, B E N G T A N DE RS E N , A N D ASTRI MA RGARETA D ALS E ID E

8 Urban youth, narrative dialogues, and emotional imprints: how co-creating the ‘splotting’ methodology became a transformative journey into interdisciplinary collaboration

135

AINA L ANDS VE R K HA GE N A N D J EN N Y B . O SULDSEN

9 What makes spatial difference? Conceptualizing architectural anthropology through filmmaking

149

L INA B E RG LU N D -S N O DG RA S S A N D EB BA H ÖGSTRÖ M

10 ‘After Belonging’: a study of proposals for architectural interventions for arrival of refugees in Oslo, Norway

164

E LI S TØ A A N D AN N E S I GF R ID G R Ø N S ET H

PART III

Processes of creativity, participation, and design EDITED BY ELI STøA AND AINA LANDSVERK HAGEN 11 Architectural anthropologists in the making? Paths to creative youth participation in local urban development INGRID M . T O L STAD AN D A S TR I M A R G A RETA D ALSE IDE

177

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Contents vii

12 Questioning the shape of social concepts: transforming anthropological insights into architectural design drivers

194

DRE W NATHA N TH I LM AN Y

13 Rendering atmosphere: exploring the creative glue in an urban design studio

207

ANE TT E ST EN SL U N D AN D M IK K EL BIL LE

14 Constructing community? A collaborative housing development process meeting credit and concrete

224

S IL JE ERØY SO L L I E N AN D S Ø RE N N IEL S E N

15 Norwegian pilots: navigating the technological logic of sustainable architecture

237

RUTH W OODS A N D TH O MA S B ER K ER

Afterword: engaging architectural anthropology

251

S ARA H PINK

Index

264

Contributors

Bengt Andersen, social anthropologist, senior researcher, Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan University. He has recently published on segregated cities, surburban dreamscapes and visual marketing in home selling. Claus Bech-Danielsen, architect, professor, Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University. Research in housing architecture including postwar housing, disadvantaged housing, suburbia, homemaking, housing trends, affordable housing, and downsizing. Holds several positions of trust in the Scandinavian research community, is chairman in think tanks, and has received awards for his research. Lina Berglund-Snodgrass, landscape architect and urban planning researcher, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Research interests include urban planning ideas, knowledge and forms of organizing. She has recently published on testbed planning as a way of conceptualizing urban planning in the intersection between experimental and public sector logic. Thomas Berker, social scientist, professor in science and technology studies and leader of the Centre for Technology and Society at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). His main research area is end-user research, predominantly related to sustainable building. Mikkel Bille, anthropologist, associate professor, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University. His research focuses on atmospheres and social uses of lighting, particularly in Scandinavia and the Middle East. He is leading the projects Living with Nordic Lighting (Velux Foundation) and The Pandemic City (Velux Foundation). Astri Margareta Dalseide, architect and urbanist at the architecture firm A-Lab. Her practice focus has been on public participation in planning. Recent publications concern parents’ experiences of revitalized urban areas. Cicilie Fagerlid, anthropologist, associate professor, VID Specialized University. She has co-edited two anthologies on public and academic

Contributors ix libraries. Her publications on libraries concern author events and the potentiality of literature, democratic coexistence and participatory emancipation. Hanne Cecilie Geirbo, social anthropologist, associate professor at Oslo Metropolitan University. She has a researcher position at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and holds a PhD in information systems. Sten Gromark, architect SAR/MSA, professor emeritus, Chalmers University of Technology ACE, Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Göteborg, Sweden. His research profile is on critical interpretations of contemporary residential architecture based on humanistic and social science-oriented perspectives. Anne Sigfrid Grønseth, professor of anthropology at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer and head of Unit of Migration and Diversity. Has recently published on the ethics of knowledge creation and mobilities of wellbeing. Aina Landsverk Hagen, senior researcher, Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan University. PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oslo on collaborative creativity among architects in Oslo and New York. She researches topics like urban development, youth participation, freedom of speech, innovation and idea development. Lisbet Harboe, architect, associate professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). She practised architecture before completing her PhD in 2012 on social concerns in contemporary architecture. Ebba Högström, architect and urban planning researcher, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Research interests include social issues in architecture and urban planning, welfare geographies, and experiencedbased knowledge and methods. Has recently published on the urban ethics of the asylum. Laura Helene Højring, architect, PhD, project leader, OK-Fonden. Focusing on the interdisciplinarity between theory and practice, architecture and anthropology, she has done research on housing architecture, homemaking, and homelessness. Højring works with architecture and homelessness, through research, as adviser, and as member of boards and interest groups. Tim Ingold, professor emeritus of social anthropology, University of Aberdeen, and a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has written extensively on northern circumpolar peoples, human–animal relations, evolutionary theory, environmental perception, lines, walking, art, and architecture.

x Contributors Marie Blomgren Jepsen, sociologist, research assistant, Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University. Her research focuses on the social forms of urban life, the interplay between spatial settings and social life, disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and the relationship between neighbours in the city. Runa Johannessen, architect, PhD, adjunct professor at the Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation. Johannessen is specialized in the political instrumentation of architecture in sites of violence, conflict, and societal transformation. Tomas Max Martin, prison ethnographer, PhD, senior researcher at DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture. Specialized in prison sociology and the anthropology of the state with a focus on the localization of human rights and appropriation of new technologies and penal architectures. Søren Nielsen, architect MAA, partner and director of research at Vandkunsten Architects. Main fields of interests include aesthetics of circular design, sustainability documentation and research. Nielsen is responsible for large upgrading projects in non-profit housing areas reusing building materials and small radical natural materials based experimental buildings. Turid Borgestrand Øien, architect, postdoctoral researcher, Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University. During her twelve years in research, her work has explored and dealt with experiences and effects of architecture. She has explored complexities of the sociotechnical indoor environment and provided new insights on issues such as moulds and lighting. Jenny B. Osuldsen, landscape architect, partner in the architectural firm Snøhetta, professor of landscape architecture, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Her practice, research, and teaching focus are on the intersection of landscape architecture, urbanism and architecture looking for strong concepts in conversation with humans, context, and environment. Sandra Lori Petersen, anthropologist, postdoc, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She is principal investigator of the projects ‘What is neighbour noise’ and ‘Together around neighbour noise’. Her research focuses on sonic experiences, soundscapes, social relations, personal identity, homemaking, the human voice, modes of listening and radio. Sarah Pink, professor and director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, Australia. She is a design anthropologist,

Contributors xi whose work is currently focused on questions relating to human and environmental futures and emerging technologies. Mia Kruse Rasmussen, anthropologist, industrial PhD researcher at AART architects A/S, Denmark. She has been engaged in several cross-disciplinary research and innovation projects within the fields of sustainability and building performance, focusing on the relationship between people and environments. Silje Erøy Sollien, architect, PhD, industrial researcher at Vandkunsten Architects and Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University. PhD in architecture and urban heritage planning, research on housing in Africa and Europe, and employment as architect and planner. Her postdoc project ‘DiversifyNow!’ is about alternative housing models in Denmark. Marie Stender, anthropologist, senior researcher, Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University. Co-founder and project manager of the Nordic Research Network for Architectural Anthropology. Apart from architectural anthropology, Stender’s research interests include place-making, disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the relationship between social life and built environments. Anette Stenslund, sociologist, postdoctoral researcher, Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University. Specialized in studies on space and atmosphere. She has done extensive fieldwork in hospitals and critically engaged in debates on healing art and architecture. Recently she has published on how urban designers address atmosphere throughout design processes. Eli Støa, architect, professor at the Department of Architecture and Planning at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. She teaches housing design and has published on environmentally friendly neighbourhoods and the role of architecture and housing quality for human wellbeing and social inclusion. Drew Nathan Thilmany, industrial PhD, Henning Larsen Architects and the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. Trained in anthropology, sociology, and applied cultural analysis, his research explores the human experience of architecture and the design of shared space. Creator of Henning Larsen’s cultural analysis program (2017). Ingrid M. Tolstad, anthropologist, senior researcher at the Work Research Institute, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. She holds a PhD in musicology, and has published on youth participation, quality assessments in creative art processes, organizational change, and music production. Ruth Woods, anthropologist, researcher at the Centre for Technology and Society at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology

xii Contributors (NTNU). Buildings that include advanced technical systems, the occupant’s response and the building’s relationship with the social context are her main fields of interest. Albena Yaneva, professor of architectural theory, University of Manchester, UK. Crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory, and political philosophy. Yaneva is author of several books, including Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy (2020), and recipient of the RIBA President’s Award for outstanding research (2010).

Foreword Tim Ingold

Architectural anthropology is not the same as the anthropology of architecture. Nor is it ethnography for architects. The anthropology of architecture has a pedigree that stretches back to such nineteenth-century classics as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines. Since then, there have been any number of studies relating the forms and layout of buildings of the most varied descriptions, in societies around the world, to the rhythms of domestic life, patterns of kinship, symbolic structures, belief systems and ritual practice. These studies have always gravitated towards vernacular traditions sustained in the collective consciousness of a people, as against the elevation of individual genius that – in the Western world, at least since the Renaissance – has distinguished architecture as a profession. In this the anthropology of architecture has much in common with its cousin, the anthropology of art. With architecture as with art, this kind of anthropology turns native productions into ready-made objects, ripe for analysis and interpretation. It is a colonizing endeavour, which encompasses the creative impulse and productive achievement of other lives within the contextual frames of culture, society, or history. In so doing, it absolves the analyst of any responsibility to join with the productive process, or of to learn from it. Rather, the anthropologist of architecture sides with the other grand masters of contextualization, the architectural historian and the critic, as a gatekeeper to meaning, interpreting the work for the benefit of those less knowledgeable than they are. For many, however, anthropology is distinguished less by its objects than by its method, of participant observation. In principle, of course, there can be no observation without participation – without, that is, an intimate coupling, in perception and action, of the observer with the phenomena that capture his or her interest. In that sense, participant observation is more a condition of inquiry than a method, an acknowledgement that we can only know from within the field of our relations with others, in a process of joint attention and response. To recast the condition as method, however, is to convert lessons learned through observant participation into data for analysis. And with that, participant observation mutates into ethnography. Close-up and patient participant observation can indeed reveal ethnographic details

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Foreword

unobtainable by other means, of how people use the spaces they inhabit, or turn them to account for practical purposes. Such details could potentially be of considerable interest to architects in the design of new buildings. If their aim is to create spaces that are easy and safe to live in, and that promote personal and communal wellbeing, then ethnographic findings could help them find viable solutions and avoid mistakes. This is ethnography for architects. Yet in this as in its counterpart, user-centred design, the resident is posited as a consumer, whose needs or desires are to be prioritized. Thus ethnography for architects conforms to a market-based logic of service provision, and does nothing to challenge it. What, then, is architectural anthropology? To find the answer we have, first, to cease thinking of architecture as buildings. It is rather a discipline of study, a mode of inquiry, distinguished by a fascination with materials and structures, with surfaces and atmospheres, and with the fashioning of a multisensory environment that can become a place of habitation for both human and nonhuman beings. It is not that there are no buildings in architecture; rather, that every building asks questions of its inhabitants, of its materials, of its environment, to which the architect is bound to listen and respond. Second, then, we have to rethink what we mean by anthropology. It is not, as exponents of the anthropology of architecture would have it, about embedding other lives within an all-encompassing framework of cross-cultural comparison. Nor, as the conflation of anthropology with ethnography might lead many architects to believe, is it a way of collecting data on people by feigning friendship and intimacy in the practice of participant observation. Anthropology’s mission is rather to inquire into the current conditions and future possibilities of life in this one world we all inhabit. And in the fulfilment of this mission it is prepared to draw upon the experience of people everywhere. At this time of crisis, when the very habitability of future environments is at stake, this is experience we cannot afford to ignore. But nor can we ignore the lessons of architecture. The possibility of a truly architectural anthropology, however, has arisen only thanks to recent developments across the spectrum of the so-called human sciences, which have upended the doctrine, inherited from the Enlightenment, of progress and perfection in a world in which humanity is destined to rule over the rest of creation. For anthropology, this has entailed a recognition that the world we inhabit is not reserved for us alone but teeming with vitalities of every conceivable kind. As an inquiry into the possibilities of life in a more-than-human world, anthropology has no choice but to engage with these vitalities. Architectural anthropology works by way of these engagements, through speculative interventions that join with inhabitants in the design of environments for life. This volume contains a wealth of instances of how this might be done, focusing respectively on houses and homes, urban spaces, and issues of creativity and participation in design. Consider the home, for example. An anthropology of architecture would explore how the house, along with its furnishings, both scaffolds the

Foreword xv activities of residents and maps them symbolically. Ethnography for architects would collect data on these activities, and on residents’ experiences with them, in order to feed back into the design process. But for architectural anthropology the home becomes a site of experimentation. Thus we can do experiments with walls, to find out what happens when things going on in adjoining rooms can be heard but not seen, or with balconies, to inquire into how the tenor of domestic life is affected by being enacted, as it were, ‘on stage’, in full view of neighbours or passers-by. We can investigate the temperature and humidity of indoor spaces, how these factors impact on the growth of mould, and how mould, in turn, affects human health. We can compare home-living with the condition of homelessness, learning from the ways homeless people perceive the urban environment. In the home, things can be arranged in such a way that movement from one space to another can be relatively seamless. Does this, then, mean that life for the homeless, who cannot arrange things to suit themselves, is disjointed and episodic? Is it like a collage? And what happens when people find themselves in close proximity? Might their density be reduced by building up? But then, what does it feel like for your floor to be someone else’s ceiling? Can the home be anywhere other than on the ground, at the meeting of earth and sky? And how can people be expected to go about their lives, which extend along lines, in an architecture built of blocks? Turning to urban spaces: with its overwhelming focus on people in ‘traditional’, predominantly rural societies, the anthropology of architecture has had rather less to say about the environments of the city. These have been considered, instead, within literatures on space and place, which often make little mention of architecture at all. Here, attention tends to focus on such matters as the orientation of buildings, the location of doors and windows, and the street as a thoroughfare, elaborating on the distinction between the settings of domestic and public life. Ethnography for architects, for its part, would collect data on the use of different kinds of urban space to inform a process that, at this scale, is more frequently known as ‘planning’ than as design. Armed with this information, architects and planners would set out to design urban spaces that offer congenial opportunities for residents to come together in the formation of what they call place. For architectural anthropology, however, the city is a great human experiment, a site for investigating not only the relation between place, space, and movement, but also the experience of weather and seasonal variation, the affective dimensions of what it feels like to ‘belong’, and the possibilities for citizens to participate actively in the shaping of their surroundings. How can the flux of social life, with all its comings and goings, knotting and unravelling, be reconciled with the apparent fixity of the urban fabric? How do features of the urban environment, both natural such as riverbanks and coasts, and built such as walls, canals, and railway lines, work to keep people apart? Architectural anthropology would show

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how planning is enacted situationally, as a way not of predetermining what is to follow, but of assembling or pulling together the wherewithal to be able to launch into the future with a reasonable chance of success. In recent years the meaning and purpose of ‘infrastructure’ has emerged as a core theme, raising critical questions about how what is envisaged as a foundational support for the city, on which all else rests, can eat away at it from below. From sewers to metro-lines, from old mineshafts to the roots of trees, underground workings threaten the neat division between infrastructure and superstructure at the heart of progressive urbanism. What if we thought of buildings not as erected on a solid base but as floating in a waterlogged earth, under a looming sky? Is this a glimpse into the future, when rising seas are expected to inundate many of the world’s megacities? When it comes to questions of participation and creativity, the limits of the classical anthropology of architecture are yet more clearly exposed. For an approach that starts from completed works, and sees in them the expression of cultural values, given and transmitted from the past, can have no purchase on the creative processes that brought these works into being. People, in this approach, are bound to the reproduction of traditional designs – designs that have effectively written themselves through a sort of mental ‘bricolage’ – rather than participating actively in their co-creation. Ethnography for architects could introduce a ‘user-perspective’ into the design process, but as noted above, this still positions inhabitants as consumers of an environment that has been designed and built for them, with their needs in mind, and not as active producers or makers. In many fields today including architectural design and urban planning, ‘participation’ is a mantra of good practice, yet it remains a panacea if it is not transformative for all parties. The mere collection of ethnographic data, even by means of the most participatory of methods, does nothing to transform the understandings of the people themselves, nor does it alter their status vis-à-vis the recipients of these data, who reserve the faculties of creative design for themselves alone. How, then, would an architectural anthropology do things differently? First, it could promote the idea of participation as a genuine co-creation that is mutually transformative, particularly for younger generations. Then, it could recognize both design and making as ongoing, collaborative processes in which people and materials are caught up in a complex web of ecological relations. It could reconceive plans as ‘pilots’, in which these relations – their resilience and creative potential – are put to the test through rehearsal, or through their rendering in computer-generated imagery. This would mean locating the creativity of the design process not in the exceptional faculties of ‘creatives’, such as architects and designers, but in the generative potential of the social relationships in which all participants are involved. And it would allow for a degree of friction and even resistance in the design process itself. Architectural anthropology does not assume that ‘users’ automatically

Foreword xvii comply with whatever designers, on the basis of received data, have decided is good for them. The boundaries of inclusivity and exclusivity in the design process are shifting and permeable. Both architecture and anthropology are poised at an important moment in their respective disciplinary histories, as they navigate the choppy waters stirred up by the collapse of the project of Enlightenment humanism in which they came of age. Neither can appeal, any longer, to the doctrine of human exceptionalism, or to the idea of the progressive conquest by modern civilization not only of the one world of nature, but also of the many cultural worlds within which the lives of traditional folk were once assumed to be confined. Anthropology and architecture, in opening to a more-than-human world, and to the sheer range of human experience within it, are also opening to one another, even melding with one another, in their common bearing on the design of environments for future collective life. This volume points a way forward. University of Aberdeen, March, 2021

Acknowledgements

Most of the chapters in this anthology originate from the three workshops of the Nordic Research Network for Architectural Anthropology held in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Oslo in 2018–2019 organized by the five editors and Jennifer Mack, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and the Built Environment. We would like to thank Jennifer and all the participants in the workshops. The workshops and the publication of this book were only possible with the generous support of the joint committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences. For the preparation of this manuscript, the editors are especially indebted to Maja Wolters.

Introduction to architectural anthropology Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielsen, and Aina Landsverk Hagen

We shape our surroundings – our buildings and homes, our cities and landscapes, and even our world – and it shapes us back, often in unintended ways. This is becoming unpleasantly clear in the era of the Anthropocene, where human-made transformations of the Earth have reached an extent that makes it relevant to consider human beings a geological force. The relationship between human beings and their built environments is not a oneway, finite process. Instead, it is an ongoing entanglement between humans and their non-human surroundings. As the cases explored in this book demonstrate, architecture does not just concern buildings as delimited designed objects but also involves mould and microbes, walls and views, sound and smell, and legal and financial structures. All of these interact in our ways of inhabiting the world, intervening in where and among whom we belong and how space is lived. To fully grasp such entanglements and design more liveable and sustainable buildings and cities in the future, we need new crossdisciplinary approaches combining anthropology and architecture. Thus, this book prompts architects and anthropologists to think and act together. The two disciplines have long been related. Thinking about how we inhabit the world is closely related to thinking about what it means to be human. As argued by anthropologist Victor Buchli, the architectural form has been the most significant analytical category in which to consider the origins and ideal forms of human society throughout the anthropological debates of the 19th century (Buchli, 2013, p. 21). Early anthropologists, like Lewis Henry Morgan (2003/1881) and Cyril D. Forde (1934), used the study of architecture to support the development of more general comparative theories (Vellinga, 2011). For French sociologist Marcel Mauss (2006), architectural form was the key technology through which social life and reproduction are made possible, and classic social anthropologists, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu, have meticulously studied the architectural layout of villages and huts as representing universal social structures. Strauss launched the concept of house societies, highlighting the house as an objectification of social relations (Carsten & Hugh-Jones, 1995). Henrietta Moore (1986) argued that the universal children’s game ‘playing house’ demonstrates how concepts of space are acquired and thus

2 Stender, Bech-Danielsen, & Hagen ‘signify principles or values which go beyond, and even determine, functional uses’ (Humphrey, 1988, p. 17). Architects have also studied vernacular architecture around the world as a source of aesthetic inspiration; knowledge of functional, tectonic, or material properties; or a foundation for general theories on architecture. ‘The primitive hut’ has been a recurrent preoccupation in architecture at times when renewal was needed, according to American architectural historian Joseph Rykwert (1981). The common interest of the two disciplines has been concentrating primarily on vernacular architecture, or architecture without architects, as Bernard Rudofsky (1964) coined it. Such approaches have recently been revived through the promotion of the concept of new vernacular architecture, stressing the environmental and cultural benefits of architecture learning from and further developing native building techniques and local materials (Frey, 2013; Richardson, 2001). Nevertheless, the notion of the vernacular can also be considered to be promoting reductionist and romanticist representations of ‘the other’ (Vellinga, 2013). This book thus argues in favour of architectural anthropology beyond the vernacular. If the two disciplines have a common interest in architecture without architects, it should be even more apparent for them to also come together around architecture with architects. A range of recent developments in both disciplines renders further integration of the two disciplines more relevant than ever. In architecture, the break with modernism has given rise to a renewed focus on the social and cultural contexts in which architecture is integrated and coproduces. Modernism has been criticized for its intention to create a rationalistic and universal architecture liberated from historical values and traditional life forms and focusing on the needs of the average person (Bech-Danielsen, 2004). In the early 1960s, Canadian urbanist Jane Jacobs (1961) was among the first to criticize the rational thinking of modernism, in which the social qualities of urban life were disregarded, and she agitated for the shared urban space as the place where people meet and engage in urban development. In the following decade, the Norwegian architectural theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz (1978) criticized the oblivion of the diversity of places and pointed to the relationship between place and identity. In the 1980s, a growing interest arose among many architectural scholars in the existential phenomenology brought into the discourse by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), among others. This interest led to a rediscovery of the sensory experience in architecture. Thus, the quantitative objectives that characterized modernism were replaced by or at least supplemented by objectives of a more qualitative nature and a renewed focus on the aesthetic qualities of architecture. The development continued in the 21st century. For instance, Clapham (2005) criticized 20th-century housing research for being too rational and quantitatively oriented in its view of housing needs. He pointed out a focus on objective categories and quantitative data regarding housing size and the number of installations

Introduction 3 and called for more qualitative approaches that considered both individual and cultural differences. Today such attention is even more relevant, as many architects work in cultural contexts different from their own, while their own cities are becoming increasingly multicultural. An ‘ethnographic turn’ can already be seen in contemporary architecture and design research (Yaneva, 2017), which stresses that architecture is to be seen not as an object or a product but as a continuous social process involving both human and non-human actors (Awan et al., 2011; Latour & Yaneva, 2008). Sub-disciplines, such as landscape architecture and interior and urban design, have long tended to focus on the entanglement of humanmaterial interactions, organisms, and objects. Such disciplines aim to create an atmosphere and design spaces for a multitude of uses and potential misuses (or alternative uses), including a holistic perspective of their design of public places. Nevertheless, their methodological training has not focused much on the interaction with the actual or future user. Moreover, architectural education and research at the schools of architecture are currently transformed and modified to the standards of the universities, implying a stronger focus on academic research. An increasing number of researchers in architecture – not least the junior researchers – are inspired by anthropological methods and theories.

Turning home and towards practice Anthropology has, conversely, experienced an increasing interest in physical surroundings, spaces, landscapes, things and materiality over the last two decades. What has been described as spatial, material, ontological, and post-humanist turns has produced an increasing interest in design, architecture, and the built environment. With inspiration from phenomenology, actor-network-theory and philosophical pragmatism concepts like dwelling (Ingold 2000), the agency of things (Latour 2005) and the ontology of materiality have been promoted (Henare, Holbraad, & Wastell 2007). In addition to this, while architecture has increasingly ‘gone global’, anthropology, in contrast, can be said to have ‘turned home’. This turning home, as argued by Norwegian social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad, also implies an inherent criticism of the binary segregationalism of colonialism (Lien & Melhus, 2011) that was so integral to the thinking of the founders of anthropology. Whereas before it was a comparison between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (also implicit in the notion of the vernacular), in recent decades, anthropologists have been preoccupied with treating each context and empirical setting with equal rigour in methodology (Lien & Melhus, 2011). The commitment to context and ethnographic thick description of interconnections among different institutions and parts of society, which is referred to as holism, is also integral to the anthropological approach. Though initially developed as a study of other cultural contexts, many anthropologists now apply similar approaches in their own societies, often

4 Stender, Bech-Danielsen, & Hagen focusing on some of the same settings with which architects are familiar: large cities, housing areas, office buildings, or modern institutions like schools, hospitals, or prisons. Furthermore, applied anthropology has experienced an upsurge in interest in the last few years, exemplified by annual conferences and applied anthropology networks with participants from a range of disciplines and sectors. When the American anthropologist Margaret Mead and fellow anthropologists founded the Society for Applied Anthropology in the 1940s (Bennett, 1996), they were clear on its commitment to improving the quality of life in local communities. Nevertheless, applied anthropology has a conflicted history, including dubious colonial policy development and military operations, going back to the early days of the discipline and involving founding fathers, such as Bronislaw Malinowski (1929), who referred to it as practical anthropology, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1931), and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1946). Sub-disciplines, such as business, developmental, and institutional anthropology and action research approaches, have involved participants or respondents in different ways. Moreover, these disciplines have aimed to influence policymaking and apply anthropological methods and theory to the analysis and solution of practical problems in the contemporary world. Lately, design anthropology has evolved as a sub-discipline partly initiated by international design and innovation companies implementing anthropological approaches as tools for user-driven innovation, co-creation, and collaborative design. Increasingly, design anthropology has also become a field of research and teaching that merges applied anthropology and design approaches (Gunn, Otto, & Smith, 2013). This development conflates an increasing preoccupation with stakeholder engagement, user involvement, citizen science, and impact measurement and the adherence to UN Sustainable Developmental Goals by the founding institutions on the European, regional, and national levels. Within the world of architecture and urban design, the focus on social sustainability and user involvement has also increased, and in this endeavour, architects and planners have started to collaborate with anthropologists and related disciplines. In academia, an emerging interest in architectural anthropology has appeared in publications (Allen, 2014; Buchli, 2013; Hagen, 2015; Ingold, 2013; Stender, 2016; Yaneva, 2012), conferences, and networks. This anthology emanates from the Nordic Research Network for Architectural Anthropology, which gathers scholars and practitioners working in the field between architecture and anthropology. The anthology aims to explore and further develop the research field of architectural anthropology and link scholarly research to architectural design practice. Architects and anthropologists co-wrote several of the following chapters, and the presented case studies often build on collaborative projects between research and practice. Developing architectural anthropology further is also about developing a more engaged, applied, and constructive anthropology and a more critical,

Introduction 5 sound, and explorative architecture. Both are urgently needed as our ways of inhabiting the world are in acute need of a redesign. The current global crises of climate, health, and inequality call for new ways of engaging with our surroundings and each other in more sustainable ways. As cities grow and people increasingly live in dense urban agglomerations worldwide, built environments increase in importance as habitats for humans and other species and as the main factor changing our planet. The global building sector is currently responsible for almost 40% of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is growing at unprecedented rates. Over the next 40 years, 230 billion square metres in new construction are expected to be built, adding a building volume equivalent to Paris to the planet every week (Abergel, Dean, & Dulac, 2017). As we apparently cannot stop building, we must find ways to ‘build back better’, as currently promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other stakeholders and policymakers. Although originating from post-disaster reconstruction in the wake of earthquakes, the concept is presently also applied to how societies can engage in resilient recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic (OECD, 2020). Whether it is in the wake of earthquakes or global health crises, building back better is about not just returning to business as usual to restore economies and livelihoods quickly but also about increasing society’s sustainability and resilience. Despite the physical connotations of building back better, this cannot be done by material or technical solutions alone. Instead, the approach stresses the importance of focusing on behavioural changes, well-being, and inclusiveness (OECD, 2020). If we are to build back better, rather than just build as we used to, we need to combine anthropology’s profound understanding of human beings and their social relations with architecture’s ability to create and innovate the way we live.

Nordic and post-human perspectives A majority of the authors contributing to this book come from the Nordic countries, and most of the empirical cases presented in the book are Scandinavian. This regional focus of the book reflects that the idea for it was born out of the activities of the Nordic Research Network on Architectural Anthropology.1 The network gathers researchers from various Nordic universities and architectural schools and junior researchers and actors from outside academia – all working in the interdisciplinary field combining anthropology and architecture. The scope of the network and this anthology is open and explorative, aiming to discover what is occurring in this cross-disciplinary field, who is working with or interested in architectural anthropology, and how they understand and practice it. What methodological developments and theoretical reflections does it entail? How can it contribute, and how can it be further developed? These questions have inspired the analyses and discussions presented in these chapters.

6 Stender, Bech-Danielsen, & Hagen We are assured that there is much interesting architectural anthropology occurring in other places in the world, which is highly relevant to include in future volumes on the topic. The Nordic influence may also permeate the contributions presented in other ways. Nordic architectural and urban design approaches are typically associated with notions of liveability, putting people first, well-being, welfare, cities for people, and democratic urban design. The humanistic approach has long been a hallmark of Nordic architecture and urban design, and architects and anthropologists in this region have always shared interest in the relationship between human beings and their spatial surroundings. Nevertheless, both architects and anthropologists must currently open up to a more-than-human world and may benefit from opening to one another. It is time to question such human-centredness and explore how we create worlds for both humans and non-humans. Posthumanism, an integrated theory of knowing/being (Barad, 2007), has emerged from critiques of rational humanism and anthropocentrism and fundamentally disrupts the logical binaries of the Western world: body/ mind, self/other, and human/non-human. It is about insisting on power analyses and disrupting normative thinking practices that perpetuate inequities (Braidotti, 2013). There is a need for new ways of inquiring into the current conditions and future possibilities of life in the world we inhabit. Recent developments in both architecture and anthropology have stressed the potential of further integrating the two disciplines in this endeavour. Architectural anthropology is neither anthropology of architecture nor ethnography for architects but is a new approach beyond these positions. This anthology aims to inspire and challenge architects and anthropologists to think and act together in the future by demonstrating how the two disciplines can be combined in novel and productive ways. The emerging field of architectural anthropology has so far primarily been dominated by anthropologists writing theoretically about architecture, or architects drawing inspiration from anthropological methodological approaches, often by default or without studied reflection. This anthology instead outlines a broad range of concrete examples of how the two existing disciplines can be combined in novel and productive ways. It aims to move beyond an anthropology of architecture, regarding the world of architecture as a mere object for anthropological scrutiny. It also seeks to move beyond ethnography for architects, or simply applying ethnographic methods to inform the design of buildings and cities. Instead, the book asks how both architecture and anthropology can be transformed by engaging with one another. It shows that architecture is not just about buildings but is also a mode of study and inquiry and that anthropology is not just about inquiry but can also join with and learn from the productive process. A disciplinary characteristic of anthropology is the comparison between ethnographic material that describes social phenomena in different communities

Introduction 7 worldwide. Anthropologists negotiate not only cultural boundaries, but also disciplinary boundaries and are suited for interdisciplinary work (Sillitoe, 2007). For anthropologists as for architects, concepts are tools to work with and building blocks of theory development. The late Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1990, p. 86) rhetorically asked, ‘if not to comparative insights, where might an analyst turn for ideas?’. An essential methodological strategy for anthropologists is to never start with preformulated concepts when engaging with the field but to develop these in close contact with the empirical material. Another disciplinary strategy that anthropologists have institutionalized is to situate their knowledge by making their position as researchers explicit towards both the people they meet and the analyses they write. This reflexivity is also visible in the chapters of this volume. By promoting such architectural anthropology, we do not mean to suggest that it is an easy or unproblematic task to collaborate and combine disciplinary approaches. As with all interdisciplinary work, there is a risk of starting at the lowest common denominator and ending up with something that qualifies neither as proper architecture nor as decent anthropology. As argued elsewhere (Stender, 2016), several fundamental differences between the two disciplines may complicate collaboration. Architects communicate through plans, pictures, models, diagrams, and visualizations, whereas anthropologists tend to prefer words, even though films, photographs, and drawings of both people and objects have been part of the fieldwork data collection strategy since the early days (Bateson & Mead, 1942; Pink, 2006). Architects study the world to change it. Architectural researchers even change the world to study it, whereas anthropologists tend to study the world as it is with ongoing social relations before suggesting any change, adhering to the ‘native point of view’ as an outset for analysis (Malinowski, 1932/1922). As Jamer Hunt noted, ‘The ethnographer works in ever greater detail to ensure that she has got the present just right … The designer uses the present – and uses it often imperfectly – as a provisional leaping off point for re-imagining possible futures’ (Hunt, 2011, p. 35). Like designers, architects are trained to have a firm sense of quality and are expected to make judgements based on their own ‘first-person perspective’ (Wang & Groat, 2002, p. 229), whereas anthropologists are much more inclined to question and challenge such judgements and presumptions. These differences hold plenty of potential for conflict and misunderstanding, yet in combining and overcoming them, we may develop promising new approaches. Architecture can be considered a means of studying anthropology, and anthropology can serve as important insight in the realities hiding behind the architectural drawings and facades. In an architectural anthropological perspective, the built environment emerges in a new light – not only as an object but also as an active part of our lives. Studying architecture is not only a question of what it ‘is’ to us but also what it ‘does’ to us. Anthropological methods become crucial to answer such questions.

8 Stender, Bech-Danielsen, & Hagen Comparison with distant phenomena enables us to make both what we study and our own gaze relative (Vike et al., 2001). As a fundamental antipositivistic strategy, it is nonetheless full of uncontrollable variables and is difficult to standardize. When translocating an anthropological concept across cultural contexts, deliberations on what aspects of the concept we bring from its original context and what is left behind are essential. Barth argued that comparisons within fields are not distinguishable from comparisons ‘between fields’; the focus is on using variation for a comparative investigation (1999, p. 84). As is apparent throughout this anthology, variation is an integral part of architectural anthropology, being a mode of inquiry and perspective that includes rather than excludes, through investigating on a meta-level what we take for granted in the respective disciplines.

Fifteen ways to explore lived space The anthology gathers contributions from leading researchers from various Nordic universities, architectural schools, architectural firms, and prominent international scholars who have been an important source of inspiration in developing the cross-disciplinary field between anthropology and architecture. The foreword of this book is written by Tim Ingold, who has inspired anthropologists and architects to open to one another and reconsider our approach to our environments. Ingold provides an essential starting point for the book in arguing in favour of architectural anthropology as being different from the anthropology of architecture and ethnography for architects. Rather than regarding architecture as buildings, we need to regard architecture as a mode of inquiry, he writes. Equally, anthropology’s mission is not just to collect data on people but rather to inquire into the current conditions and future possibilities of life in this one world we all inhabit. After the introduction, Albena Yaneva, another central pioneer in the field of architectural anthropology, unfolds how architectural anthropology can offer such an enquiry into the current conditions and future possibilities of life. She argues that architectural anthropology needs to perfect and renew its methods and offers six methodological suggestions as to how this can be done: first, to adjust the speed of enquiry and to suspend explanation; second, to follow in concreto the paths and flows of non-humans and the connections they trace; third, to stay on the ground as that site where little can be seen, but can be seen well; fourth, to learn from the visual epistemology of architects and mobilize design visuals as a form of generating knowledge; fifth, to renew the descriptive techniques that better capture the ontological granularity of architectural processes; and sixth, to increase our ability to intrude in the design worlds, to interfere and make difference. After these introductory chapters, 15 chapters follow that present a broad range of empirical examples, methodological approaches, and theoretical reflections, providing inspiration and tools for scholars, students,

Introduction 9 and practitioners interested in exploring lived space. The 15 chapters are divided into three parts with different empirical foci and objects of study. We first focus on the built environment of the home. Then, we turn to the shared spaces of the city and public life. Finally, we broaden our outlook to the processes involved in architecture across scales. The first part focuses on home, walls, and boundaries. The five chapters explore the socio-material dynamics at play in our most intimate built environments. Walls, windows, balcony railings, and other boundaries in the domestic built environment keep us apart and yet connect us in sometimes unexpected ways. The chapters illustrate that the built environment of the home provides shelter from the outside world, yet also mediates our relationships with the outside world. Walls are both for keeping in and keeping out. We open up the boundaries of the home to remove mould and microbes yet enclose other boundaries that are built to exclude some people from our communities, protecting normality through walls and islands. The chapters reveal that home is not necessarily a private heaven. To some, home can also be a trap or prison, and power is also at play in where, how, and with whom we live. The emphasis on power and processes of inclusion and exclusion is further developed in the second part of the book, focusing on urban space and public life. Urban neighbourhoods, streets, squares, parks, libraries, and community centres are for everyone in principle, yet not everyone is included equally in public life. We need better tools to analyse how, why, and where we belong and how built environments take part in such processes. The chapters explore how space and sociality play together in cities and public places in various ways and discuss whether urban and public spaces can be designed for inclusion or whether architecture also has other means for designing inclusion than through the design of built spaces. The third part of the book focuses further on architectural processes of creativity, participation, and design. The chapters delve deep into such processes by examining how co-creation and participation unfolds and how anthropologically informed insight into the social concepts of inclusivity and the social constructions of architectural renderings can drive design processes. It includes planning, piloting, financing, and building processes as integral parts of the architectural anthropological creativity. As such, all become elements in what shapes our built surroundings. These chapters all demonstrate a mixture of research and practice efforts that include the creative component that provides hunches and tentative intuitions of what might be the most telling features of a group of people and what might be trivial (Barth, 1999) and the scientific component to inform the studies we conduct. The concluding perspectives by prominent design anthropologist Sarah Pink point to future perspectives and potential for further developing this field. She argues that the combination of global crises and emerging technologies necessitates a turn towards more active and engaged anthropology worldwide. There is an urgent ‘need for a movement, an impulse and a

10 Stender, Bech-Danielsen, & Hagen mode of engagement’, and this is where architectural anthropology has a pivotal role to play. Through discussing cases of the unbuilt, the prototype, and construction work, she shows how future-focused architectural anthropology might attend to different elements of creativity involved in the circumstances in which architecture as a practice and process is implicated. Architectural anthropology enables researchers and practitioners of multiple disciplines to reveal experience, imagination, inequalities, and possible productive ways forward. In Pink’s words, ‘it is a sub discipline that has the potential to combine theoretical scholarship and applied practice in exemplary ways’.

Note 1 From 2018 to 2019, the network supported by the joint committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences, hosted three workshops in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

References Abergel, T., Dean, B. & Dulac, J. (2017). Towards a zero-emission, efficient, and resilient buildings and construction. United Nations Environment Global Status Report 2017. Allen, S. (2014). An award controversy: Anthropology, architecture, and the robustness of knowledge. Journal of Material Culture, 19(2), 169–184. Awan, N., Schneider, T. & Till, J. (2011). Spatial agency: Other ways of doing architecture. Routledge. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barth, F. (1990). The guru and the conjurer: Transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia. Man, 25(4), new series, 640–653. Barth, F. (1999). Comparative methodologies in the analysis of anthropological data. In J. R. Bowen & R. Peterson (Eds), Critical comparisons in politics and culture (pp. 78–89). Cambridge University Press. Bateson, G. & Mead, M. (1942). Balinese character: A photographic analysis. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences Vol. 2. W. G. Valentine (Ed.). New York Academy of Sciences. Bech-Danielsen, C. (2005). Ecological reflections in architecture. The Danish Architectural Press. Bennett, J. W. (1996). Applied and action anthropology: Ideological and conceptual aspects. Current Anthropology, Special Issue: Anthropology in Public, 37(1), S23–S53. Bourdieu, P. (1979). Algeria 1960: The disenchantment of the world: The sense of honour: The Kabyle house or the world reversed: Essays, R. Nice (trans.). Cambridge University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). Posthuman Humanities. European Educational Research Journal, 12(1), 1–19.

Introduction

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Buchli, V. (2013). An anthropology of architecture. Routledge. Carsten, J. & Hugh-Jones, S. (1995). About the house: Lévi-Strauss and beyond. Cambridge University Press. Clapham, D. (2005). The meaning of housing. A pathways approach. Policy Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1946). Applied anthropology. Africa, 16, 92–98. Forde, C. D. (1934). Habitat, economy and society: A geographical introduction to ethnology. Methuen. Frey, P. (2013). Learning from vernacular: Towards a new vernacular architecture. Actes Sud. Gunn, W., Otto, T. & Smith, R. C. (2013). Design anthropology: Theory and practice. Bloomsbury. Hagen, A. L. (2015). Calling it a crisis: Modes of creativity, work and magic in an elite architect company. Journal of Business Anthropology, 4(2), 201–218. Henare, A., Holbraad, M. & Wastell, S. (2007). Thinking through things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/ 9780203088791 Humphrey, C. (1988). No place like home in anthropology: The neglect of architecture. Anthropology Today, 4(1), 16–18. Hunt, J. (2011). Prototyping the social: Temporality and speculative futures at the intersection of design and culture. In A. J. Clarke (Ed.), Design anthropology. Springer. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment. Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9780203559055 Jacobs, J. (1993). The death and life of great American cities. Random House. (Original work published 1961). Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-networktheory. Oxford University Press. Latour, B. & Yaneva, A. (2008). Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move. An ANTs view of architecture. In R. Geiser (Ed.), Explorations in architecture. Birkhäuser. Lien, M. & Melhus, M. (2011). Overcoming the division between anthropology ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’ – Marianne Gullestad interviewed by Marianne Lien and Marit Melhuus. Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift [Norwegian Anthropological Journal], 22(2), 134–143. Malinowski, B. (1932). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. George Routledge & Sons. (Original work published 1922). Malinowksi, B. (1929). Practical anthropology. Africa, 2, 22–38. Mauss, M. (2006). Techniques, technology, and civilisation. N. Schlanger (Ed.). New York: Durkheim Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Le visible et l'invisible [The visible and the invisible]. Gallimard. Moore, H. (1986). Space, text, and gender: An anthropological study of the Marakwet of Kenya. Cambridge University Press. Morgan, L. H. (2003). Houses and house-life of the American Aborigines. University of Utah Press. (Original work published 1881).

12 Stender, Bech-Danielsen, & Hagen Norberg-Schulz, C. (1978). Mellom jord og himmel [Between earth and sky]. Universitetsforlag. OECD. (2020). Building back better: A sustainable, resilient recovery after COVID-19; OECD Policy Responses to Coronavirus (COVID-19). Retrieved 5 June 2020 from www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/building-back-better-a-sustainableresilient-recovery-after-covid-19-52b869f5/ Pink, S. (2006). Future of visual anthropology: Engaging the senses. Sage. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1931). Applied anthropology. Proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the Advancement of Science, 20th meeting, Brisbane, 267–280. Richardson, V. (2001). New vernacular architecture. Laurence King Publishing. Rudofsky, B. (1964). Architecture without architects (2nd ed.). Doubleday & Company. Rykwert, J. (1981). On Adam’s house in paradise: The idea of the primitive hut in architectural history. MIT Press. Sillitoe, P. (2007). Anthropologists only need apply: Challenges of Applied Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 147–165. Stender, M. (2016). Towards an architectural anthropology: What architects can learn from anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1), 27–43. doi:10.1080/13264826.2016.1256333 Vellinga, M. (2011). The end of the vernacular: Anthropology and the architecture of the other. Etnofoor, 23(1), 171–192. Vellinga. M. (2013). The noble vernacular. The Journal of Architecture, 18(4), 570–590. Vike, H., Lidén, H. & Lien, M. (2001). Likhetens virkeligheter [The realities of sameness]. In M. Lien, H. Vike & H. Lidén (Eds), Likhetens paradokser: antropologiske undersøkelser i det moderne Norge [Paradoxes of sameness: Anthropological examinations in modern Norway]. (pp. 11–31). Universitetsforlaget. Wang, L. & Groat, D. (2002). Architectural research methods. John Wiley & Sons. Yaneva, A. (2012). Mapping controversies in architecture (1st ed.). Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315593807 Yaneva, A. (2017). Five ways to make architecture political: An introduction to the politics of design practice. Bloomsbury.

The method of architectural anthropology Six suggestions Albena Yaneva

The interest in architectural anthropology gained its contemporary cur­ rency from a range of different analytic developments: first, the emergence of a reflexivity trend among architectural professionals and scholars as a key epistemological feature of architectural studies; second, the increasing realization of architecture as a social practice and the awareness of the highly contingent socio-cultural nature of all outcomes of architectural production. It flourished in particular in the past three decades in the aftermath of the 1980s structuralism wave when a number of fields changed their conceptual repertoire and took a pragmatist orientation. Its critical counterpart that emerged in the 1960s based its method on critique to construct its object of study – that is, by rupturing with the social preconstructions, both spontaneous and scientific, of this object and explaining the subjective experience of all social agents based on their insertion into objective social structures relevant to the object of study. If the main task of critical anthropology was to reveal what was hitherto hidden, i.e. the real mechanisms behind official social representations, its pragmatist version is based on what architects and dwellers do, the actions they undertake and assume, the discourse they sustain while acting; their institutions, cultures and practices, rather than their theories and ideologies (Schön, 1983). It embraces a relational perspective that reinstates previously ignored areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant and forgotten actors and connections. Thus, an architectural anthropology emerged (not anthropology of architects or for architects) as “a mode of inquiry, distinguished by a fascination with ma­ terials and structures, with surfaces and atmospheres, and with the fash­ ioning of a multisensory environment that can become a place of habitation for both human and non-human beings” (Tim Ingold, Foreword, this vo­ lume). In this chapter I will discuss three concrete empirical settings that exemplify three fieldworks, three settings for doing architectural anthro­ pology and illustrate three possible modes of enquiry into architecture: designing, archiving, and dwelling/inhabiting. While they are somehow

14 Yaneva

Figure 0.1 Architects at work at OMA, Rotterdam. Photo: Albena Yaneva.

biographical and trace my long-term engagement with the field, they aim at providing the background for a methodological reflection on architectural anthropology formulated in six suggestions for improving its methodolo­ gical tactics.

Six methodological suggestions

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Setting one: Designing Designing takes us to the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam (2001–2004). While design has been the subject of multiple studies, architectural scholars have rarely touched on the contingency of design process, or on the process of designing as key for understanding how buildings, cities, landscapes, and environments come into being. To grasp the meaning of OMA buildings and Koolhaas’s architecture, we need to forget the architect and his building for a moment and turn away from official interpretations in architectural theory. Instead, we need to engage in architectural anthropology that will circumvent traditional understandings of star-authorship (in the spirit of subjectivist anthropology) or critical studies (in the spirit of critical-historicist anthropology). This would mean to follow the models, the foam materials, the software, and tools mobilized by architects to design, but also the entangled networks of engineers, cli­ ents, professional model makers, and interior designers. It requires ac­ counting for the ordinary forces and conditions of design experience, following (not Rem) but many young designers in the office and the paths their work has traced. We track the way their actions spread, and the way architects make sense of their world-building activities, the routines, mis­ takes, and workaday choices usually considered of lesser importance. In so doing, we can arrive at a better understanding of OMA’s design by the means of a detour to design experience (Yaneva, 2009a, 2009b). The purpose is to avoid the passage through the vague notions of society, cul­ ture, imagination, creativity, which do not explain anything but rather need explanation. Thus, from the incidental accounts of design as product, I suggested shifting the attention to design as practice, from design qua noun to de­ signing qua verb, from buildings as static objects to buildings as uncertain and contested moving targets (Latour & Yaneva, 2008). An architectural anthropology of designing requires tracing the complex socio-spatial co­ ordinates of design venture through the daily work of architects, models, instruments, and technologies.

Setting two: Archiving Archiving takes us to the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal (2015–2018). While the fate of established archives has been the subject of multiple studies, architectural scholars have rarely touched on the mechanisms of constructing these archives and the process of archiving as keys for understanding how historical sources in architecture are estab­ lished. An architectural anthropology of archiving aims at understanding how mundane architectural objects become archival by scrutinizing the specific mechanisms of production of archives in design practice (archive making). Tracing also how architectural archives are assembled to reflect

16 Yaneva

Figure 0.2 Archivists and curators at work at the CCA, Montreal. Photo: Albena Yaneva.

the nature of design as a collective, heterogeneous, social process, we ex­ amine the situated and local practices of arranging (cataloguing, archiving, numbering) and taking care of archival objects (preserving, conserving, repairing, maintaining) and how they all happen to produce larger struc­ turing effects in collections that resonate with greater epistemological an­ xieties, coming from the discipline or the profession. To do this the architectural anthropologist circumvents traditional understandings of starauthorship, placing the architect or the key curator in the limelight of History, and rather follows the myriad of actors: archivists, conservators, digital archivists, librarians, registrar people, museum technicians, but also instruments, microscopes, solvents, digital files, folders, and codes, thus, tracing archiving in its mundane and practical course. Following archiving and its web of moves is a way to access the specificity of the current con­ ditions of architecture making. Thus, from the incidental accounts of archives as sources, I suggested shifting the attention to archives as practices, as ways of scrambling epis­ temologies, from archive qua noun to archiving qua verb, from collections as sites of enduring historical evidence to collections as sites of epistemo­ logical reshuffle (Yaneva, 2020). An architectural anthropology of ar­ chiving requires tracing the work of all human and non-human participants in archiving and requires attention to the various sites of knowledge

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Figure 0.3 The gas technician Chris at the National Graphene Institute, Manchester. Photo: Albena Yaneva.

production and care, the attitudes, the forms of life, the conditions of enunciation, discursive and nondiscursive, all those little and insignificant things that little by little, step by step, allow us to understand what archi­ tectural archiving is.

Setting three: Dwelling/inhabiting Dwelling/inhabiting takes us to the National Graphene Institute (NGI) in Manchester (2017–2019). Dwelling is understood here as the process of active settling in, transforming, appropriating, adjusting, maintaining and living with the varying materiality and programmes of action of a building. “Dwelling” is a processual version (Strebel, 2011) of the functionalist concept of “use” (Hill, 2003), the oppositive of a “building perspective” according to which “worlds are made before they are lived in” and which assumes that “acts of dwelling are preceded by acts of worldmaking” (Ingold, 2000, p. 179). Dwelling/inhabiting is thus the activity of world­ making through active participation in the shaping of material form and the reshaping of the built through inhabitation. While science buildings have been largely explored in the past three decades, existing research focused either on the technical side of lab design (studies of efficient and sustainable design) or on the human interface (studies of the communication patterns, the shaping of scientific identities). Yet, how technical and human aspects

18 Yaneva tangle in everyday lab dwelling remains largely unexplored. An archi­ tectural anthropology of dwelling circumvents traditional understandings of users and blatant functionalistic post-occupancy accounts that place architects and clients in the limelight. Instead, it follows simultaneously the modalities of action of the design infrastructure that makes a science lab possible (the gas rooms, the grey spaces, the utilities blocks, the mechanical workshops, and the different ways of servicing them) and the human ex­ periences it facilitates. The purpose is not to trace the individual subjective opinions and perceptions of this type of architecture, but to rather grasp the quality and variability of the experience of different lab dwellers, i.e. the various instrumental practices, the hours spent, the lost track of time, the intensity of communication, the plethora of activities performed in the same compact building, the equipment arrangements, the spatial choreo­ graphy and the speed of work. As isolated and protected environments set barriers for an anthropologist to access and freely stroll in these spaces (much more than they do in an architectural office or in an archiving in­ stitution), to circumvent these restrictions, the anthropologist takes eth­ nographic walks and “tours” to gain insights into the different spatial practices and daily routines of dwelling that form the core of the “la­ boratory life” at the NGI. We question people’s attachments to the building, take numerous photographs to explore the different atmospheres, material arrangements, equipment settings, inscription techniques and the various design features that matter for them. This allows following the rhythm of scientific dwelling in its course. Thus, from the incidental accounts of use and users, I suggested shifting the attention to using/inhabiting/dwelling as a process, as spatial practice, from dwelling qua noun to dwelling qua verb as key for un­ derstanding the new generation of 21st-century science labs (Novoselov & Yaneva, 2020). An architectural anthropology of dwelling requires tracing the spatial practices and daily work of an array of participants that are commonly excluded from the studies of scientific design: lab technicians, facility managers, gas room and storage room technicians, house attendants and porters, but also apparatuses, gases, flows, cylin­ ders, cleaning machines, nanoparticles, that all partake in scientific production. In all three settings we witness how architectural anthropology inquiries into the current conditions (and future possibilities) of life in the world we all inhabit and recognizes all its participants. It outlines de­ signing/archiving/dwelling as ongoing, collaborative processes in which people and materials are caught up in a complex web of ecological re­ lations. Moreover, it acknowledges all “unsung heroes” – the young designers, foam, and foam cutters at OMA (not just the star architect); the conservators, technicians, cataloguers, solvents, and software at the CCA (not just architects and curators); the lab technicians, the facility

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managers, the porter, gas cylinders, and the lab apparatuses at the NGI (not just scientists and designers). That is, architectural anthropology accounts all sorts of practical work contributing to the making of knowledge in these three different settings. Tracing those that are less accustomed to our presence as anthropologists, those who greet us with the question “why me?”, will increase the chances to unravel a reality that is commonly forgotten or considered as insignificant to the under­ standing of the world we live in. In all these three cases, designing/archiving/dwelling are not ways of es­ tablishing kinds of stable knowledge (knowledge as a certainty), but rather an active ongoing process of exploring, testing, assessing, repairing, con­ serving, and reappraising the architectural connections of design/archival/ dwelling objects to the world, to other bodies of knowers and objects. It is mediated, collective, and distributed. Knowledge is seen in a continuous line of its reworking by human practice (Harris, 2007), as well as by a variety of non-humans that act on and react to it. Architectural anthropology does not settle on the ready building/archive/user but rather explores the cultures of designing/archiving/dwelling by following, meticulously and slowly, their specific moves, procedures, and instruments. Unpacking these processes through the various moves of all entities involved in designing/archiving/ dwelling, while following their wider networks that often cross confined institutional boundaries, architectural anthropology traces how these worlds come to be. How can we trace designing, archiving and inhabiting qua processes and in concreto instead of embracing an individualized vision or the ob­ jective vision? Away from the abstraction of a building, an archive or use as a frame, the question to be asked is not “what is …?” The very question “What is this?”, as Deleuze has put it, assumes the simplicity of “essence” (1994). Asking it, reduces the city to a logic of contradiction, caught between the pincers of being and non-being, ordering it by what it is and what it is not, and ultimately draws us away from reality. Another way of setting the question of exploring the specificity of designing/archiving/ dwelling is to assume that the insignificant, the details, the banal, could contain the significant, or the “essential”, and only in different properties and events. The questions to ask might be: “how does an archive/building/ use work?”, “Who and what sets it in motion?”, “In what cases?”, “How and where?”, “Where and how?”, “What are its modalities of action?”, “How does it become traceable, knowable?”, and “under what circum­ stances can it be seen, grasped, and composed?’ Moving beyond the ex­ isting trends of “subjectivist” or “objectivist” approaches and responding further to these questions by drawing meticulously on the three empirical exemplars, what I intend to offer here is an argument for a richer archi­ tectural anthropological practice in the form of six methodological reflections.

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Method: Six suggestions First: Follow slowly! Do not rush to explain! A quick visit of an architectural office, an archive or a science building will provide an impression of designing/archiving/dwelling as activities, but hardly an experience of them. It will result in “quick” typologies and bullet point as ways of understanding that rely on stable definitions and cate­ gories. On these occasions we will become hasty writers and will produce quick accounts by reconnecting the materials from the quick studies with the literature and the key concepts. However, such a swift and partial perception will inevitably limit any theory of it. The interpretation will be analytical and one-sided. As hasty sightseer we will begin to replace the missing experience of designing/archiving/dwelling as processes with un­ related notions coming from the world of theory. The theorizations will define random equivalent relationships between architectural works and the larger frameworks of societies, cultures, and symbols, and will rely on the rigid conceptualizations of styles, languages, and typologies. Yet, as architectural anthropologists we can embrace another epistemo­ logical position to engage with architecture, a slow one (Stengers, 2016). As slow researchers we can visit the sites of designing/archiving/dwelling more often, trying to understand their specificity by experiencing them, carefully keeping a diary, interviewing, observing, documenting, and tracing dif­ ferent activities, movements, and gestures. Exploring a design practice/ar­ chival institution/building through repeated visits, we will be able to experience the various speeds and intensities of the processes unfolding there, the changing crowds of people and flows of things. Follow the moves of the foam as Sarah is using the foam cutter at OMA and trying to reach to that new shape of a building-to-be, follow the tentative gestures of a con­ servator preforming a treatment of a mouldy drawing, placing it in a folder, adding a code, on its way of becoming archival, follow the argon, as the gas runs through the system of flows at the NGI reaching out to graphene work in the labs and the moves of Chris trying to fix the valves. Follow them slowly. Tracing gradually and trying to make sense of what we see, guessing the meaning and “assessing the better guesses” (Geertz, 1973), mapping out the trajectories, the events, and the happenings, we gradually gain experi­ ence. This will make our theory different. It is this rich experience that will form the core of our interpretations; this is, I will argue, the only founda­ tion for theory. Historical and cultural information can throw light on a building/archive/user but cannot substitute the understanding of the ar­ chitectural objects or processes in their own qualities and relations. The epistemology of the slow architectural anthropologist relies on presence and immediacy and grasps the specificity of various architectural objects and institutions rather than replacing them with the quick concepts of society and culture, like a hasty sightseer would do.

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Follow the moves of designing/archiving/dwelling; there is nothing behind these actions that could explain the shape they take. Social forces, economic factors, or cultural and contextual explanations are too general, too detached from the real to explain the specific actions witnessed (Latour, 1988). Instead of explaining, we simply witness designing/ar­ chiving/dwelling happening and numerous events unfolding. This slow mode of enquiry reclaims the art of dealing with and learning from what some may consider messy and contingent realities (Till, 2009), and what escapes the objective categorizations of traditional disciplines. Second: Chase up all non-humans! Trace the relations! It is impossible to understand and account for designing/archiving/dwelling in concreto without tracing the paths and flows of a variety of non-humans. Far from the dominant anthropocentric design or dwelling narratives, the type of architectural anthropology description gives speech to that which has no language: to the foam, the cutter, the spatula, the mould, the dust, and the gas infrastructure. They are all part of the story to the extent that they rely upon action. It is through the sliding of action from subject, to model/foam/chemicals/spatulas/dust/gases, to potential spaces and objects that designing/archiving/dwelling events occur, and actions are affected. There is neither simply an architect and a model, an archivist and a mouldy drawing, a technician and an infrastructure of flows in a science lab. Instead, what enacts the chain of actions is “the foam cutter that makes the architect bend and interact with the nebulous texture of versatile foam”, or “the fishy smell of a mouldy drawing making the spatula of the conservator perform a treatment of a drawing”, or “an invisible infrastructure of flows, water and power running through the veins of a science lab enacted by a technical operation in the gas room”. Follow them, trace and account for their repetitive moves as slowly as possible, and what will be seen is a building/archive/use that is not made just by powerful humans, but rather populated by many characters as they act and trace many intricate relationships with a variety of non-humans. Following how these nonhumans move back and forth between sites will allow us to witness how a design product/an archive/use emerge, become knowable, traceable, and work. Accounts produced by architectural anthropologists can also better capture the practical relations between the large scale and the modification of the human and non-human associations. A better understanding of buildings/archives/use could be gained by literally keeping our compass sights on the paths through designing/archiving/dwelling, following the routes that link the humans with the natural world, the subjective with the objective, the built with the unbuilt, the small with the big. To miss fol­ lowing these traces and accounting for these paths is to miss the specificity of these processes. Trace the moves, the unfolding developments,

22 Yaneva controversies and disputes, suspend the zoom, multiply the adjunctions between the different statements, re-localize the relevant sites, and you will see a building/an archive/use that is to be composed, recollected, and aggregated. Tracing various modalities of connections and attachments in designing/ archiving/dwelling makes us move both beyond the cognitivist, rationalist perspective that situates the cogito or brain processes in the centre of knowing, and beyond the phenomenological perspective situating the body and the senses in the centre of knowing. Exploring different “ways of knowing” (Boyer, 2005; Harris, 2007; Grasseni, 2007) as movements, as achievements of repetitive work, of experience, of timing and spacing, of inter-corporal and inter-textual activities, a slow ethnography suggests a symmetrical ecological approach to designing/archiving/dwelling. This ap­ proach emerges from the relational dispositions of humans and nonhumans, in their dynamic timing and spacing, and captured both in specific sites and larger networks. Designing/archiving/dwelling emphasizes the active and reciprocal nature of knowing and in return, influences how a building/archive/use is understood. Third: Stay on the ground! Abandon the panoramic and panoptic ways of looking at design/archives/ users/cities. Forget about the Eiffel Tower viewing platform – you believed that Paris can be seen from up there? Forget about the office of Rem Koolhaas – you believed that OMA’s design can be understood from up there? But it can’t! You thought the picture you have taken from the gal­ leries of the CCA captured its archival collection. But it doesn’t! If instead of embracing the official discourse of architects, city planners, politicians, or investors, we rather follow designing/archiving/dwelling on a daily basis, we rarely witness a building/an archive/use “as a whole”. Thus, abandon all sites where we talk of these activities “as a whole” (the panoramic ones) and focus instead on the small sites, on these misty locales of practice where very little can be seen, but it can be seen well. Those sites, termed by Latour oligopticons, are fundamentally invisible. By this neologism, Latour means “narrow windows through which, via numerous narrow channels, we can link up with only some aspects of beings (human and non-human) which together comprise [the city]” (Latour & Hermant, 1998, p. 173). Examples of oligopticons include design spaces and model shops in an architectural studio, a conservational lab, cataloguers or registrar offices in an archive, a lab, a gas room or a mechanical workshop in a science building. Once there, we find ourselves in offices, corridors, tracing alignments, instruments, dossiers, codes, solvents, facing teams, precautions, alerts, dangers. All these rare and fragile places that accumulate the power of the oligopticon are situated on the ground, not on the top, under our feet, not in our imaginations; they are all dispersed and at our disposal.

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Moreover, designing/archiving/dwelling cannot be captured from a static viewing position, on one steel picture only, taken from the top in a moment of contemplation. These processes are to be understood only as we move and meander through the locales of practice and visit different oligopticons. Just like the social is active engine (not a static frame) that orders and lo­ calizes, reassembles and situates, links and distinguishes, but does not have the shape of Society (Latour, 2005), a building/archive/use are also to be traced and composed. They do not emerge as objective frames. Alternatively, favouring the point of view of the human/designer/archivist/ user will not help us to get a better understanding of buildings/environ­ ments/archives either. Instead, we access those channels that enable us to connect the objects with the subjects, we follow trajectories of traces, series of transformations; we stay on the ground and we realize that in fact, we can never see the totality of a building/an archive/use. This is a pragmatic absurdity. We only see those traces, small and big, perceptible and distinct, running at different pace of speed in front of us, with us. Fourth: Visualize and amplify! Following slowly, factoring all connections, staying on the ground, the knowledge practices of designing/archiving/dwelling emerge as restricted and circumscribed into intricate and frangible, yet costly, networks of praxis. To better understand them, we should engage in visualizing such networks. Practising architectural anthropology, we begin to learn a great deal from the indigenous visual epistemologies of designers and their techniques of image production. Architects need visuals for a number of reasons: to express and translate creative ideas, to communicate with other architects or workers in construction, to explore the relationship between site and surroundings, to present a building to larger audiences of nonspecialists, clients and sponsors, to teach and transfer knowledge, to con­ duct experiments and generate new knowledge. Follow architects and learn from their practices of visualization, and you can fully grasp the visual potential of architectural anthropology. Ethnographic images do not merely document a practice in minute detail but may themselves contribute to strengthening or diminishing arguments. In going beyond illustration, they mediate, they travel in cascade. Their epistemic style thus captures the density of local “cultures” of practice while questioning what truly matters to practitioners. In addition, shifting the focus beyond single-sited ethnographies towards methods and techniques able to grasp the “figurational” dimensions of collaborative networks requires a versatile use of visuals supporting an­ thropological research. Rather than simply replacing the traditional methods with their computational alternative, a blended method of inter­ views and observations as well as digital mapping can be used. This will allow us to witness in the very process of tracing, mapping, diagramming,

24 Yaneva and sketching, the constitution of an actor (or connections) whose format and magnitude might not be initially obvious. Notably, rather than repla­ cing ethnographic accounts or substituting the painstaking collection of ethnographic data itself, these visuals can inform, enrich, and complete an enquiry. Just like in design, the visuals of the architectural anthropologist, are neither an endpoint nor standby for visual methods. They instead provide a starting point for a richer and more intense anthropological en­ quiry and can thus greatly facilitate the generation of a novel type of qualitative data. More mapping, scientometric, and parametric based tools can form a major step forward in tracing visually and analytically the networks of practice, thus enabling us to powerfully respond to critiques of our pre­ dominantly qualitative and descriptive methods. Networks cannot be re­ duced to purely social relations: they are socio-technical, and the power of the visual techniques lays in their capacity to trace the heterogeneous constitution and dynamics of these networks. To connect to the examples from the three empirical settings presented above, it is clear that two years in an architectural practice or in archive cannot simply be replaced with a figurational map. However, an understanding of such a practice could be much enhanced and complemented by a visualization/a map/a diagram that adequately situates it within a larger comprehensive network. Composed of the many agencies that make it work, this map or diagram would in turn allow for the inspection of the actors’ constitutive relationships and could

Figure 0.4 Mapping visualizations. Diagram: Albena Yaneva.

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Figure 0.5 Mapping visualizations. Diagram: Albena Yaneva.

offer visual strength to the analytical arguments made on the basis of eth­ nography only. Ultimately, it would allow for a more comprehensive view of the larger-scale networks of designing/archiving/dwelling. Identifying the visual techniques used by the practitioners we study to generate reality before transporting them into a field of study where these techniques can further knowledge about native phenomena might appear as an unconventional technique. Ought we to use a master plan to study the practices of planning? Statistic graphs to study statisticians at work? Scale models to study architects and collages to study artists? There is something that fascinates me in that extreme way of learning from the epistemology of the practitioners we follow, how to study them in a different way. That is an intriguing shift in epistemology. Yet, using images as subject matter of inquiry is not enough; it is instead crucial to mobilize architectural visuals to generate knowledge about de­ signing/archiving/dwelling leading to the visual structuration of arguments. Using versatile architectural visuals can better help us to witness the process through which actors gain identity via tracing their dynamic interconnec­ tion or capture the constituency of a network and the fluency of the social. A creative use of anthropological visuals can offer insightful ways of vi­ sualizing dynamic relations and depicts a much more fluid world of active entities in which the form of the phenomenon does not appear as de­ termined from outside; it is being shaped in the flow. Such visualizations

26 Yaneva have the potential to make stronger epistemological statements, while overcoming the ontological assumption of “out-there-ness”. This specific visual epistemology helps the architectural anthropologist to develop an analytical method capable of portraying a degree of complexity that is difficult to capture with traditional qualitative and quantitative methods. Thus, drawing on the visual epistemology of designers, architecture itself transmogrifies into something more than a site of anthropological ex­ ploration. It becomes a site of experimentation for both architects and anthropologists. The visuals of the architectural anthropologist successfully capture the occurrences, events and situations that make the social grasp­ able; they trace dynamic assemblies of heterogeneous actors, their locations in time and space, and how their concerns work in tandem to shape an environment, an atmosphere. Yet, no matter how versatile, these visuals cannot replace a conventional ethnography of the process of designing/ar­ chiving/dwelling. They rather help discovering actors, alliances or concerns that might not be obvious at the start; they act as an epistemological tool for underlining ontological singularities: a powerful visual device for de­ ploying, not just describing, phenomena. Indeed, visualizing in architectural anthropology is not a way of illustrating, but a way of generating and deploying knowledge and thus offers a powerful technique for producing infra-reflexive anthropological accounts. It has its own range of episte­ mology offering a denser understanding of the world, in addition to textual descriptions and analyses. Fifth: Re-describe, re-describe, re-describe! Drawing on novelists like Calvino (1974) and literary theorists like Barthes (1975) can also inspire architectural anthropologists to perfect their “art of describing” processes, environments, and atmospheres in cities and to produce accounts that trace and measure the pluriverse of life without re­ placing the specific with general. It is therefore critical to reinvent the narrative techniques that will help us gain access to the particular, to grasp the unique, and to offer an adequate description on the basis of the series of situations that are accounted for. Equipped with various tools of descrip­ tion, both discursive and visual, the accounts of the architectural anthro­ pologist should deploy the networks of designing/archiving/dwelling, instead of merely ethnographically describing, or unveiling in a critical fashion, what is behind them: the culture or the social forces at work. To deploy means to account with meticulousness the performances of entire collectives of humans and non-humans (suggesting the collective of models, archival materials, forces at stake in dwelling, etc.). Instead of relating ac­ tion simply to a particular agent or explaining it with enduring historical structures and urban systems, the narrative techniques of architectural anthropology will capture the particular threads that connect different entities. Sketching actions in a variety of situations allows us to dislodge

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designing/archiving/dwelling from the subjectivity of individual perspec­ tives, of lone pairs of eyes or single voices. It helps us describe and redescribe them from within; a building/an archive/use do not emerge in a series that implies logical sequence or a hierarchy, but their specificity is rather revealed in a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw manifold ramified conclusions. The writing techniques follow suit: advocating a respect for what things communicate without words, tracing the irreducible proliferation of objects, buildings, times, spaces, and people, anthropological description places the enquiry within the heart of urban life/dwelling/designing/architectural archiving to better capture their specificity. Sixth: Make a difference! Committing to describe the variable settings, objects, and practices of de­ signing/archiving/dwelling, means concomitantly stating willingness to at­ tend empirically to the disorderly specificities of the world of architecture. Yet, it does not mean, taking sides while describing. Power of description is not won at the expense of any serious attempt at engagement. In each empirical situation we are confronted with what, following Donna Haraway (1991), we can call “situated knowledge” or contested truths about the mechanics of designing/archiving/ dwelling. Just as there is no general methodological due process in design and design knowledge is specific and arises out of the practices of architects or dwellers as they sketch or inhabit a building, knowledge in architectural anthropology is also specific and irredeemably messy. As architectural anthropologists we witness states of instable idiosyncratic relationships, we follow outlandish objects, we experience shambolic architectural settings together with de­ signers and dwellers, we describe their specificities, contingency, and het­ erogeneity for they are simultaneously material, social, political, technical, and architectural in character. However, describing the daily practices of designing/archiving/dwelling is also about making a difference; it is a form of interference. It is in fact possible to attend to specificity and to make a difference at the same time. While engaging in re-description, we do not take any sides. We are all, as Haraway puts it, “located in the belly of the monster” (1991). The idea that we could climb out and look down to get an overview, and therefore make a judgment, makes no sense. Immersion in the world of designing/archiving/ dwelling, allows us to produce descriptions where architecture appears as performative and situated; not a distant and passive formal reality that would project power, styles, cultural ambitions, and identity aspirations. We describe, we attend to the specificities, the contingency, and the un­ certainties of the empirical; the more we immerse into these worlds of de­ sign and describe, the more we understand and learn. Our knowledge practices are performative and so are our descriptions. The more specific

28 Yaneva they get, the more the difference we can make would be embedded in their specificities and our ability to intrude in design worlds will increase. Sometimes unpredictably and involuntary, the descriptions start interfering in their object of study. They can disperse it or diffract it, move it on or redo it according to the angle they take, the actors they follow, the grain of details, the time-spaces and durations; they make a difference and they make us intervene. We interfere! It is an illusion to believe that these descriptions are neutral. And we have known this since Geertz’s Interpretation of Culture (1973); description is never innocent. All an­ thropological descriptions of settings and sites, of atmospheres, landscapes and processes are simultaneously empirical descriptions and interferences. In addition, re-descriptions lead to new ways of experimenting, new ways of designing and redesigning. Attending to the specificity of designing/ar­ chiving/dwelling, accounting partial local and perplex architectural order­ ings of the reality can further inform practice and can instigate a different thinking about design among practitioners.

References Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text (R. Miller, Trans.; 1st ed.). New York: Hill and Wang. Boyer, D. (2005). Visiting Knowledge in Anthropology: An Introduction. Ethnos, 70(2), 141–148. Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible Cities (W. Weaver, Trans.; 1st ed.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Grasseni, C. (2007). Communities of Practice and Forms of Life: Towards a Rehabilitation of Vision? In M. Harris (Ed.), Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning (pp. 203–222). New York: Berghahn Books. Haraway, D. (1991). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (pp. 183–201). London: Routledge. Harris, M. (Ed.). (2007). Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Knowledge and Learning. New York: Berghahn Books. Hill, J. (2003). Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2000). Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World. In The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (pp. 172–188). London: Routledge. Latour, B. (1988). The Politics of Explanation: An Alternative. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge (pp. 155–176). London: Sage.

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Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B., & Hermant, E. (1998). Paris: Ville Invisible. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte. Latour, B., & Yaneva, A. (2008). “Give Me a Gun and I Will Make Buildings Move”: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In R. Geiser (Ed.), Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. Novoselov, K. S., & Yaneva, A. (2020). The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene. Singapore: World Scientific. Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Stengers, I. (2016). “Another Science is Possible!” A Plea for Slow Science. In H. K. Letiche, G. Lightfoot, & J.-L. Moriceau (Eds), Demo(s): Philosophy – Pedagogy – Politics. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Strebel, I. (2011). The Living Building: Towards a Geography of Maintenance Work. Social & Cultural Geography, 12(3), 243–262. Till, J. (2009). Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Yaneva, A. (2009a). Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010 Publishers. Yaneva, A. (2009b). The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. Oxford: Peter Lang. Yaneva, A. (2020). Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Part I

Home, walls, and boundaries Edited by Claus Bech-Danielsen and Marie Stender

From an architectural-anthropology point of view, a home is not to be understood as a mere physical object – a building. Le Corbusier’s wellknown phrase, “The house is a machine for living in”, needs to be re­ interpreted, in order to understand how this machine takes part in the social world. It now becomes important to study what home does, and it no longer makes sense to consider the home in isolation from the individual residents as well as the society it is a part of. Home is to be understood as a personal relation between house and residents, and it has to do with emotions and feelings that occurs when the residents become attached to the place they live in. The residents develop their home, while at the same time the home shapes them. Cross disciplinary research in the field between architecture and an­ thropology thus study how the built environments of the home interact with the everyday life of residents. This brings a focus on how social re­ lations, dwelling and bodily being-in-the-world is mediated by walls, façades, and other physical boundaries in architecture. In classical archi­ tecture the walls and the façades were seen as solid and static frameworks around the home. There was a clear division between the two sides of the walls, and doors and windows were designed to mark a clear zone of transition between the spatial entities of the two sides. In contemporary architecture a more dynamic spatial perception is developed, and a liquid conception of space is promoted – walls are increasingly transparent and the boundaries are in constant transformation reflecting and reinforcing social and cultural developments. Boundaries between home interior and outside space dissolve due to li­ quid spatial concepts and transparent architecture, and boundaries between private and public change and might seem blurred. However, the bound­ aries play a pivotal role in housing architecture, as they define private versus shared space and mediate social and cultural interaction. The five chapters in this part deal with walls, windows, balconies, railings and other

32 Bech-Danielsen & Stender boundaries to explore the socio-material dynamics at play in the built en­ vironments of homes and to understand how boundaries are both keeping us apart and connecting us. Chapter 1, written by Sandra Lori Petersen, focuses on the experience of one specific wall, the bedroom wall in the flat of a woman named Liva. Liva is exposed to faint sounds from her neighbours, keeping her awake at night. The author consults an architect, acoustician, and engineer who all find the noise to be a problem connected to the material properties of the wall. Liva, on the contrary, blames herself for finding it so difficult to handle the nuisance. The chapter presents a binary categorization in the perception of neighbour noise as being the fault of either the resident or building. Through the concept of viscous porosity, a third position is suggested, investigating the similarities and entanglements between Liva and the wall, showing how each shapes the other. In Chapter 2, Marie Stender and Marie Blomgren Jepsen take us to the very edge of domestic boundaries in a study of Copenhagen balconies. The chapter explores how balconies intervene in the social relationship between city dwellers by adding new angles of exposure and new surfaces for con­ tact. Differences between neighbours become increasingly manifest as ma­ terial boundaries become blurred. As architectural attributes, balconies affect the social forms of urban housing and city life, enabling new ways of behaviour, and challenging the norms of co-existing on the boundaries between private homes. The authors compare balcony façades to social media, arguing that they expose those who live behind them and that such exposure entails both possibilities to stand out and social pressure to fit in. Chapter 3, by Turid Borgestrand Øien and Mia Kruse Rasmussen, focuses on the indoor climate of the home. The two authors argue that architectural anthropology can contribute to the understanding of indoor environments by exploring the complex, multisensory entanglements between people, mate­ rials, and meanings through the micro-scales of everyday life. In this light, different properties of the outer walls of the home appear: Walls are both keeping in and keeping out. We sometimes open windows in the walls to remove unhealthy indoor air, whereas at other times we need the walls to be an airtight shelter from unhealthy indoor air (e.g. because of pollen). Sometimes, the walls are the very reason for the unhealthy indoor climate, for instance, when mould and microbes grow on the inside walls. In Chapter 4, Laura Helene Højring and Claus Bech-Danielsen focus on homelessness and homeliness. Using collages as a part of their research method, they study how home is perceived to someone who is or has re­ cently been homeless. The two authors conclude that, to the people who are homeless, the feeling of home is not always connected to a dwelling. ‘Home’ is not always something bound by walls but can also relate to an urban space, to being with friends and one’s dog, or to specific activities and daily routines. The chapter also demonstrates that home in a dwelling is not necessarily a safe haven. To some people who are homeless, a dwelling can

Home, walls, and boundaries 33 evoke feelings that are contradictory to home, and they might even perceive a dwelling as a trap or a prison. The incarcerating dimension of walls is further explored in the final chapter of Part I, by Runa Johannessen and Tomas Max Martin, Chapter 5. With an empirical focus on a prison and a deportation centre on a small island, they explore the archetypical boundaries of the wall and the island. Both walls and islands can be viewed as sheltering the domestic from the public or the wild, yet both also hold an intrinsic and particularly brute violent potential in their capacity to domesticate people forcefully against their will through exclusion and enclosure. The chapter demonstrates that walls and islands not only protectively frame the domesticity of homes and communities, but like other barriers and boundaries, also serve to exclude and marginalize as a way of protecting normality.

1

The viscous porosity of walls and people Sandra Lori Petersen

On the third floor of a five-story building in central Copenhagen that dates from 1901, Liva lives with her partner and their two children. Everyday sounds, party sounds, and sexual sounds frequently seep into their 75 m² flat from their downstairs and upstairs neighbours, while the sound of traffic and construction work seep in from the outside. Liva, who is going through a period of intense stress, finds these sounds overwhelming. Yet what disturbs her the most are actually the faint sounds of what she as­ sumes to be a couple, lying in bed, quietly talking to each other. Every night, as Liva lies in her own bed, these sounds come through the wall next to her. “It feels like an itch,” she says, explaining: I try to ignore it, like I tell my kids to do if they have a mosquito bite. […] [The neighbours] talk in a quiet way – there is nothing to complain about – but [the sound] is more annoying to me than for example music would be, because it is private. Liva keeps earplugs next to her bed, but they hurt her ears, and she tries to avoid using them. Instead, she breathes calmly and attempts to soothe herself and think about something else, “But it doesn’t work,” she says. Every evening, she hopes it will be quiet, but every evening the sounds seep through her wall anew. This chapter is based on Liva’s account but also informed by the accounts of how other flat-dwellers experience the sounds of their neighbours as disturbing noise. The accounts draw on fieldwork among occupants of multi-storey housing in Denmark, as well as professionals in the Danish building and housing sectors.1 For the purpose of this chapter, several ac­ counts of occupants’ experiences with neighbour noise were read by and discussed with an architect named Søren, an engineer specializing in sus­ tainable construction called Lau, and an acoustician named Rasmus.2 My initial motivation for asking Søren, Lau, and Rasmus to participate in this experiment was to gain a better understanding of their professional ap­ proach to the relationship between occupants and buildings through their readings of these accounts. As I describe below, our discussions showed me

36 Petersen that, to Søren, Lau, and Rasmus, the sole issue at stake was the wall; as a consequence, they valued only the elements of the account that allowed them to learn more about the wall as real knowledge. My conversations with them allowed me to access the wall in ways I would not have been able to using only my anthropological approach and Liva’s experiences. Hence, their response to Liva’s account, their interpretation of the drawings of her home, and their characterization of their personal professional approaches allowed me to engage with the material properties of the wall and to consider the relationship between Liva and the wall, rather than solely considering it from Liva’s perspective. “Do things speak?” asks Martin Holbraad (2011) rhetorically, reflecting on recent tendencies in anthro­ pology towards an emancipation of things that, in his view, runs the risk of treating them as almost human. Things do speak for themselves, he asserts, but the challenge is to hear their voice over the noise of what we say about them (Holbraad, 2011, pp. 11–12). A way around this, he suggests, is to conceive of things as concepts, defining them based on what our inter­ locutors say and do with them. This would lead us to a better under­ standing of ethnographic things (ibid., p. 12). Through Søren, Lau, and Rasmus’s descriptions, the wall became an ethnographic thing to me. In this chapter, I explore how built environments and human subjects are deeply entangled with each other. Through the specific example of Liva and her bedroom wall, I wish to explore what we can learn about both humans and built environments through this entanglement. Liva appears to be a critical case with respect to noise nuisance, since she describes the stress she suffers from as closely related to her sensitivity to noise. When considered together with the building she lives in, which is old and poorly soundinsulated, Liva’s sensitivity is particularly interesting to me, because it ex­ poses the intimate connections between the occupant (Liva) and the building she occupies. Liva’s sensitivity enlarges connections that are om­ nipresent, but difficult to grasp because of the subtle ways in which they find expression. Instead of seeing built environments as composed of disparate elements, architectural critic Sarah W. Goldhagen (2017) calls for an understanding of the city as an integrated whole. Goldhagen addresses architects and other professionals of the building sector in particular, since – she argues – they tend to consider disparate elements of the built environment independently from each other in their design and conceptual processes. As a result, Goldhagen states, they overlook the numerous ways in which people in the city experience these elements as informing, contextualizing and shaping each other. Implicit in Goldhagen’s call is an understanding that people who inhabit the city do not merely experience built environments; indeed, they not only partake in constituting their environments, they are themselves shaped by them. Architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes how, for an architect, the process of designing a building includes the gradual internalization of its

The viscous porosity of walls and people 37 surrounding landscape, its functional requirements, and other character­ istics (Pallasmaa, 2012, p. 71). To Pallasmaa, designing a building is a bodily process that communicates with the body of the person who will later use or even inhabit the building (ibid., p. 71). I find Pallasmaa’s approach particularly interesting, because he places sensuous engagement at the core of his work. He describes how the human body relates to buildings through processes that internalize space and knowledge by imitating buildings through multifaceted sensory engage­ ments. These engagements merge with personal memories and imagination in ways that sometimes allow people to experience resonance and even rootedness within built environments (Pallasmaa, 2012, pp. 22, 71–72). As we shall see in this chapter, in Scandinavia, we tend to inhabit our homes in a way that makes the internalization processes quite intense, and thus our homes often become closely connected to our experiences of intimacy and personal identity (Gullestad, 1992). Inspired by Pallasmaa’s understanding of the relationships between buildings and humans, I am interested in the relation between Liva and her wall. I move beyond the interface between the two and into their respective textures and dynamics. In this way, I get to learn more about both Liva and the wall: rather than describing how Liva perceives the wall, I explore the ways in which they can form each other. To undertake this, I turn to an­ thropological notions of personhood as porous, to examinations of the materiality of walls, and to philosopher Nancy Tuana’s (2008) conception of “viscous porosity” as a means of describing texture, dynamics, inter­ relatedness and entangled emergences.

Human and material inadequacies An examination of the architectural drawings of Liva’s building3 reveals that the bedroom wall through which she can hear her neighbours talk is especially thin, and is likely to consist simply of wooden boards or coke. Liva does not believe her neighbours are doing anything wrong. Instead, she assumes, the problem lies in her own experience of the nightly situation. “I am the one who is wrong,” she says. “I should not live in the city if I am not able to cope with it.” Hence, Liva takes the responsibility for the dis­ turbing sounds upon herself. The way she sees it, neither the sounds themselves nor the wall that allows the sounds to pass through it is the real problem. Rather, she blames her own inability to ignore the sounds and her feelings of annoyance. Indeed, as she attempts to “breathe” her way through her annoyance, she experiences her inability to do so as proof that she is in the “wrong”, and that she “should not live in city.” To Søren, Lau, and Rasmus, it is evident both from Liva’s account and from the drawings of her house that the wall between her bedroom and the neighbouring flat offers little resistance to the subtle sounds of her neigh­ bours’ nightly conversations. Lau, the engineer, explains that his approach

38 Petersen

Figure 1.1 A section of the drawing of the façade as well as a cross section of the building from 1901 in which Liva lives with her family on the 3rd floor. Its storey partitions are made of wood, and its walls are constructed of bricks and wooden boards or coke. Drawing: Municipality of Copenhagen.

would be to focus on the quality of the wall. “When we deal with issues of noise in buildings,” Lau says, “we are interested in the sound transmission of the construction – for example, in how much sound passes through a wall.” He concludes, “If someone is disturbed by noise in a house, we consider it a

The viscous porosity of walls and people 39 problem of the building, not of its occupants.” To Søren, Lau, and Rasmus, Liva’s account testifies to a wall that ought to be soundproofed. “It would be incredibly easy to ameliorate the situation,” says Søren, the architect, who describes how Liva could buy the necessary materials at a do-it-yourself centre, layering plasterboard and insulation to create what he calls a “layer cake solution”. I tell Liva that I have had the opportunity to see the drawings of her building, and that the wall is very thin. She is surprised and relieved to hear that the experts I consulted expect that even weak sounds would be audible through it. I ask if she would consider insulating the wall as a means of dampening the noise. She immediately dismisses the possibility, claiming that her bed would no longer fit in the room. “The bed is not very good,” she says, “but it is too overwhelming to have to change it.” I argue that this dismissal may have less to do with the bed’s size than with Liva’s framing of the issue at stake. To her, the real problem is not the wall’s inadequacy, but her own, since she has proven unable to ignore the sounds. To Søren, Lau, and Rasmus, however, the nuisance clearly arises from the inadequacy of the wall. The issue at stake, then, is either occupant or wall – human or material capacities. Each perspective structures different solutions: either Liva should work on her ability to ignore the sound (or move to the countryside), or the wall should be insulated. However, the binary conception of the issue pro­ duced via these two perspectives creates a catch-22 situation, in which further analysis is halted. To unfold these issues further, therefore, I seek a third position. Instead of considering whether the core of the issue is Liva or her wall, I explore what they have in common – namely a certain degree of porosity.

The porous self Liva can often hear construction work and traffic from outside of her building, but she finds the sounds from her neighbours more disturbing because, she says, they “draw” her into their lives. When the students in the flat downstairs are having a party, she thinks about their musical choices, even though she would rather sleep. She cannot keep herself from won­ dering what her upstairs neighbour is doing when his footsteps are ac­ companied by sounds that she cannot immediately relate to a concrete action. The intimate sounds of the couple talking behind her bedroom wall cause Liva to dwell on the fact that she is in bed alone, because her partner goes to bed later than she does. Their talk is especially disturbing to her because it is private and draws her into an intimacy between others that she longs for in her own life. I suggest that Liva’s way of reacting to these sounds can be understood as an expression of a form of porosity inherent in the way she is formed as a person. In order to understand the profound ways in which Liva is affected by these sounds, I will consider some aspects of how personhood is perceived in the anthropological literature, where it has long been a source of rich

40 Petersen

Figure 1.2 Original drawing of Liva’s flat, which occupies the corner of the building. The arrow indicates the wall separating Liva’s bedroom from her neighbours’ which is visibly remarkably thinner than the supporting wall running through the inside of the apartment. Drawing: Municipality of Copenhagen.

discussion. A landmark in this discussion occurred when Marilyn Strathern took up the notion of dividual to describe the Melanesian person as emerging through and dependent on relations with a community of social others (Strathern, 1988; Smith, 2012, p. 54). The dividual was originally formulated as a binary contrast with the so-called Western individual, which was perceived as an indivisible whole formed around an essential core that contained its uniqueness (Smith, 2012, p. 53). Strathern rejected any strict opposition between dividuals and individuals when she argued that the Melanesian person inhabited traits of both (Strathern, 1988, p. 268). Several others have since shown how the two notions are more enriching when considered together as general aspects of personhood across regions, rather than mutually exclusive allencompassing descriptions (Englund & Leach, 2000; LiPuma, 1998). The result is a conceptualization of all human beings as having both unique characteristics and permeable boundaries through which exchanges and transactions take place; thus, each person is shaped through their relations with others while also being a distinct self (Smith, 2012, p. 55). In short, each person must be understood as both distinct and dependent – as permeable, porous and embedded in relations (ibid., p. 60). Considering the person as porous and permeable is key in understanding how the sounds seeping through Liva’s wall can become more than

The viscous porosity of walls and people 41 mundane nuisances to her. Indeed, because of her porosity, they become part of what shapes her in an intimate way. Of course, this does not imply that every trace of sound that crosses Liva’s path influences her person­ hood, nor that every person is porous to the same extent as Liva. There may be degrees of porousness, just as there can be periods of time when others make more significant impressions upon a person, or when one must rely more heavily on others. When the sounds seep through Liva’s bedroom wall, they become impossible for her to ignore because she is in a vulnerable state: she is undergoing a period of intense stress and – importantly – she is lying in her bed in the privacy of her home.

The intimacy of the home Privacy and intimacy are qualities that most Scandinavians expect to find in their homes, and upon which they depend in order to create a sense of wholeness and integration within it (Gullestad, 1991, pp. 490–491). This wholeness and integration is part of how Scandinavian personhood is configured, according to anthropologist Marianne Gullestad, who describes how the borders of the home are essential to this process (Gullestad, 1992, p. 197). She illustrates how the home is constructed as a unique inside space that contrasts with a more fragmented outside, and how the home’s boundaries are established by its occupants through what Gullestad de­ scribes as a “neat but in some ways fictional separation between the spheres” (Gullestad, 1991, p. 494). Liva’s frustration with the sound of her neighbours indicates that when she is about to sleep at night, she longs for her sphere to be separated from theirs. Though the wall between Liva and her neighbours looks like a solid se­ paration between their homes, aurally, it is permeable. Pallasmaa describes how what is heard structures the bodily experience of space, and how sound creates an experience of interiority (Pallasmaa, 2012, p. 53). Queer theoretician Sarah Ahmed writes that the lived experience of being at home “involves the enveloping of subjects in a space that is not simply outside them: being-at-home suggests that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other” (Ahmed, 2000, p. 89, emphasis added). When Liva hears the sounds of her neighbours, they become interior to her – they inhabit her momentarily, to paraphrase Ahmed, though she does not want them to. In his studies of the acoustic environment of public British hospitals, an­ thropologist Tom Rice (2013) describes the everyday life of patients for whom the hospital has become a temporary home. Patients lying in multiplebed hospital wards are exposed to the private sounds of their fellow patients when they react to pain, for example, or when their bodies emit involuntary sounds. Rice details patients’ varying degrees of success at attempting to “turn a deaf ear” or to “create privacy through the application of a particular attitude or mental approach” (Rice, 2013, pp. 173–174). In a similar way,

42 Petersen Liva expects herself to establish a separation between her and her neigh­ bours’ spheres through force of will. Just as the ambition of not scratching a mosquito bite implies the capacity to ignore it, she is frustrated by her in­ ability to “turn a deaf ear” to these sounds. I argue that when Liva tries to guard the privacy of her bed in this way, she is unsuccessful precisely because she is in her own home and in her bed, the locus for an intimate form of being where wholeness and integration are pursued. She is enveloped in this space and comes therefore to experience the intimate sounds of these neighbours, whom she does not know, as interior to herself.

Professional conceptions of a wall Earlier in this chapter, I described Søren, Lau, and Rasmus’s impressions of the wall based on Liva’s account and on its appearance in the building’s architectural drawings. The wall is unquestionably very thin and likely to be made of either wooden boards or coke. Neither of these materials is very solid, but both possess a certain porousness. To Liva, a wall is a wall; she tends to identify it by its visual qualities, and this particular wall shows no sign of being any different from the other walls in her flat. It is painted in the same shade of white, and decorated with a colourful poster, just like the walls of her living room. As an acoustics specialist, Rasmus relates to walls in a rather different way. When entering a new space, he begins by clapping or snapping his fingers, “to find out how much the room resonates,” he says. “Then I knock on the wall to find out if it is a heavy or light material. I don’t listen to how loud the knock is. I am interested in how much response I get from the wall – if it yields, or feels hollow, for example.” Using a series of multisensory skills, Rasmus is thus able to characterize the consistency of a wall and work out whether it is made of brick, concrete or wood; whether it contains cavities or is solid; and ultimately, what kind of acoustic qualities it is likely to have. He then uses a variety of machines to measure sound transmission. Although he has not had the opportunity to evaluate Liva’s wall, this description of the way Rasmus relates professionally to walls in general relativizes Liva’s approach to a wall as being merely a wall. When Rasmus deploys his auditory and haptic senses in his encounter with a wall, his professional capacities combine with his bodily knowledge to demonstrate a subtle and nuanced understanding of the texture of the built environment. His approach informs us of the expectations he has regarding any wall’s propensity to transmit sound. As an acoustician, he is interested in esti­ mating the density of a wall. Its lightness or heaviness may be connected to a certain degree of porosity in its material composition. The material properties of coke, of which the wall in question is likely to be composed, happen to include a fair degree of porosity. Above, Lau explained that he always assumes the quality of the building to be the main issue in cases of noise nuisance. Similarly, Rasmus is

The viscous porosity of walls and people 43 concerned with the quality of the wall. None of them believes that any inadequacy of Liva’s is at the core of the problem, and as a consequence, her accounts of her experiences do not represent knowledge to them. The three professionals all express surprise that Liva does not consider insula­ tion an option to rid herself of this nuisance, but they also maintain that her account teaches them nothing new. They did not expect an occupant to act – or in this case, abstain from acting – in the way Liva does. That said, they do not consider her experiences to represent relevant knowledge to them, since their concern is with the building. Liva, on the other hand, is relieved to hear that the wall is in fact thin, but this information does not change how she perceives the problem. The issue at stake would seem to be either-or: the problem is either one of Liva’s inadequacy, or of the wall’s. It is clear from Liva’s account that the wall influences her life when it allows sounds to pass through to her. For her part, Liva could change the wall by insulating it. This assessment of the relationship between the two is clear enough, but overlooks why the re­ lationship between this particular person and this specific wall is so sig­ nificant. This is because they enhance specific qualities in each other, and thereby influence each other in a very particular way.

Viscous porosity Homes and persons have boundaries, across which substances, sounds, images and ideas can travel. Liva’s flat would not be a suitable home without its floors, ceilings, and walls; but the boundaries they demarcate are permeable. Liva attempts to turn a “deaf ear” to the sounds that seep through to her in the evening in her bed, but she does not succeed. Instead, she feels “drawn in” by the sounds of others; they lead her to imagine what others are doing and to long for quiet conversations in bed with her own partner. The sounds of Liva’s neighbours represent a stimulation of her sense of hearing, of her imagination, her emotional life, and her nervous system, transgressing the physical borders of her body and preventing her from falling asleep. Instead of sharing her evening thoughts with her own partner, she interiorizes the intimate conversations of a pair of neighbours, who are strangers to her. Her relationship to these strange voices becomes part of what shapes her as a person. In order to understand how this is possible, I find it fruitful to reflect on Tuana’s (2008) concept of “viscous porosity”. Tuana conceives of viscous porosity as a metaphor that points at the multifaceted ways in which beings are interrelated (Tuana, 2008, p. 188). It is in the interplay of these webs of relations that subjects – and I would add objects – emerge (cf. ibid., pp. 188–189). As I have shown above, both Liva and her bedroom wall can be described as porous. Thinking through por­ osity, according to Tuana, “helps to undermine the notion that distinctions […] signify a natural or unchanging boundary” (ibid., p. 194).

44 Petersen

Figure 1.3 A photo of the wall in Liva’s bedroom with her bed right next to it. The wall is simply white and decorated with a framed poster. It is through this seemingly solid wall that the faint sounds of the nightly conversa­ tions of Liva’s neighbours seep through to her. Photo: Sandra Lori Petersen.

The viscous porosity of walls and people 45 Whereas porosity describes a textural aspect that the bedroom wall and Liva have in common, viscosity adds an important element in describing how they are entangled in and form each other: how they emerge through one another. The term viscosity is borrowed from Newtonian physics, as a way of indicating the extent to which a fluid resists deformation, or opposes the propensity to flow (Wagner, 2018). Viscosity and porosity then both describe texture; but whereas porosity describes density, viscosity points at malleability. Something that is viscous, in Tuana’s words, is “neither fluid nor solid, but intermediate between them” (Tuana, 2008, pp. 193–194). Viscosity is akin to stickiness in the sense that it offers a certain level of resistance (Wagner, 2018). The bedroom wall is permeated by the con­ versation of Liva’s neighbours, but it prevents Liva from discerning the words themselves. Liva hears them talking, but continuously tries to ignore them. Both the wall and Liva are permeated by, and mount their own resistance to, these nighttime sounds.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have examined specific instances of the relationship be­ tween occupants and the built environment of their homes. Typically, the anthropological core interest would be primarily in occupants’ experiences, leaving the specificities of the built environment to architects and engineers. As we have seen, the constitution of a home as a specific instance of the built environment is a process of emergence that happens in the interplay between occupants and the built environment. This process is the result of a deep entanglement and cannot be understood by looking solely at the occupant (as anthropologists might) or at the built environment (as archi­ tects and engineers might). Indeed, the locus where the home is constituted is to be found in the relationship between the two, which is why my main interest here has been to explore this relationship. By situating my analysis in this third position, I have attempted to capture what I consider the ex­ perimental aspect of architectural anthropology. It has allowed me to move beyond documenting the fact that Liva and the wall influence each other to examining how this influence plays out. Not only do Liva and her wall share a degree of porosity, but the visc­ osity of each helps form the other. What the wall allows through irritates Liva like a “mosquito bite”, and her inability to ignore it leads her to think that she should leave this wall, this flat, and even the city itself. In this sense, the viscous porosity that Liva shares with the wall threatens the wall’s very status as an element of the border of her private sphere. By seeking a perspective that defines neither Liva nor the wall as pro­ blematic, I show how both emerge through their mutual entanglement. If we recall Pallasmaa’s description of how the architect communicates to the bodies of a building’s future occupants (what some might call users) through its design, these bodies are more than receptors and much more

46 Petersen than users. Through the ways in which they inhabit the building’s space, their bodies continuously shape it and allow it to emerge in different forms. These mutual processes of emergence represent more than aesthetic changes of surfaces; they reach into the very textures and dynamics of buildings and occupants. It is tempting to derive an analogy from the occupant-wall relationship to the disciplines of anthropology and architecture themselves: whereas the two disciplines will typically be conceived of as representing different realms of knowledge that might draw inspiration from each other, what architectural anthropology points to is the space between the two. If we – as anthro­ pologists and architects – situate ourselves in this space, we allow ourselves to perceive how the profound entanglements between our two disciplines can reshape both of them. Just as bodies and buildings reach into each other’s textures and dynamics, anthropology and architecture can allow each other to re-emerge in new forms. With its origins in another field of study entirely, the concept of viscous porosity can help anthropologists and architects situate themselves between their two disciplines. Thus positioned, we can consider the forms of occupants and walls as they appear here.

Notes 1 “What is neighbour noise?” is a three-year research project financed by Grundejernes Investeringsfond (The Investment Fund of Landowners) and Realdania. 2 Whereas Liva is a pseudonym chosen to protect the privacy of the occupant in question, these three professionals appear under their real names: Søren Nielsen is a partner at the architectural firm Vandkunsten, Lau Raffnsøe is the technical director of Green Building Council Denmark, and Rasmus Stahlfelst Holck Skov is an acoustician at the GTS institute Force Technology. 3 These drawings are digitized and accessible through the Municipality of Copenhagen’s archive of construction projects. I have been fortunate to benefit from the guidance of acoustical engineer Dan Hoffmeyer in examining these drawings. Hoffmeyer estimates that an investment of 10,000–15,000 Danish kroner (about €1,300–2,000) would allow the wall to be soundproofed by in­ stalling an additional wall (forsatsvæg) and insulation that would take up 16 centimetres of the room, according to the recommendations from Danish Building Research Institute.

References Ahmed, Sara (2000). Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge. Englund, H. & Leach, J. (2000). Ethnography and the meta-narratives of moder­ nity. Current Anthropology, 41: 225–248. Goldhagen, Sarah W. (2017). Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. HarperCollins. Gullestad, Marianne (1991). The transformation of the Norwegian notion of everyday life. American Ethnologist, 18(3): 480–499.

The viscous porosity of walls and people 47 Gullestad, Marianne (1992). The Art of Social Relations: Essays on Culture, Social Action and Everyday Life in Modern Norway. Scandinavian University Press. Holbraad, Martin (2011). Can the Thing Speak? OAC Press. LiPuma, Edward (1998). Modernity and forms of personhood in Melanesia. Lambek & Strathern (eds), Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia. Cambridge University Press: 53–79. Pallasmaa, Juhani (2012). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley. Rice, Tom (2013). Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience. Sean Kingston Publishing. Smith, Karl (2012). From dividual and individual selves to porous subjects. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23: 50–64. Strathern, Marilyn (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. University of California Press. Tuana, Nancy (2008). Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina. Stacy Alaimo & Susan J. Hekman (eds). Material Feminism. Indiana University Press. Wagner, Laura B. (2018). Viscosity. Retrieved from: https://newmaterialism.eu/ almanac/v/viscosity.html

2

An outdoor living room Balconies and blurring boundaries Marie Stender and Marie Blomgren Jepsen

At the turn of the millennium, balconies were still rare in Denmark’s ca­ pital, Copenhagen. The central city is dominated by a relatively homo­ genous building stock of five to six storey brick blocks arranged around green inner courtyards. The queen celebrates her birthday every year by standing on her balcony waving to the crowd gathering in front of the royal palace. Besides the queen, the experience of gazing down at urban life from one’s balcony was only familiar to a minority of citizens living in buildings provided with small balconies as part of the original façade ornamentation. From being a ceremonial space or exceptional architectural ornament, balconies have, however, become a much more common domestic and re­ creational space. Within the last two decades, the city has witnessed an immense increase in the number of balconies, in new urban areas along the harbour where all flats have at least one big balcony and in older buildings where new balconies are sprouting from façades facing both the street and green courtyards. The development has caused fierce public debate. Proponents have argued that balconies add to the quality of urban life and provide a sense of security and life to urban space (Gehl, 2010; Earon, 2015). Sceptics have mourned the aesthetic and social consequences of the balconies and have argued that they contribute to the privatization of outdoor life in public space, where neighbours and strangers used to meet and interact in the parks and squares of the city (Sonne & Weirup, 2018). The rapid increase of balconies in Copenhagen and subsequent fierce discussion can be regarded as one of the urban controversies that can teach us what design does (Yaneva & Heaphy, 2012, p. 33). Balconies are in­ teresting from an architectural-anthropological perspective because they materialize boundaries but, as we argue, also transform boundaries and relations between private and public space and between the domestic and urban realms. Domestic boundaries and objects are a classic anthro­ pological focus (Goffmann, 1990; Bourdieu, 2003; Douglas, 1996; Garvey, 2005; Löfgren, 2003; Miller, 2001), but attention has traditionally been primarily focused on their symbolic meaning and social status. Although this research has provided valuable insight, it may leave the materiality of the domestic environment as a passive backdrop for social

An outdoor living room 49 relationships. Recent theoretical developments instead propose regarding material objects of the home as artefacts or agents capable of changing the world and our relationships (Jacobs & Malpas, 2013, p. 213). Correspondingly, the focus in architectural theory has turned increasingly from what architecture is or represents to what it does (Gieryn, 2002; Latour & Yaneva, 2008). As argued elsewhere (Stender, 2016), a main endeavour or contribution of architectural anthropology is to develop such refined understandings of what buildings do and how they do it. This is done not by regarding them as static objects containing the social but by combining perspectives from the two disciplines to scrutinize how they take part in social life. The architectural-anthropology advanced in this chapter is not just about combining methods from the two disciplines. It is just as much about developing an approach to architecture and the built en­ vironment as experiments that can both cocreate and provide better insight into our social worlds. As Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas coined it when presenting the balcony as an element of architecture on the Venice Biennale in 2014: “Balanced precariously between these poles, the balcony serves as a laboratory where sometimes explosive mixtures of public and private, inside and outside, are tested” (Koolhaas, 2018, p. 803). In the following paragraphs, we enter this laboratory to unfold the bal­ cony as a piece of social architecture and explore how it both constitutes and changes the boundaries and relations between public and private, and domestic and urban life. The empirical base of the analysis is collaborative fieldwork conducted during the summers of 2019 and 2020, combining approaches from architecture, anthropology, and sociology.1 The fieldwork focused on three residential buildings: (1) an older building with co­ operative housing flats in Nørrebro where all flats had balconies installed during 2019, which made it possible to compare the situation before and after balconies; (2) an older building in Vesterbro consisting of mixed te­ nure flats, of which approximately one-third had added balconies over the last 10 years; and (3) a new, owner-occupied residential building in Nordhavn that was built with big balconies for all flats. In all three cases, we conducted recurring in-depth qualitative interviews – 48 in total – with residents both in flats with and without balconies, and we conducted an equivalent number of brief interviews with people passing by or staying at adjacent streets and courtyards. We observed and registered activities on and around the balconies for about a week for each place and used field notes, drawings, spatial analysis, quantitative regis­ trations, and film recordings. The process of filming and reviewing film recordings served to focus on the interplay between the lived and built space. Registrations and drawings helped further direct our attention to how balconies change urban space by adding new layers to the façade occupied not so much by people as by their material belongings. Furthermore, as informants recurrently referred to discussions and pic­ tures of balconies on social media, we added a bit of ‘netnography’

50 Stender & Jepsen

Figure 2.1 Three different spatial layouts: The case buildings in Nørrebro (left) and Vesterbro (middle) have large, green courtyards and smaller balconies both towards the courtyard and towards the street, whereas in Nordhavn (right), the courtyard is smaller and the balconies bigger. Drawing: Anna Jo Banke.

(Kozinets, 2010) to map how balconies appear on social media, such as Instagram, and interviewed a few of the bloggers that regularly share their balcony life on social media. In the following paragraphs, we first analyse how domestic life is affected by being enacted on balconies in the close presence of neighbours and passers-by, and then discuss how balconies change boundaries and relationships between public and private, and do­ mestic and urban life. We relate such changes in the built environment to those of social media and conclude that architectural anthropology can contribute to providing significant insight in such developments by meti­ culously focusing on how built environments take part in social life.

Getting others into one’s living room Anna lives with her boyfriend in a spacious third floor flat in Nørrebro. When we first interviewed her, she did not yet have a balcony, but was very excited about their coming balcony facing the green courtyard: I love living in the city, but I am so tired of having to ‘be public’, in order to be outside […] It always makes me happy when the sun shines, but I don’t always have the energy to go out and enjoy it. It would be nice to be able to just open the door and have a cup of coffee, read the news or talk on the phone or whatever. I think it would work almost as my living room – just outside. Like many others we interviewed, Anna looked forward to being able to “just open up the doors” and have a small private outdoor space, while still

An outdoor living room 51 living in the city. She regarded the balcony as a direct continuation of her home – “an outdoor living room” as she says, where one does not have to deal with others or face the public realm. When visiting her again nine months later, her balcony was established, and she had decorated it with potted plants, two chairs, and a small table. Anna was happy about the balcony and told us that she often enjoyed sitting there, drinking her coffee. In the afternoon when her neighbours came home, she would nevertheless move inside, as she felt they were too close and making too much noise. Our notes and film recordings from the time spent with her on the balcony also document that she moves around on the balcony silently setting her cup on the table, being extremely careful not to disturb her neighbours. Though she has extended her domestic life to the new outdoor space, she adjusted her outside behaviour, withdrawing to the indoor depending on their presence. Antonio, who lives alone in a third floor flat at the other side of the same courtyard, also preferred to move inside once his neighbour was out on the balcony: The one who is out there first has it. When you sit in here it is like [shows that when sitting at his dinner table he leans towards the balcony to glance out through the open door to see if the neighbour is out on the balcony]. When the door is open at this angle, it can be like a loudspeaker: everything that is said is forwarded. The only way to keep the privacy is to close the door. As Antonio noted, his domestic life is not only affected when he is on the balcony. In the summer, he tends to leave the door open, which lets sounds flow freely between his living room and that of his neighbours. He has been living in the building for more than 20 years and describes how the at­ mosphere has changed along with the composition of residents. Everyone used to know each other. There were more people with an ethnic minority background like him, and a bunch of drunkards used to hang out on the corner. Today, he feels slightly uncomfortable to find that most of his new neighbours are university students younger than his daughter. The new balconies have rendered this development more striking to him. He was surprised the first time he went out on the balcony and saw a neighbour he had never met before standing on the balcony right next to him: “She was a babe, only 20 years old, and standing there in her bikini … We didn’t say hello, I just hurried inside”. Thus, the balconies have brought the neigh­ bours closer both visibly and audibly and have confronted him more di­ rectly with their differences in lifestyle. He pointed out one of the carefully decorated balconies below him with furniture, flowering pot plants, and a parasol and explained in a slightly sarcastic tone that there is clearly “some young, well-organized woman living there”. He covered his balcony with a net to prevent his two cats from jumping out and installed a mattress that

52 Stender & Jepsen

Figure 2.2 The dream of the balcony is a private, outdoor living room, but neighbours also come closer for better or worse. Photo: Nanna Nielsen.

takes up most of the balcony floor so that he can lie out there in the sun without being visible from the courtyard or by most of his neighbours. In her study of the Norwegian window, Pauline Garvey finds that privacy is not so much about keeping personal information secret as having a mea­ sure of control over its circulation (Garvey, 2005, p. 172). She suggests that we can understand domestic boundaries through Wallman’s analogy of the social boundary as a teabag “that allows influences to pass across a social boundary without jeopardizing it. It permits a certain to and fro across the boundary that affects both sides” (Wallman, in Garvey, 2005, p. 162). The teabag metaphor is appropriate to stress the porousness of domestic boundaries at play on Copenhagen’s balconies. Influences certainly pass to and fro the transparent railing and open doors thereby soaking domestic life in the public and social realm surrounding it. Anna, Antonio, and other in­ formants like to think of their balconies as a private, outdoor living room where they can make themselves comfortable without entering the social realm. Yet, the presence of neighbours and the fact that they can see and hear each other influences how and when they use the balcony. As Karen, who lives in the harbour area Nordhavn in a newly built fifth floor flat with large and closely spaced balconies, puts it: “You almost get the others into your living room, though you don’t really know each other”. Getting others into the living room, however, challenges the measure of control that Garvey identifies as the quintessence of privacy. Private control is not given by the built environment of the balconies, and the boundary is consequently not as stable and unchanging as Garvey finds to be the case

An outdoor living room 53 with Norwegian windows. Rather, domestic boundaries are continuously maintained and recreated through ongoing negotiation and adjustment of both material environments and bodily practices. By placing nets, mat­ tresses, sunshades, chairs, barbeques, and potted plants along the edge of the balcony, residents supplement the somewhat sparse material border of the balcony railing. However, they also negotiate and recreate domestic boundaries through bodily practices, timing when they are on the balcony and adjusting their behaviour there, using subtle body language and min­ uscule gestures to maintain privacy. Several mentioned headphones or the act of controlling one’s gaze as a way to prevent social interaction on the balcony when neighbours are present. Others describe how turning one’s face and body away from the neighbour serves as a sign that interaction is unwanted. Such manoeuvres are well known from studies of behaviour in public spaces where symbolic boundaries can supplement physical ones, as people tend to use “body management under particular circumstances to create for themselves a symbolic shield of privacy” (Lofland, 1973, p. 151). Like the teabag being soaked in hot water, the private space of the balcony is saturated by the surrounding social sphere, and people adjust to codes of conduct known from public spaces. Such behaviour seems generally agreed upon to avoid socializing when on a balcony. Still, several informants de­ scribed how the situation can be awkward if one actually has become ac­ quainted with one’s neighbours but still wants to maintain the privacy of the balcony. Karen, for instance, has a good relationship with her neighbours and often chats with them over the railing of the balcony. Yet, sometimes she prefers to be left alone and then must signal this quite manifestly: When those two are out there, it can be a little … I mean, they are really sweet, but this summer I was ill, and I went out there in my bathrobe, and I just couldn’t handle that they would ask me how I was doing … So, I either chose not to go out there, or I just turned my back in their direction. Like Antonio, she also feels that many of the other residents have lifestyles and norms that differ from her own, and the huge and closely spaced bal­ conies of the building expose and confront these differences, most notably when younger neighbours use their balcony to party all night, keeping her awake. However, as boundaries are not given by the built environment, even small differences, such as her next-door neighbours being retired and having more time to talk, require ‘more things to be spelled out’ as she puts it: They are actually the same age as me, but they are retired […] and she is very talkative … and there you have to indicate with your body that you want to be left alone, or that you just want to sit and read […] I have also had to say directly to my neighbours: “I am actually working right now …” It was OK, but there are just more things that needs to be spelled out.

54 Stender & Jepsen Consequently, she has decided to sell her flat and move to a place where there is more space between people and a stronger common code of conduct. Garvey relates the discussion of domestic boundaries to Barth’s classic studies of ethnic boundaries and argues that “in contrast to Barth, the demarcation of socially significant difference and the point of distinction between households does not necessarily run along ethnic lines; having a “cosy” home has certain material manifestations that cross-cut ethnic, age and class backgrounds” (Garvey, 2005, p. 162). Yet, as Karen and Antonio’s experiences above bear witness, the material manifestation of domestic boundaries may accentuate perceived differences in ethnicity, age, and class background. Differences between neighbours can become in­ creasingly manifest and bothersome concurrently with material boundaries becoming blurred and porous. The implication can be that boundaries are maintained and recreated by other means – through material objects, body techniques, or verbally ‘spelling out’ – but the implication can also be a change in the relationship between what was demarcated on each side of the boundary. Getting the others into one’s living room thus requests that they are not too different from oneself; therefore, people may seek to live among more likeminded people. Like the materiality of teabags matters, so

Figure 2.3 Differences in lifestyle become more manifest with balconies. Getting others into one’s living room is easier if they are not too different from oneself. Photo: Nanna Nielsen.

An outdoor living room 55 does that of balconies and domestic boundaries: permeability and porosity pave the way for exchange and mutual influence of domestic and urban life. Moving one’s living room outdoors not only affects domestic life but also the urban realm that it enters. Therefore, we now focus on how balconies foster new ways of participating in and relating to urban space.

Private pouches in public space Many informants describe how they enjoy viewing urban life from their balconies. One can be a first-row spectator of urban events, such as music festivals, marathons, and so on, and still have access to one’s toilet and fridge with cold drinks. Moreover, one can also be a first-row spectator to everyday life on the streets and in the courtyards. The view of the balcony spectator encompasses not only distant urban scenery and street life but also the very near surroundings, including balconies on adjacent façades. Lily, who lives in a first floor flat in Vesterbro with a balcony facing the courtyard, indicated that she enjoys observing the life and décor of the other balconies: I enjoy observing how others decorate their balconies. For example, there is one woman down there who has wildly colourful flowers all over, every year. Not like my own half-dead pots [laughs]. That’s very nice. Or light chains – during the dark months of winter, there is actually light in the backyard because people decorate their balconies with light chains. It is so cosy to wake up to Christmas lights on the balconies. Domestic light is intricately connected to Scandinavian notions of cosiness and social participation (Bille, 2015). Garvey finds that placing lamps and candles in the window occupies a double role: drawing attention to the beacon in darkened surroundings and “diverting attention away from the interior by providing a focus on the border of the visual field”, adding that “Plants on windowsills potentially function in a similar manner” (Garvey, 2005, p. 169). However, as Garvey also notes, residential ways of dealing with interfaces between public and private often have less to do with being seen than with the perception of the social gaze (ibid., p. 157). Balcony owners internalize such a gaze and view their balcony through the eyes of passers-by or neighbours. This gaze has a pivotal say in what belongings are placed on the balcony. Lena, for instance, described how she felt an urgent obligation to decorate and furnish her balcony, which had less to do with her use than with how it appeared from the outside: I looked at our balcony and thought it was so embarrassing that it was all bare. There was nothing out there apart from three plants that died

56 Stender & Jepsen within three weeks. So, we bought a couple of chairs and a table because I thought it somehow said something bad about our relation­ ship if there was nothing there. And everyone else started setting flowers out there, and I thought: I really can’t cope with this. She hired professional assistance, and today, her balcony is packed with huge green plants that serve both as a shield against the neighbours and an im­ pressive showcase of how to turn the balcony into a lush urban mini-jungle. After this transformation, she has shared plenty of photos of her balcony on Instagram and laughingly admitted that she even had to visit her friend living on the opposite side of the courtyard to shoot some of her best-posted photos. If windows offer pedestrians a glimpse of domestic life, balconies provide private pouches exposed into public space. The Scandinavian home since the birth of the Bourgeoisie has had a double role as both a stage and shelter from the outside world (Löfgren, 2003, p. 144). Lena’s simultaneous staging and shielding strikingly demonstrate how balconies not only mate­ rialize but also merge and magnify this double function. The relationship between balconies and social media is interesting, not just because balconies are commonly exposed and staged on social media but also because clear parallels exist between how boundaries and relations between private and public life are currently changing. Like digital tech­ nologies change and cocreate our social worlds, so does architecture and the built environment. Rather than just blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces, balconies create private pouches in urban, public

Figure 2.4 Furnishing and decorating one’s balcony entails possibilities to stand out but also social pressure to fit in. Photo: Nanna Nielsen.

An outdoor living room 57 space, changing the ways of being private and public. Social media has provided individuals with a new creative autonomy, changing power rela­ tions in communications (Castells, 2009) and colonizing the space between traditional broadcast and private dyadic communication (Miller et al., 2016, p. 2). Similarly, the Copenhagen balcony boom has allowed not only the queen but a broad range of citizens to appear to the urban public on the façade of their homes. Such appearance, however, entails possibilities to stand out and the social pressure to fit in. In their studies of social media around the world, Miller et al. (ibid., p. xvii) concluded that “social media creates additional stress over public appearance”, and that “where social media is used to express individuality, the enhanced visibility tends to make this increasingly conformist to accepted cultural styles of individualism”. Correspondingly, the strive to follow similar fashions of interior design to keep up with decorative trends is enhanced on balconies because they di­ rectly expose and become part of the neighbours’ view and enter the cover of the urban scenery. Thus, a strong consensus exists among the informants that using the balcony for disorderly storage, garbage, or empty beer cans is unacceptable. “You ought to contribute to the cosiness of the courtyard yourself”, as Lily stated when discussing the plants and flowers of her neighbours’ balconies. Our observations from the three case buildings also document a process of social alignment, where people on adjacent balconies purchase similar furniture, flowerpots, and barbeques. At the same time, the balcony – like the personal social media platform – offers the possibility of standing out. Either with plants and furniture or by flagging personal preferences through rainbow pride flags, flags of a favourite football team, Tibetan prayer flags, or even banners with statements, which is frowned upon by some neighbours. Rather than the anonymous façade that neu­ tralizes how citizens appear in public, the façades with balconies expose those who live behind them. They turn private living rooms into open, outdoor stages while rendering residents as spectators of the urban theatre. Returning to the teabag metaphor, it is not only the inside of the teabag that transforms by being soaked in hot water; public space also takes the flavour of the private pouches infused in it. When boundaries become permeable, residents extend the control of their private space into the urban realm. Anita lives on the second floor in Nørrebro with a balcony facing the street. She described how the balconies brought the streetscape somewhat closer to her domestic space. She is, therefore, more likely to intervene when seeing something outside that she does not approve of: I’d say you have more access to what is going on outside your windows. I saw a woman with her dog, and it left a poo, so I went out there and shouted to her “pick up that poo!” I just felt like saying it to her. Based on our registrations, such direct interaction between balconies and public space are rare, but the private control of the balconies extends into

58 Stender & Jepsen

Figure 2.5 Balconies provide a platform for standing out, much like social media. This changes the façades of the city from anonymizing to exposing those who live behind them. Photo: Marie Stender.

An outdoor living room 59 the public space of the street in more subtle and indirect ways. The possi­ bility of being heard or seen from the balconies above one’s head can in­ fluence people’s behaviour in the streets and courtyards. Nanna provided an example of that. She lives on the first floor in Vesterbro and does not have a balcony herself but often sits outside on the stone step: I was chatting the other day with a young girl I know from my stairway. And the fact that they (her parents) were present on the balcony over us affected what we talked about, and what we could allow ourselves to talk about because you knew that there were somebody sitting there and listening … I just noticed that we changed the subject because I could hear that they were up there. Though people are not always as conscious of these dynamics of influence as Nanna, balconies affect the urban spaces they are placed in. Most of the year, the Danish climate is too cold to stay outside, and no one is on the balconies. Still, their spatial presence, material belongings, plants, and décor add a more organic, private, and sprawling layer to the façades of the city. Balconies thereby change urban space in a way resembling how social media changes spaces of public communication: From being dominated by a few authoritative bodies, be it planning authorities or media institutions, the public space is pervaded by a polyphony of individual expressions mutually competing and comparing.

Conclusion Architectural anthropology is not just about combining methods from the two disciplines. It is also about regarding architecture as a discipline that shares with anthropology the concern to explore processes that produce the environments we inhabit and the ways we perceive them (Ingold, 2013, p. 10). Taking this point of departure, we explored the Copenhagen bal­ cony as an architectural experiment that reveals and cocreates the current blurring boundaries between public and private space. This experiment calls for a revision of existing theory stating that Euro-American home life has turned progressively inwards, emphasizing the intimacy of the home away from the public realm of the street and the alienation that it represents (Garvey, 2005). The present analysis indicates that balconies, hand in hand with social media and other technologies, reflect and pave new ways for us to turn outwards. Balconies expose and extend the private intimacy and control of the living room into the public realm of the street, transforming its pub­ licness. Like social media fosters a polyphonic space of public commu­ nication, balconies foster the pervasion of public space by sprawling private pouches. With both balconies and social media, we find new ways of turning outwards, while still turning inwards. This implies possibilities to

60 Stender & Jepsen stand out but also pressure to fit in. The balconies make residents turn the social gaze onto their balconies, entailing an obligation to ‘contribute to the cosiness’ of courtyards and streets. Like teabags, the private pouches of balconies immerse domestic life in the public realm that surrounds it. This affects the way people create and maintain privacy, but it also brings neighbours closer. New possibilities for contact and exposure are created, but dissimilarities between neighbours also concurrently become manifest and bothersome with material boundaries becoming blurred and porous. The materiality of teabags matters, and so does that of the boundaries between domestic and urban life. A key task for architectural anthropology is to explore how the materiality of built environments comes to matter. Consequently, we must reconsider the existing understanding of domestic boundaries and the home as a mere canvas for representing social relations (Garvey, 2005, p. 165). Neither the home nor the interface between the interior and the wider public sphere is a passive canvas. Rather, the built environment and material boundaries between the home and public sphere take part in the social life of the spaces and relationships between them. Balconies not only materialize but also merge and magnify the home’s double role as a stage and shelter from the outside world. Architectural anthropology has a pivotal role in providing insight into such processes by combining methods, competencies, and approaches from the two dis­ ciplines and by meticulously focusing on and learning from the ways we interact with the environments we inhabit.

Note 1 The research was financially supported by Aalborg University, Grundejernes Investeringsfond (The Investment Fund of Landowners) and the balcony con­ tractor Altan.dk.

References Bille, M. (2015). Lighting up cosy atmospheres in Denmark. Emotion, Space and Society, 15, 56–63. Bourdieu, P. (2003). The Berber House. In S. M. Low & D. Lawrence-Zúniga (Eds), The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (pp. 131–141). Blackwell. Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Oxford University Press. Douglas, M. (1996). Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste. Sage. Earon, O. (2015). The Living Edge: The Prospect of Architectural and Urban Dimensions of the Domestic Border. The Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation. Garvey, P. (2005). Domestic boundaries: Privacy, visibility and the Norwegian window. Journal of Material Culture, 10(2), 157–176. Gehl, J. (2010). Cities for People. Island Press. Gieryn, T. F. (2002). What buildings do. Theory and Society, 31, 35–74.

An outdoor living room 61 Goffman, E. (1990). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Penguin Books. Ingold, T. (2013). Making. Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Routledge. Jacobs, K. & Malpas, J. (2013). Material objects, identity and the home: Towards a relational housing research agenda. Housing, Theory and Society, 30(3), 281–292. Koolhaas, R. (2018). Elements of Architecture: Floor, Ceiling, Roof, Door, Wall, Stair, Toilet, Window, Façade, Balcony, Corridor, Fireplace, Ramp, Escalator, Elevator. Taschen. Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. Sage. Latour, B. & Yaneva, A. (2008). Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move. An ANTs view of architecture. In R. Geiser (Ed.), Explorations in Architecture (pp. 80–89). Birkhäuser. Löfgren, O. (2003). The sweetness of home: Class, culture and family life in Sweden. In S. M. Low & D. Lawrence-Zúniga (Eds), The Anthropology of Space and Place. Locating Culture (pp. 142–160). Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Lofland, L. (1973). A World of Strangers – Order and Action in Urban Public Space. Basic Books. Miller, D. (Ed.) (2001). Home Possession: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Berg. Miller, D., Sinanan, J., Wang, X., McDonald, T., Haynes, N., Costa, E., … Nicolescu, R. (2016). How the World Changed Social Media. UCL Press. Sonne, K. & Weirup, T. (2018). Altanboom i København: De giver livskvalitet – og “gør byen mere asocial” [Balcony boom in Copenhagen: They provide quality of life and “make the city more anti-social”]. Berlingske Tidende, 8 May. Stender, M. (2016). Towards an architectural anthropology: What architects can learn from anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1), 27–43. Yaneva, A. & Heaphy, L. (2012). Urban controversies and the making of the social. Architectural Research Quarterly, 16, 29–36.

3

Mould, microbes, and microscales of architecture An anthropological approach to indoor environments Turid Borgestrand Øien and Mia Kruse Rasmussen

The architectural profession has a strong focus on scale: working in models, drawings, and representations of different physical scales, zooming in and out from details to district plans, processing a design and addressing future users. However, visible and physical structures are often prioritized, while less attention is paid to the interactions between buildings and users, taking place inside and outside of these structural boundaries. Indoor climate re­ search investigates the small-scale of our built environment, mainly starting from the health and technical sciences. In a Danish context, indoor climate has been used as a broad term to describe studies that investigate hazardous health effects triggered by the built environment (CISBO, 2016). The field addresses physical senses and human perceptual systems by assessing four basic factors: thermal comfort, quality of air, acoustics, and light (Bluyssen, Bayon & Hamilton, 2009). Consequently, triggers are often reduced to quantifiable metrics of physical conditions, as particles, temperature, deci­ bels, or lux-levels, falling short of providing qualitative insights of how these environments are experienced and how they affect peoples’ everyday lives. Other academic traditions have explored the micro-scales of buildings and homes as well, offering diverse approaches to the notion of scale. From a phenomenological perspective, architecture, in addition to being a structure with a given function, is understood as an embodied experience, which “at its best, creates a meaningful relationship and mediates between ourselves, the surrounding world and other people in it” (Fabian, 2016, p. 192). Architects and scholars of architecture such as Zumthor and Pallasmaa embrace the personal, vague, and ephemeral experience of at­ mospheres as an important part of architectural quality (Havik, Teerds & Tielens, 2013). However, even though this phenomenological under­ standing of architectural spaces gains increasing traction across the pro­ fession, the majority of architects remain relatively unconcerned with gathering post-project data (Lawson, 2004) and most building evaluations still lack social considerations (Sylvest, 2017).

Mould, microbes, and microscales 63 This chapter presents the work of two scholars, an architect in academia and an anthropologist employed at an architectural firm. Each studies the otherwise technical field of indoor climate from another perspective, pro­ posing to broaden the scope and focusing on indoor environments through an architectural-anthropological lens. If we want to investigate how buildings impact people’s everyday lives, and how these lives in turn impact buildings, we need to consider the social dynamics of how everyday users “bond” with buildings (Ballantyne, 2011). We need to understand and acknowledge the dependencies between architecture and everyday life (Till, 2009) and account for both the social and material elements of buildings in use (Van der Linden, Dong & Heylighen, 2019). In our studies of indoor environments, we build on anthropological understandings of the re­ lationship between people and environments as dynamic and enacted through the performance of everyday practices (Ingold, 2000; Mol, 2002; Pink, 2012; Shove, Pantzar & Watson, 2012), focusing on the significance of microbes and domestic boundaries in configuring and developing these micro scales. This chapter is our first collaboration and it has enabled fruitful discus­ sions of the similarities and differences between the architectural and the anthropological approach, as well as our contribution to academia and practice. In two individual studies, a mixed-method study of the indoor climate consequences of energy renovation and a PhD project investigating mould issues in public housing, we study the ways in which various ele­ ments affect the configuration of indoor climates in different multisensory contexts, and explore how they are negotiated and change over time. Furthermore, our studies show that architectural-anthropological explora­ tions can offer unique perspectives for understanding the social dynamics of domestic spaces.

Study 1: Opening the black box of the mould issue The first study investigated how mould growth are understood and handled as part of people’s everyday life.1 Despite increasing scientific knowledge and growing concern about the health risks of environment-related ex­ posures, the problem of moulds in domestic spaces is widespread. Caused by constructional conditions and/or the improper use of a building, this issue and its solutions are often disputed, and conflicts concerning re­ sponsibility and accountability are common. Generally, people perceive the mould phenomenon as abstract and inaccessible, which causes doubt about how to maintain a healthy living environment (Øien & Frandsen, 2015). Moreover, as the knowledge of people’s motivations and rationales re­ garding housing are often unknown, ignored or based on assumptions, it constitutes a black box – a system whose internal workings are hidden or inaccessible (Latour, 1987). In order to open up to the internal workings of these domestic boundaries, field studies and observations were conducted in

64 Øien & Rasmussen 11 public housing complexes where problems with mould growth had more or less initiated the ongoing refurbishment, and included 41 semi-structured qualitative interviews with occupants, building superintendents, and re­ presentatives from the housing association. To prompt the participants to describe their use of the building and their personal experience of the phenomenon as part of their everyday life, the observations included walkthroughs conducted with the occupants around their dwelling or with the building superintendent around the housing complex. Engaging with issues of mould growth, disclosed otherwise hidden as­ pects of housing, such as how we behave when the unintended and un­ foreseen alter our human-environment relationships. First of all, I could feel it affected my breathing. My nose got stuffy … and there was a very peculiar smell when I entered the bedroom … I just knew that was not a bedroom smell. It was such a wrong smell … I could just feel it … (Occupant in housing complex 1 describing the first encounters with the mould issue) Several interviews included descriptions of sensory experiences, such as obscure visual hints of the substance, vaguely discoloured or spotted sur­ faces, odd smells, or distant feelings: The moisture came from the ground and we would smell it in the winter … we have a saying that we “could smell the edge of the lawn” … Because it smelled damp and musty, and it came from the ground. (Occupant, housing complex 7) Decades had gone by in this manner but compared to other neighbours the given residents were hardly affected: “we were pretty much spared from the discomfort, but we had that smell. Once you returned back home, you could clearly sense it.” These sensory experiences represent tacit knowledge, em­ bedded in materials and embodied in individual, personal experiences as well as in residents’ responses to the problem. Each interview and associated observation helped form manifold detailed descriptions of these entangle­ ments, first assembled across each case to understand each issue and then assembled across the eleven cases to explore the phenomena more broadly. Thus, the sensory perception of the phenomenon differed, and it was clear that the narrative of the mould issue had changed throughout the 50 to 70 years of the building’s lifetime. Some occupants had been living in the complex since its construction, and their narratives touched upon scenarios from the early years – a long period of comprehending and fighting the problem – but also reflections on the current renovation. One occupant described a memory of the extensive mould issue in one of the neighbouring houses:

Mould, microbes, and microscales 65 We walked around this area with the building superintendent and stopped at a house where the window was taken out and the floor was gone [in the middle of refurbishment] … however, I recognized the smell immediately, when I put my head inside the window opening … I could still smell it … it just demonstrates its proportions. (Occupant, housing complex 10) Identifying and analysing key actors: Buildings, humans, and microbes Actor network theory (ANT) interprets the world as consisting of networks of actors, where human and non-humans act, mediate, or intermediate through associations (Latour, 1987). When a stabilized network, a “black box”, fails or breaks down, its hidden complex internal workings are re­ vealed. The mould issue, seen as a breakdown of the housing network, revealed the workings of a range of actors: occupants, building and household technologies, building structures, building superintendents, housing associations, public administrations, treatment regimens, and, of course, microbes. The mould issue also renders visible the indoor environment and its relationship to time. Initial encounters with the mould-as-actor estab­ lished new relations between the occupants and their home environment, which recognized the building and its technologies as actors co-creating the present living conditions. One of the activities often adjusted as a response to the mould issue was the practice of airing out. While the act of opening windows was also related to getting up in the morning or going to bed at night, its frequency often increased due to the mould issue, and several respondents kept their windows open all day. For some, the open window also assumed a social value, as occupants re­ ported that the practice helped them feel connected to other people in the neighbourhood. Others developed neatly tailored routines for airing out, cleaning, and organizing, which were all closely related to the present condition of the indoor climate. These changing routines relate to the notion of dynamics in everyday practices and reveal that mate­ rials, competences, and meanings are interdependent and fluctuating (Shove et al., 2012). Studying the mould issues as interactions between everyday practices, materialities, and conventions (Øien, 2017, 2018) revealed different inter­ pretations of the mould phenomena, how it was assumed and acted upon in the everyday practices of occupants and building superintendents. The fear of moulds but not of mildew illustrated that the rhetoric surrounding mould as a technical/construction issue or as a health risk prompted dif­ ferent daily practices. Additionally, it affected the individual’s relationship to the substance itself, the mould issue in general, the home, and the housing association. These different interpretations particularly emerged in

66 Øien & Rasmussen cases where the mould issue had become rampant, unexplainable, obscure or contentious. In her empirical study of atherosclerosis, Annemarie Mol (2012) developed the notion of the body multiple. Informed by their background, their hinterlands2 of professional and scientific knowledge and its ruling conventions, the clinician, physical therapist, and patient under­ stood and enacted different versions of the atherosclerosis. Sometimes the versions were ignored or excluded; on other occasions they were ac­ knowledged and coordinated at various locations or times. Different in­ terpretations were included in others or distributed in relation to diagnosis, treatment and/or prevention. When applied to the mould issue, the body multiple manifests across the professional networks of healthcare, building, and laboratory professionals as three different versions of mould, assessed by (1) the human body (re­ vealing its effects on health), (2) the building structure (offering ideal mould conditions), or (3) the microbes themselves (allowing identification and classification). With the different versions came different approaches to how to solve the problem, which also prevailed across the network of ev­ eryday life, affecting the interpretations and actions taken by nonprofessionals. Combined with various concerns regarding the issue’s impact on financial wellbeing, public health, or energy savings, the different in­ terpretations of the mould phenomenon instigated conflicts regarding, for example, the frequency of opening windows. Finally, different versions were employed in the renovation projects, typically one version replacing the other as the project proceeded: First, it was translated from a health issue initiating the project to a structural and technical problem to be solved technically in the renovation. This translation was mainly enacted by the initial building investigation and identification of the microbes. A specia­ lized engineer or consultant often conducted this part and in many of the cases the mould issue was considered remedied by the phase of demolition or construction. In cases where the technical and social understandings clashed, the di­ verging interpretations of the phenomena increased the situation’s com­ plexity. Figure 3.1 illustrates a case in which the occupant, the building superintendents, and the management, among others, had different inter­ pretations of and solutions to the problem, which had extended the con­ troversy for fifteen years. Issues with the building typology and an earlier renovation combined with other local controversies, and together with the occupant’s airing and cleaning efforts, the mould issue was unclear and most importantly, not acknowledged. The occupant’s suspicion was finally confirmed when the roof structure was opened during construction work.

Study 2: Perceived indoor climate and everyday life The second study3 investigates the indoor climate consequences of energy renovations in three different types of dwellings: a social housing area built

Mould, microbes, and microscales 67

Figure 3.1 Collage illustrating the materialities (plan and section), the practices (stippled), and the conventions and controversies at stake (majuscules). Illustration: Translated from Øien (2017).

with prefabricated concrete elements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, townhouses from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, and a red-brick public housing area from the early 1950s. Using a mixed-methods approach, the phenomenon of indoor climate is analysed from the perspectives of en­ gineering, public health science, and anthropology. Building on a holistic understanding of indoor climate as measurable as well as perceived, as il­ lustrated in Figure 3.2, the goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the different elements that affect the indoor climate in different contexts, both

68 Øien & Rasmussen

Figure 3.2 The Indoor Climate Wheel shows the different elements, both sensory and measurable, that constitute indoor climate in a given context. Illustration: Developed in a collaboration between Pluskontoret, Lendager Arkitekter, MOE, and Realdania By & Byg, in the Realdania funded 1:1 demonstration project “Healthy Homes”.

technical and sensory, and how these change over time, before and after renovations. In the anthropological studies, special attention was paid to the various everyday practices considered to have a particular influence on indoor cli­ mate: cooking, laundry, cleaning, and airing out. In this chapter the townhouse case is used as a primary point of reference. Most homeowners had carried out renovations and adjustments over the years, houses ap­ peared well maintained, and there were no apparent mould problems or other types of structural decay. Situating practices Fifteen field visits were conducted in total. Ten homes were visited before renovation, and five households agreed to be revisited after renovation as well. Each visit lasted 2 to 3 hours and included a combination of semistructured interviews, asking about residents’ perceptions of their indoor climate and the performance of different everyday practices, and home tours, in which we moved around the homes to see where and how desig­ nated tasks and practices were carried out. This enabled a close look into the micro-processes involved in various practices, and an opportunity to discuss residents’ specific behaviours in more detail. It provided a way to approach these otherwise invisible or unarticulated aspects of everyday life related to indoor climate, and allowed us to focus on both the overall perceptions and narratives as well as the specific performances, to be able to

Mould, microbes, and microscales 69 situate the practices within “wider ecologies” (Pink, 2012, p. 23). Sarah Pink proposes to examine individual performances and how they can be understood within wider ecologies as a way of attending to the situatedness of practices beyond their social, material, and technological elements: how we understand embodied practices in relation to the wider ecologies they are part of: where environments are not just social, material, and technological, but multisensory, charged with energy, emotion, shifting with the weather, and contingent on the activity of non-human organisms too. (Pink, 2012, p. 23) Her approach also draws on Tim Ingold’s work on the relationship between people and their environments. With central concepts like “dwelling” (Ingold, 2000) and “entanglements” (Ingold, 2008), Ingold invites us to think about place as relational and dynamic. He asserts, “Environments are never complete but are continually under construction” (Ingold, 2000, p. 172), and our individual actions are shaped by past experiences as well as practical engagements with our environments. This approach resonates well with a study of indoor environments as complex phenomena consisting of material, technical, and sensory elements that continually change, because it “situates perception and practical activity within the ways we move in and as part of the environment” (Pink et al., 2013, p. 4). Situated practices offer a way of approaching the phenomenon empiri­ cally and analytically. By focusing on the reported changes or fluctuations in people’s practices and perceptions related to indoor environments over shorter periods of time, we come closer to understanding the phenomenon as a dynamic part of our material, social, and sensory environments, and as part of a continuous dwelling. Across the cases in this study, people perceive indoor climate as complex, and they are often unsure what the right thing to do is. They experience conflicting concerns and make situated judgements case by case, as the following reflection on laundry and drying of clothes exemplifies: I know it is not optimal to dry the clothes in the basement, and I also feel that it does get more humid down here when I do so. However, it is not good to use the [tumble] dryer too much either. I try to air out as much as possible and the window is always open when I air dry clothes down there … (Homeowner 4) Though it may seem trivial, this statement demonstrates the concrete en­ tanglements of multiple concerns and the pragmatics of decision-making. Drying clothes in the house is not “good” from an indoor climate per­ spective but might adhere to other concerns (the need for dry clothes in the

70 Øien & Rasmussen morning) or personal beliefs (using a tumble dryer is “bad”). Options are evaluated holistically, weighing conflicting concerns and making situated judgements, highlighting the interconnection of indoor climate with other aspects of the home, personal values, and social life. People’s attention towards their indoor climate varies greatly, and so do their behaviours associated with it. Some aspects of indoor climate are not readily available to us through sensory experience. As long as everything seems “normal” they remain black boxed, as described in the previous study. Humidity, for instance, is not readily noticeable unless it moves above or below a certain comfort threshold. The eyes or nose detect if it becomes too dry, and the odour is immediate if it is too humid, but it otherwise goes unnoticed. Other changes can be triggered by the fluctuation of seasons, or concrete health issues, and different triggers result in mark­ edly different perceptions and performances of indoor climate. From natural and invisible to centre of attention Generally, people do not pay much attention to their indoor climate. Statements like “I don’t really think about it that much,” “It’s quite average, I guess,” or “It’s just air!” dominate in cases in which there are no apparent domestic issues or challenges to be dealt with. However, even these cases show significant variation in the performance of practices across seasons: “In the summer we usually have the windows open, but during the winter I guess we often forget.” The analysis shows strong patterns of interconnectedness: The perfor­ mance of airing out one’s space is contingent on the weather and season, and residents report opening doors and windows in their homes sig­ nificantly more in the summertime as opposed to the colder winter months. Though this is not explained as a deliberate effort to air out the house, but rather a result of the warmer temperatures or an increased use of outdoor spaces, it still affects the indoor climate. The point is exactly that these changes go mostly unnoticed, so closely connected to the natural cycles of everyday life that they remain in the background. At the opposite end of the spectrum, other changes in practice are brought about by individual health issues. In contrast to the seasonal changes, these changes are experienced and articulated as needing attention and action: Well, the problem is, my girlfriend, she has a lot of pollen allergies, and our daughter is allergic too. She is multi-allergic to different foods and is very allergic to birch pollen. We have a large birch tree on the backside of the house, so it is kind of a dilemma: we don’t really want to air out her room during this period, because then all the birch pollen will get in her room. (Homeowner 8)

Mould, microbes, and microscales 71 What is otherwise invisible or peripheral suddenly takes centre stage, shifting both perception and practical activity. Much like the microbes, pollen acts as a strong trigger, creating very visible effects, though invisible in its own right. It shifts attention from inside to outside, reinforcing do­ mestic boundaries. The walls and windows of the house shield residents from the outside air, creating a pollen free environment. This stands in conflict with airing out, and so this practice (of airing out) must be com­ promised, at least for a while, until the very visible and sensory effects of pollen wear off. For other types of allergies, focus remains on the inside and the changes in practice are less defined and better aligned with creating healthy indoor environments: I think we air out more than most people. Upstairs we air out several times a day, summer and winter – and that is of course also because he tends to get these rashes and I assume, it is important to get a lot of fresh air into the house. We also change the linens once a week to keep it down. (Homeowner 3) In these cases, indoor climate plays a more active role in individuals’ lives because of the visible effects on individual well-being. The examples show not only how different triggers can bring the otherwise “invisible” indoor climate to the foreground, but also how changes can occur more seamlessly and inconspicuously. They reveal the complex, interconnected, and dy­ namic nature of indoor environments and people’s actions in relation to them, and they also show the dynamic character of domestic boundaries in mediating these relationships between people and their environments.

Contributions of an architectural anthropological approach The two studies represent different theoretical frameworks and have been conducted by scholars with different professional backgrounds. However, there has been common ground in bringing qualitative research into the field of indoor climate. Our discussions have revealed a range of similarities between the architectural and the anthropological, such as an interest in context and ecologies, scales and human-environment interaction. While there are clear differences in the studies, and the scope of the mould study is broader physically, temporarily, and socially than the study of energy re­ novation, the empirical findings point to the same overall insights. Through the studies, we have identified three major contributions of the architectural anthropological approach: as a lens for studying (1) the often invisible microscales of indoor environments, (2) the multiplicity of versions added by different interpretations and hinterlands, and (3) the situatedness of these microscales on a continuum of temporal, physical, and social scales.

72 Øien & Rasmussen A lens for seeing the otherwise invisible Architectural anthropology allows us to focus on the microscales of everyday life to understand what otherwise remains largely unnoticed. While architects have focused on lighting and the visual environment, an increasing scientific monopoly has evolved on indoor climate throughout the last century, en­ gineered in rates of air change, comfort temperatures, and lux-levels. Thus, indoor climate is both omnipresent and largely invisible, and to understand it we need ways of knowing that extend beyond deliberate articulations. We need to find the cracks that allow us to open this otherwise black-boxed issue. In the first study, we see how the mould issues expose an otherwise invisible network of actors and demonstrates that a focus on everyday practices fa­ cilitates an understanding of these relations from a personal, material, and structural perspective and addresses indoor climates from a broader outlook, putting the quantitative measures into context as indoor environments. In the second study, the focus on the performance of practices helps us understand the fluctuations and configurations of people, places, and practices in relation to indoor environments. The empirical data we gathered from interviews and observations provides rich material for exploring these patterns and connec­ tions, and it allows us to go beyond the reflections of individual respondents. The anthropological approach studies the seemingly mundane practices of everyday life and provides a theoretical framework for understanding these practices in wider ecologies. By focusing on the performance of spe­ cific practices, we gain access to knowledge about the social and the ma­ terial, and the relationship between the two. Individual, technical, and social Among the actors, ranging from microbes, humans, technologies, buildings, and natural elements to policies and funding restrictions, entanglements arose both as intimate encounters between individuals and as controversies over responsibilities, public health issues, and precautionary principles ne­ gotiated across housing associations. Consequently, the architecturalanthropological approach not only acknowledges the entanglements of humans and nonhumans, which could involve the technical indoor climate and the phenomenology of individual experiences, but it also recognizes the social aspects. As the mould issues showed, the divergent interpretations were conflicting in some cases, while others acknowledged these different meanings and managed to negotiate and coordinate technical and social interpretations when addressing the problems. Across physical, social, and temporal scales Departing from what we have called the microscale of architecture, the studies demonstrate how the intimate and immediate are interrelated across

Mould, microbes, and microscales 73

Figure 3.3 Architectural anthropology as a lens for zooming in and out. Illustration: Turid Borgestrand Øien & Mia Kruse Rasmussen.

not only physical scales but also social and temporal scales, and how the configurations of these elements constitute indoor environments. Recognizing indoor climate as part of wider socially situated practices helps us understand the shifting dynamics at play. As illustrated in Figure 3.3, architectural anthropology works as a lens for zooming in and out across physical, social, and temporal scales. Moreover, it locates itself between the fields of indoor climate and atmospheres, by combining the technical, social, and individual, insisting on a holistic understanding. The studies show that sensory experiences of indoor environments fluc­ tuate over time, and while they may not necessarily be predictable, they still carry a certain rhythm, constituted and evolving through perception, movement, and place. The same goes for our bodies and surroundings. Architects are already working across scales, coordinating details and concepts, and translating through the different phases from idea to con­ struction and use. However, these intimate and relational experiences of the user(s) need to be recognized as an aspect of architectural quality. As the trajectory of entanglements studied across the settings of the construction, everyday use, and renovation illustrate, there is a fantastic, complex, dy­ namic interrelation both within and across the domestic boundaries of the built environment after its construction, which needs further exploration.

Concluding remarks The contribution of architectural anthropology in these studies lies in both the methodological and the theoretical. Approaching the built environment through detailed narratives of microscales helps us understand the dynamic entanglements of the individual, the social, and the material. First, by ac­ knowledging everyday routines and status quo, which then allow us to notice shifts, changes, and convergences. Moreover, the theoretical lenses offered by the anthropologists Pink, Ingold, Latour, and Mol also encourage attention

74 Øien & Rasmussen to and patience for insisting on the microscales of everyday life. This focus includes an exploration of the multiplicity of scales present in the specific empirical context, such as how an odour can link people emotionally and physically to their environments and their nonhuman cohabiters. Maintaining the architectural scope of scaling and contextualizing, ar­ chitectural anthropology as an inquiry, does not propose quick fixes or simple explanations, but attempts to look deeply into complexities and anomalies. In this regard, we argue that learning from our built environ­ ment as it exists in these ever-evolving entanglements is also key to the development of future architectural design. Not by providing lists of design properties but by acknowledging the dynamics and complexity of indoor environments, and showing the nuances and richness of the microscale.

Notes 1 The study was funded by The National Building Fund, The Landowner’s Investment Foundation, and Aalborg University. 2 Hinterlands describe pre-existing social and material realities that are built up, sustained and enacted in our practices (Law, 2004, p. 13). 3 The Be Ready projects (2015–2022) were funded by the philanthropic fund Realdania.

References Ballantyne, A. (2011). Architecture, life, habit. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69(1), 43–49. Bluyssen, P., Bayon, R., & Hamilton, K. (2009). The indoor environment hand­ book: How to make buildings healthy and comfortable. CRC Press. CISBO (2016). Indeklima og sundhed i boliger. [Indoor environment and health in housing]. Center for Indeklima og Sundhed i Boliger, Realdania. Fabian, L. (2016). The spatial, the social and the architectural. In: B. B. Jensen & K. L. Weiss (Eds), Art of many, the right to space: the Danish pavilion – Bienniale Architettura 2016. DAC & The Danish Architectural Press. Havik, K., Teerds, H., & Tielens, G. (2013). Building atmosphere. OASE Journal for Architecture, 91(1), 3–12. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2008). Bindings against boundaries: Entanglements of life in an open world. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 40(8), 1796–1810. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge. Lawson, B. (2004). What designers know. Routledge. Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press. Øien, T. B., & Frandsen, A. K. (2015). The role of design in healthy buildings–An actornetwork perspective. In Healthy Buildings Europe 2015. ISIAQ International Conference, p. ID568.

Mould, microbes, and microscales 75 Øien, T. B. (2017). Skimmelsvampevækst i boliger – Praksisser og politikker [Mould growth in housing – Practices and politics]. Aalborg Universitetsforlag. PhD-serien for Det Ingeniør- og Naturvidenskabelige Fakultet, Aalborg Universitet. Øien, T. B. (2018). Healthy housing enacted: A qualitative approach to indoor environment. In A. E. Toft, and M. Rönn (Eds), The Production of Knowledge in Architecture by PhD Research in the Nordic Countries. NAF/NAAR Proceedings Series, 201(1), 329–354. Pink, S. (2012). Situating everyday life. Practices and places. Sage. Pink, S., Mackley, K. L., Mitchell, V., Hanratty, M., Escobar-Tello, C., Bhamra, T., & Morosanu, R. (2013). Applying the lens of sensory ethnography to sustainable HCI. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 20(4), 1–18. Shove, E., Pantzar, M., & Watson, M. (2012). The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. Sage. Sylvest, M. (2017). Situated social aspects of everyday life in the built environment: informing the design process by expanding theory and evaluation methods related to social interactions in designed physical settings. Roskilde Universitet. Till, J. (2009). Architecture depends. The MIT Press. Van der Linden, V., Dong, H., & Heylighen, A. (2019). Tracing architects’ fragile knowing about users in the socio-material environment of design practice. Design Studies, 63(1), 65–91.

4

Homelessness and homeliness Collage technique as a research method Laura Helene Højring and Claus Bech-Danielsen

Kasper has been homeless for most of his life. His past as a street kid has left scars on his mental health that he still struggles to cope with as an adult. He uses the streets of Copenhagen, Denmark with all the external im­ pressions of the urban space to occupy his attention and thus push the chaos of his inner voices into the background. In his experience, the calm inside the four walls of a home makes his inner voices take over and makes what he is missing – contact with family, a partner, a job, money, and so on, too evident. To Kasper, a traditional home feels like a trap. In this chapter, we focus on homeless people and the way they relate to the places they live in and how they adapt. What is ‘home’ to someone who is or has recently been homeless?1 In this context, it is crucial to understand that a home is not just a physical object – a home is a relation (Després, 1991). The relation occurs when a person starts feeling at home in a certain place, and a home is the sum of emotions, habits, memories, familiarity, and social relations of the people who inhabit it (ibid.). This also means that feeling at home is not necessarily linked to a dwelling (Mallett, 2004). Our empirical studies show that the ‘post-homeless’ can have very ambiguous approaches to the places they live in and that having access to a flat not necessarily equals having a home or even getting out of homelessness. What qualifies as ‘home’ to those who are or have been homeless might as well relate to an urban space or to being with friends and one’s dog or perhaps to certain activities and daily routines. Furthermore, as in the case of Kasper, a dwelling can even evoke feelings that are contradictory to the ideal of ‘home’. In our study of homeliness for the homeless, home is not considered a physical object isolated from everyday life and social relations. The ex­ periences and narratives of the homeless are included and connected to the physical space. To explore this, we linked anthropological and archi­ tectural methods through the creation of collages. In these collages, the everyday lives of the homeless are linked to their physical contexts. Thus, the collage technique creates a way to understand the social consequences of the material world while at the same time focusing on individual per­ ceptions of the physical environment.

Homelessness and homeliness 77

Conceptualizing homeliness Theories on home and homeliness (Korosec-Serfaty, 1985; Després, 1991; Somerville, 1997; Mallett, 2004; Bech-Danielsen & Gram-Hanssen, 2004) primarily focus on middle-class families, and they typically lack a focus on the negative emotions that can be linked to ‘home’. However, this per­ spective is offered by Somerville (1992), Mallett (2004), and Wardhaugh (1999), presenting some of the variations in the experiences of home that are particularly relevant to homeless and other vulnerable groups. They stress that, by defining home as an inside that is private, safe, and com­ fortable in contrast to the world outside as dangerous, unsafe, and beyond our control, we miss the fact that these negative experiences might also take place within the four walls of home. To operationalize a phenomenon that is primarily based on feelings and therefore intangible and subjective, the literature works with a thematic structuring of the topic. In this analysis, we are inspired by the categor­ ization by Després (1991) of the meaning of home into the following six topics: safety and control, privacy, community, identity, everyday life, and time. The categories apply well to the reality observed among the homeless in the field study, and they make it possible to discuss how their living experiences relate to the more common perceptions of home. Together with the general theories on the meaning of home, the categories also help nuance the analysis of how the physical surroundings affect the everyday lives of the homeless. Thus, the feeling of homeliness was indicated by a successful connection between the person and place, while not feeling at home would indicate the opposite (Højring, 2019). Most of the sources on the meaning of home have been written by so­ ciologists, geographers, and anthropologists who focus on the social and cultural aspects of the subject. This means that the physical and material aspects are treated more as backdrops for other relations than as an active part of the experience. To better understand the influence of the physical surroundings on the experiences of home, it may be beneficial to search outside of the theories of home. Don Ihde’s (1990) post-phenomenological models of relations and James Gibson’s (2015) affordance theory unfold what objects, technologies, and – in this context – especially buildings ‘do’ to us. Affordance theory suggests the idea that the physical context pro­ motes some forms of actions and inhibits others. Affordances are present whether we use them or not. Ihde’s (1990) four models of relations (em­ bodiment, hermeneutic, alterity, and background) can be used to describe the different ways we relate to, use, and understand our physical sur­ roundings. Both Ihde and Gibson based their theories on the role of our bodies in terms of the way we perceive and interact with our surroundings. By doing so, they added another aspect to the overall picture of the many different factors that interact when we intend to understand the connections between a person and her/his environment. This point is especially valuable

78 Højring & Bech-Danielsen when setting out to understand a group of people who often distinguish themselves by a lack of personal belongings and to whom in particular the body is an important tool in their interaction with the world. As architects, we can seek knowledge about the significance of the phy­ sical surroundings through anthropological methods. This is a way to move beyond the first-person phenomenological research approach (Seamon, 2000) that is otherwise prevalent in architectural research. Anthropological methods offer not only tools to include users in design processes but also methods to become more critical and self-conscious about the co-creation of architecture and the different actors involved. As in this project, the anthropological approach and ethnographic methods can be used to in­ vestigate how architecture affects us when it is in use (Stender, 2017; Højring, 2019). Combining the two perspectives in research provides a fuller picture that not only includes knowledge of the interplay between architecture and users but also makes it possible to expand the meaning of both the social and physical. To include the body and mind, earlier experiences, cultures, norms, and the material, structural, aesthetic, geographical, and organiza­ tional aspects depending on what our informants emphasize in the stories they tell us.

Collages as a research method For this study,2 we designed a method that focuses on both the informants’ personal and emotional experiences and the physical space and archi­ tectural characteristics of homes. Furthermore, it is crucial that the physical and social are not considered and studied as two parallel tracks but as being interlinked and connected. Jane Rendell’s ‘site-writing’ (Rendell, 2010) inspired the development of a method that intertwines anthropological methods (qualitative interviews) with architectural methods (e.g. drawings and photographic registration). Site-writing is a creative method to map different layers of a place or an object, space, or text. Site-writing can consist of texts, images, or sounds and has a special focus on the way things are related to each other. In the current research, the concept of site-writing is developed into the creation of collages. In recent years, researchers have explored collages as an analytical tool (e.g. Davis & Butler-Kisber, 1999; Vaughan, 2004; Davis, 2008; Keddy, 2009; Butler-Kisber & Poldma, 2010; Gerstenblatt, 2013; Norris, 2008). They argued that collages are not necessarily to be considered only a result of an artistic process; the process itself can be part of qualitative research (Norris, 2008). Thus, the collages in the current study are not primarily considered artistic expressions and interpretations. Knowledge is developed through the very process of creating the collages. It is widely recognized in the field of architecture and architectural re­ search (e.g. research-by-design) that drawings and other visual tools can be

Homelessness and homeliness 79 used not only for communicating and creating expressions but also as a tool to uncover place and space (Hale, 2014). Drawing can be a way to create knowledge (Bagnoli, 2009). However, in the current research intending to unfold the different ways homeless people use and relate to their physical surroundings, the traditional architectural representations – drawings, such as plans and sections – are insufficient. Personal experiences, emotions, atmosphere, everyday routines, and social life are included, and new visual tools and methods are therefore developed. The intention is that the use of the different visual and creative methods can facilitate investigating layers of experience that are hard to express with words. Drawings and images are evocative and can allow access to different parts of human consciousness by communicating more holistically (Bagnoli, 2009, p. 548).

Collages in practice – three examples In the following paragraphs, we present three of the 15 collages that were made during this study. The collages were created from architectural draw­ ings, such as plans, sections, and maps, and photos taken during the interviews were cut out to highlight important belongings. The interiors were drawn by hand, and colours were used to highlight elements with special meaning. Kasper Kasper’s story exemplifies how having a flat can sometimes increase one’s problems. Kasper needs the commotion of the street to keep his mind oc­ cupied. As he expressed it: ‘The streets demand that I pull myself together’. Navigating the streets, he must stay alert all the time to stay out of sight and prevent confrontations, which is an effort that diverts attention from his internal chaos. To him, a flat represents a trap. Inside four walls, his aching body and worn-out mind start to gain his attention. When he is suddenly alone and has a place to stay and rest, all the hardship of his situation has room to show itself. It becomes evident what he is missing: that lack of contact with family, a partner, a job, belongings, money, a healthy body, and a non-fragile mind. These facts were not only depressing to him but he also thinks they are a common problem among former homeless and are a typical source of increased drinking and drug use. Kasper has chosen the street as a form of self-medication. He uses the city and its many impressions as an anaesthetic, a way to keep occupied and sane. At the same time, the city is where he practises his passion for helping others in the same situation as himself, which is a task he loves and finds mean­ ingful. He divides his everyday life between a busy daytime in the centre of Copenhagen, where he is active and social, and nights in the suburbs where he finds calm and safety through anonymity. This is an arrangement that works to Kasper because it has to but is also an arrangement that is strenuous and has an expiration date depending on his health.

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Figure 4.1 Kasper’s collage shows how his everyday life is divided between his outgoing and social life in the centre of Copenhagen and his nights in the suburbs. His nights and days are divided by a train ride, and his belongings are stored in a locker at the main train station: a small backpack for daytime and a large backpack containing sleeping gear, a toothbrush, a flashlight, and other essentials for a night outside. Collage: Laura Helene Højring.

Homelessness and homeliness 81 Majbrit Majbrit’s story demonstrates that having the right place to live and the right neighbours can exert an immense influence on the process of creating and feeling at home. Majbrit discusses very different housing experiences. The first was her old flat where she spent two, as she put it, “awful” years, and the second is her new flat where she moved in a few months earlier. The first flat was assigned to her by social services, whereas she found the second flat on her own. To Majbrit, the two flats represent diametrical oppositions to each other. The first flat was connected to feelings of chaos, unsafety, and anxiety. She did not like the flat, but the most disturbing part was her neighbours who were loud, messy, and violent. She could easily hear them talk and yell, and when the upstairs neighbour urinated, it sounded as if it was taking place in her flat. Urine and blood were on the staircase, and people were fighting. Once, she was even punched. She felt the environment sustained the chaos of homelessness that she wanted to leave behind. Having stopped her drug abuse, she was motivated to catch up on the years she felt she had lost in homelessness, and in that respect, these living con­ ditions were counterproductive. In the second flat, Majbrit went around to meet the neighbours before she signed the lease just to ensure it was not the same kind of environment. Now she only hears the neighbours when they leave and return from work, a sound that reminds her of normality. The flat is painted white and does not have a fleck of dust anywhere. Step by step by using paint and cleaning products, she has started to build up the everyday life that she has been longing for during her years on the street. This flat reflects an identity of normality that she wants. She might not have quite reached it yet, but she puts this image of normality in front of her to be followed. However, Majbrit is concerned by her lack of financial resources, which prevents her from living up to her expectations. It is important to her that things are done properly and that her neighbours can see that she has things under control. Brian In stark contrast to Majbrit, Brian has moved from a flat he liked to one that he is unhappy with. He explained how the housing department forced him to move to another flat because his dog did not fit the height restrictions. He did not see the new flat before he moved in and only realized that it was placed on the fourth floor the day he moved in. This fact increases his dislike for the place because his bad legs make it difficult for him to move back and forth between the outside and inside. While he used to stay in his old flat only occasionally, this paradoxically means that he now spends more time inside than before because he must rest every time he has walked up the stairs. As he states, ‘he just turned off his ‘computer’ the first time he saw the flat’, and he has not made any attempt to interact or take ownership of the

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Figure 4.2 Majbrit’s collage shows her local neighbourhood where she feels at home. Her flat is placed centrally as the most important part of the story. The flat is empty and painted white to illustrate her approach to it, while pieces of furniture, pictures, and colourful dots show the dif­ ferent objects like furniture and pictures that she adds to her white space. Collage: Laura Helene Højring.

Homelessness and homeliness 83 place since then. Most of the items in the flat were brought up by his friends and look like they are stranded in the spot where they were first set down. All surfaces are covered with a miscellaneous mix of clothing, musical in­ struments, plastic bags, blankets, and so on mixed with dirt. The only ones using the kitchen are his friends and his dog. He had renovated several flats and houses before this, but because he is indifferent to this place, he has not spent any resources on it. This indifference is also his explanation to why he can spend time in the flat even though it looks the way it does. For Brian, the flat is more like a garage where he can park himself and his dog for the night than a place where he can ever feel at home. Home to him is the local area he lives in, which includes both his current and old flat but, most importantly, the local square where he spends most of his time hanging out with his friends. Being outside with his friends and his dog, that is home to him.

Discussion – homeliness among homeless people This study reveals that people who are or have been homeless have many of the same considerations regarding the place they live in as are described in research on the meaning of home in general. However, the personal reasons that lead them to homelessness and the fact that the range of habitations they have access to is limited compared to the rest of the population in­ dicate that they sometimes also relate very differently to the places they live in (Højring, 2019). Based on the six categories on the meaning of home – safety and control, privacy, community, identity, everyday life, and time – we exemplify how these differences appear in the fieldwork. Safety Feeling safe and in control of one’s surroundings is essential to being at home (Dovey, 1985). People cannot feel at home if they do not feel safe. The threats, however, to this feeling can come from both external and in­ ternal factors. One must be able to feel safe from others and from oneself. As Majbrit’s story illustrates, the feeling of being unsafe among neighbours can be devastating to the entire living experience. Kasper knows that a flat equals the loss of control and safety that he finds in the crowded streets. Moving into a flat can feel like an isolating and pacifying contrast to the streets. If an individual is not able to overcome this, he or she can feel unsafe and experience a lack of control. Privacy Privacy is about being alone, of being in close, caring, and intimate relationships with oneself or especially selected family and friends. Being able to withdraw helps to define personal borders. To be able to relate to

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Figure 4.3 Brian’s collage is dominated by the local square where he spends most of his time and by his dog who is his faithful companion. His flat is scaled down in size and drawn with all its contents, whereas the belongings that have special meaning to him, such as his guitar, collection of knives, picture of his dad, and leather pants he ‘lives in’ during the summer are enlarged. Placed centrally in the picture between the square and flat is his staircase, illustrating how exhausting it is for him to ascend from street level to the fourth floor. Collage: Laura Helene Højring.

Homelessness and homeliness 85 the surroundings and ultimately to create the emotional connection that is home, people must be able to feel certain about who they are (KorosecSerfaty, 1985). Kasper finds privacy by physically distancing himself from the crowds in the city, whereas Majbrit finds it in her new flat, which means a tremendous improvement to her well-being. Community Privacy is only experienced as positive if it is balanced by social interaction. The two are thus dependent on each other, and it is important that one can choose when and to what extent one or the other is desired. To those ex­ periencing homelessness, it is often either a matter of living alone with too much privacy, resulting in isolation and loneliness or living close to others who are often strangers, and the consequence is a stressful and unsettling social context (Højring, 2019). Brian’s story illustrates that it can feel safe to have friends that keep an eye out; thus, being part of a community can feel like home in itself. Identity The place we live in and the way we inhabit it tell a story about who we are. It can reflect conscious choices but can also ‘mirror’ aspects of ourselves that we are not aware or in control of (Dovey, 1985). While most people have some form of choice in how and where they live, this is often not the case for those who are homeless. They must settle with the possibilities they are offered and carry on with their lives the best they can within that context. While Brian chose not to connect with and take ownership of his flat, the state of it still reflects something about his personality. In contrast to this stance, Majbrit tries hard to make her flat mirror the identity for which she strives. Everyday life One can determine whether a housing solution ‘works’ by observing the functionality, aesthetic, social, and emotional connection it offers compared to the inhabitant’s personal needs, desires, and dreams. If it works, the connection strengthens through the repetition of activities and routines, and if it does not, everyday life becomes a continual reminder of the problem. To feel at home, some sort of compatibility must exist between the re­ sidential situation and the inhabitant. The stories of both Majbrit and Brian exemplify the striking difference it can make to live in a dwelling that matches one’s needs. To Majbrit, having the right neighbours means peace and quiet compared to chaos, and to Brian, a move from the first to the fourth floor means that he can no longer move back and forth between outside and inside as often as he desires.

86 Højring & Bech-Danielsen Time Being able to feel at home is a process that can only be experienced over time (Després, 1991). Transforming an unknown place to a home is an effort that requires major mental habituation and physically and socially settling into the new surroundings (Bech-Danielsen & Gram-Hanssen, 2004). It takes time to build up the habits and routines of everyday life, and as Kasper stated, it can take time to even reach a point where one believes enough in the project to start making the effort necessary to create a home. As it is such a contrast to move from the streets or a shelter to a private dwelling, formerly homeless people often experience short-lived habitations, sometimes even continuing to live on the street even though they have a flat available.

Evaluating collages as a tool We view the collages as a qualitative cross-disciplinary research tool com­ bining architecture and anthropology as research disciplines, making it possible to experience, analyse, and interpret a physical place in relation to a certain person. We find that a quality of the collages is that they do not present the experienced place as isolated aspects described in order one by one but as an assembly of aspects of social, psychological, and physical natures. The collages present our surroundings as a whole, such as they are experienced in reality, where the physical and social are present at the same time and place and mutually influence each other. The first sketches were drawn at the site during the field studies. At this point, the sketches worked as personal notes but were also a way to see and understand the housing areas and homes with new perspectives. In the words of Betty Edwards (1979), a drawing is a means to see; thus, she pointed out that, through a drawing, one sees features of the motif that hide behind our preconceived notions of it. Likewise, we see the sketch as a tool that provides the researcher with better insight into the physical environment. The sketches were also integrated as a tool in qualitative interviews. When looking at and commenting on the sketches, the informants were enabled to discuss her/his everyday life in new ways and to get away from the encoded life stories that homeless people have often told, for example, to social workers and social services (Højring, 2019). After the field study, the creation of the collages began, and this process became an important part of the analysis. To create the collages, it became a cardinal point to understand how space, artefacts, and social life are interrelated at specific places and which aspects the informants find most significant. However, the collages are artistic expressions, and during the process of gluing and cut­ ting, it became increasingly obvious that the collages are expressions of figurative interpretations.3

Homelessness and homeliness 87 The question arose regarding whether the collages had become too sub­ jective, representing the experience of the researcher rather than that of the informant. Therefore, the informants were again visited to obtain feedback and further qualify the collages. As part of this process, the collages became important objects for further dialogue with the informants. The collages paved the way for new questions and made it possible to ask the same questions with new perspectives. In addition, the visual elements enabled asking more directly about specific relations and being more precise in the questions on the effects of the material and structural surroundings. In that way, the collages worked as a basis for new discussions and a deeper un­ derstanding of the narratives of the informants and as a means of resolving misunderstanding, which became apparent in the visual manifestation. During the second visits, the informants were invited to take part in the co-creation of the final collage. However, the invitation was declined by the informants – perhaps because they felt inhibited by the artistic process or because they felt that it was a product of the researcher. Therefore, in the further development of the collage technique, we address the artistic ele­ ment. The aesthetic expression of the collages might be one of the reasons informants did not want to engage in the co-creation, and by putting ‘prettiness’ aside, the recipe of sketching, photographing, cutting, gluing, and colouring might be experienced as less intimidating.

Conclusion In this chapter, we let Kasper, Majbrit, and Brian exemplify how being or having been homeless can influence the way social and physical surroundings are experienced through everyday life. Their perspectives on the meaning of home may not only be relevant to understanding the challenges connected to transitioning out of homelessness but may also inform our general under­ standing of home. By showing the difficulties they have with fitting inside the traditional boundaries of a home, they emphasize the point that ‘home’ can be linked to negative emotions. To them, a dwelling does not automatically become a home. Rather, the dwelling confronts them with feelings of in­ adequacy, lack of control, or entrapment. These feelings might also resonate with some residents in the majority population – not the least in the current pandemic period where many people might feel trapped in their own homes. The three cases also promote a widening of the idea of home as something that can be much more than what takes place inside the four walls of a dwelling. The feeling of home can be attached to urban spaces, to specific objects, to spending time with one’s friends or dog, or to activities like the daily travel back and forth between the city and suburbs. The developed collage technique is a valid method of inquiry combining ethnographic studies of the everyday life of the homeless with architectural studies of the places they live in. The collages have proved valuable in qua­ litative interviews, where they can open up alternative topics and concrete

88 Højring & Bech-Danielsen insights into the informants’ relations to the physical environment. In the analyses, the collages added new perspectives and reflections, and when the informants were subsequently visited the second time, the collages became important objects for further dialogue. The visual elements enabled asking specific questions on the significance of the physical structures, and in this way, the collages worked as a basis for a deeper understanding of the nar­ ratives of the informants.

Notes 1 This was the topic in a PhD dissertation by Laura Helene Højring (Højring, 2019). Four types of habitation typically available to homeless – a night shelter, hostel, permanent housing with social support, and social housing – were studied to understand the different kinds of social framework these habitational contexts offers in the everyday lives of the inhabitants. 2 The study was funded by the philanthropic fund Realdania and by Innovation Fund Denmark. 3 The collages are the researcher’s interpretation – as is also the case in all other qualitative research. We find it a quality of the collage technique that this fact becomes even more evident.

References Bagnoli, A. (2009). Beyond the standard interview: The use of graphic elicitation and arts-based methods. Qualitative Research, 9(5): 547–570. Bech-Danielsen, C., & Gram-Hanssen, K. (2004). Home-building and identity – The soul of a house and the personal touch. In: Bech-Danielsen, C. et al. (Eds): Urban Lifescape (pp. 140–158). Aalborg University Publisher. Butler-Kisber, L., & Poldma, T. (2010). The power of visual approaches in quali­ tative inquiry: The use of collage making and concept mapping in experiential research. Journal of Research Practice, 6(2). Davis, D. (2008). Collage inquiry: Creative and particular applications. LEARNing Landscapes, 2(1): 245–265. Davis, D., & Butler-Kisber, L. (1999). Arts-based representation in qualitative re­ search: Collage as a contextualising analytic strategy. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 19–23 April. Després, C. (1991). The meaning of home: Literature review and directions for future research and theoretical development. Journal of Architecture and Planning Research, 8(2): 96–114. Dovey, K. (1985). Home and homelessness. In: Altman, I. and Werner, C. M. (eds), Home environments (pp. 33–64). Springer. Edwards, B. (1979). Drawing on the right side of the brain. Tarcher/Putnam. Gerstenblatt, P. (2013). Collage portraits as a method of analysis in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, February: 294–309. Gibson, J. J. (2015). The ecological approach to visual perception. Psychology Press. Hale, J. (2014). Ingold on making – Agency and animacy. Retrieved from https:// bodyoftheory.com/2014/12/05/ingold-on-making-agency-and-animacy

Homelessness and homeliness 89 Højring, L. H. (2019) Hjemløse og hjemlighed – fortællinger om arkitektur og mennesker. [Homeless and homeliness – stories about architecture and people]. PhD dissertation. Aalborg University. Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld: From garden to earth. Indiana University Press. Keddy, K. (2009). New methods of researching healthcare facility users: The nur­ sing workspace. Journal for Architectural Research, 6(2). Korosec-Serfaty, P. (1985). Experience and use of the dwelling. In: Altman, I. & Werner, C. M. (Eds), Home environments. Springer, pp. 65–86. Mallett, S. (2004). Understanding home: a critical review of the literature. The Sociological Review, 52(1): 61–89. Norris, J. (2008). Collage. In: Given, L. M. (Eds) The Sage encyclopedia of quali­ tative research Methods. Sage Publication, 94. Rendell, J. (2010). Site-writing: The architecture of art criticism. I. B. Tauris. Seamon, D. (2000). A way of seeing people and place: Phenomenology in environment-behavior research. In: Wapner, S., Demick, J., Yamamoto, T., & Minami, H. (Eds), Theoretical perspectives in environment-behavior research (pp. 157–178). Plenum. Somerville, P. (1992). Homelessness and the meaning of home: Rooflessness and rootlessness? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16(4): 529–539. Somerville, P. (1997). The social constructions of home. Journal of Architectural and Planning Research, 14: 226–245. Stender, M. (2017). Towards an architectural anthropology – What architects can learn from anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1): 27–43. Vaughan, K. (2004). Pieced together: Collage as an artist’s method for inter­ disciplinary research. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4(1): 1–21. Wardhaugh, J. (1999). The unaccommodated woman: Home, homelessness and identity. The Sociological Review, 47(1): 91–109.

5

Walls and islands Exploring perpetual configurations of carcerality through architectural anthropology Runa Johannessen and Tomas Max Martin

Walls and islands are foundational elements of architecture and anthro­ pology respectively. The wall is the very first architectural gesture, whereby a dwelling is fashioned, sheltering an inside from an outside. The island is equally fundamental to anthropological science as the ur-fieldsite: Islands provided a vivid spatial premise for the holism and pristineness upon which the discipline of anthropology and the relativist understanding of the human condition was firmed up (Candea, 2007; Marcus, 1995). Walls and islands offer archetypical boundaries between domestic and nondomestic domains by sheltering the home from the public or the wild and providing habitable land and a safe haven from the sea. Yet we want to point to the social fact that walls and islands not only protectively frame the domesticity of homes and communities. Like all barriers and boundaries that seek to manage the flux and fixity of social life, walls and islands hold an intrinsic and particularly brute violent potential in their capacity to forcefully domesticate people against their will through exclusion and en­ closure. Human and nature made boundaries enable powerful people to push others behind walls or off shore into a darker space-time of peripheral abjection, confinement and immobility. This spatial push-factor is bom­ bastically pronounced in border walls (Brown, 2010) and widely and subtly implemented in urban infrastructures through nudging, gating, zoning and other forms of ‘dark architecture’ (Easterling, 2014; Graham, 2009). Yet, we suggest that prison walls and penal islands are the most vivid mani­ festations of this confining power, which, despite the acceleration of more insidious surveillance-based forms of control (Zuboff, 2019) remain potent and prevalent as the basic, hard, and core structures of carcerality.1 Our exploration takes its point of departure in, on the one hand, the realization of a brand new prison wall around the new correctional facility Anstalten in Nuuk, the capital of the former Danish colony of Greenland – representing this vast arctic country’s first ever encounter with ultramodern perimeter security; and, on the other hand, the highly charged proposal for establishing a deportation centre on the small island of Lindholm in Denmark – fuelling affective public debates about immigrant threats and

Walls and islands 91 instantiating age-old discourses of quarantine and intentional harm. To explore the carceral forces of walls and islands, we follow carceral geo­ graphers’ inspiring work on the place-based dynamics of incarceration (Moran, 2015; Turner, 2016) and seek to add our distinctly anthro­ pological and architectural perspectives to this debate. To us, architectural anthropology fuses an architectural inquiry into materials, structures, sur­ faces and atmospheres and the fashioning of multisensory environments, with an anthropological inquiry into the current conditions and possibilities of everyday life that draws on the experiences of people and the vitalities of non-human agents. We posit that this open-ended inquiry sheds new light on the ways carceral spaces are conceived and organized. Our inquiry combines our respective scholarly positions in architecture and anthro­ pology as we swap and share disciplinary archetypes in the anthropology of walls and the architecture of islands. In line with this anthology’s ambition to move beyond the standard anthropological critique of how the built environment may index and implement technologies of power and form social life, we apply an architectonic critique that grapple with the atmo­ spheric, aesthetic and affective, yet visceral, forces of walls and islands and their propensity for violence (Kenzari, 2011; Weizman, 2017). We thereby also subject the affirmative streak in standard architectural scholarship, which continues to associate architecture with a ‘will to well-being’, to critical questioning.2 We are particularly concerned with the ways that the spatial protocols of carceral walls and islands are key to contemporary sovereign practices across The Danish Realm. The prison wall in Nuuk took form as a new high-tech boundary of the progressively caring welfare state, aiming to confine the most dangerously deviant prisoners to a supposedly normal life behind bars. Almost concurrently, Lindholm Island was invoked as the very same welfare state’s regressive defense of Danish normality through an archaic form of spatial control. Since then Minister of Immigration, Inger Støjberg, in 2016 explicitly declared that it should be a “tough life” and as “untolerable as possible” to be on tolerated stay, a series of ever more strict polices was introduced (Skærbæk & Klarskov, 2016, author's translation). Two years later, Lindholm appeared as the apotheosis of this strategy. Støjberg said that she was “pleased” about the solution of a deportation centre on the island, “with which we send the signal that they do not have a future in Denmark” (Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet, 2018, author’s translation). The exploration of these two cases shows how walls and islands are not contrasting forms of incarceration (human versus nature-made, archaic versus modern, intensively vertical versus expansively horizontal, etc.), but rather co-presently affined in interlaced sovereign practices of exclusion. We thereby propose that carceral walls and islands – and the accompanying practices of ‘walling’ and ‘island-ing’ – are two distinct spatial means for shared carceral ends, namely to produce normality of the centre by

92 Johannessen & Martin physically and symbolically fixating deviance in a spatially amplified per­ iphery. Both Anstalten and Lindholm deploy a basic spatial protocol of managing deviant exclusion as a means to furnish normality. However, the two interlaced spatial protocols are in each instance differently coded (i.e. the ‘instructions’ for how they should function differs; Easterling & Hirsch, 2014). The architecture of Anstalten is conceived as modern and humane, supporting resocialization of the incarcerated by offering an artificial and approximated normality inside the wall. The spatial protocol of Lindholm is conjured up as an instantiation of engineered abnormality, where aus­ terity and literal isolation is supposed to motivate the formally deported migrants to ultimately leave Denmark (Magnussen, 2018). In the following, we will present the two cases from the vantage point of their architectural and discursive conception. We posit that architecture is enlisted to under­ state the carceral force of the wall around Anstalten by emphasizing its formal task of enclosing-cum-enabling normality within. In the case of Lindholm, on the contrary, the spatial condition of the island seems in­ strumental for overstating the expression of carceral force and isolation as an intentionally harmful end in itself, emphasizing total exclusion.

Walls The new correctional facility in Greenland, Anstalten in Nuuk, is presented as a significant change in the country’s penal history. When the Greenlandic criminal justice system was modernized and formalized by the Danish co­ lonial government after the Second World War, it was significantly oriented towards rehabilitation with a clear reluctance to imprison offenders. Greenlanders have therefore served their time in open institutions geared towards treatment, education and social reintegration. Yet, for the first time, it is now possible to deprive people of their liberty in a closed institution in Greenland. The Danish and Greenlandic governments have wanted to build Anstalten to discontinue the politically problematic and human rights vio­ lating practice of sending particularly dangerous Greenlandic offenders to serve indefinite sentences in Denmark. With the opening of Anstalten, these prisoners, who cannot function in the open institutions, can remain in Greenland. Moreover, Anstalten is a central element in the reform that in principle enables Greenland’s government to take full sovereign control of the justice sector. The Greenlandic prison service (as well as the judiciary and the police) is still governed by the Danish Ministry of Justice, but with the opening of Anstalten, Greenland now has the infrastructure in place to monopolize and wield lawful carceral violence against its citizens as it is becoming for a liberal democratic state. The renowned Greenlandic approach to criminal justice (Lauritsen, 2014), which emphasizes non-carcerality, is thereby seen to mutate, but also to persist – at least discursively – as notions of ‘prison’, ‘punishment’ and ‘cells’, for instance, continue not to apply to this new institution. Yet,

Walls and islands 93 research-based scrutiny of the actual carceral practices have shown how total institutional harm have in fact been part of everyday life in Greenland’s strained open correctional institutions (Engbo, 2018; Lauritsen, 2014). So, Anstalten might be less of a rupture and more of an infrastructural update of carceral practices, but one element stands out as manifestly new: the wall. Greenlandic institutions have had different forms of perimeter fencing, but the wall around Anstalten is the first ‘real’ prison-like wall that is formally tasked to produce a total institutional regime, and behind which a ‘normal’ life of work, education, worship, family life, leisure, etc., can take place while incarceration is concurrently and securely produced. As the director of the Greenlandic Prison and Probation service stated, when the new Anstalt was opening: The wall, that encircles the closed part of Anstalten will become a very visible manifestation of the fact that we in Greenland incarcerate citizens. The wall will remind us of the objective of the Anstalt in another way than what we are used to. (Kriminalforsorgen, 2018, author’s translation)

Figure 5.1 Perimeter wall of Anstalten. Photo: Fængselsforbundet.

94 Johannessen & Martin But what do you actually face, when you face a wall? Drawing on the creative and inspiring volume by Horvath, Benta and Davison on ‘Walling, Boundaries and Liminality’ (Horváth, Benţa, & Davison, 2018), let us to consider what a wall is. A wall is a separation, which creates division, loss and interdiction – most notably signified by the prison wall or the border wall. But walls also offer protection and enable intimacy and security – as in the city wall or the wall of the home. A wall has to be taller than a human being and somewhat insurmountable, in order not simply to be a fence or an obstacle. It has to be vertical, hard and have a capacity to block. This ability to block affords the wall time-spatial qualities. A wall thereby has a form of agency by way of producing distance – people are pushed apart by walls, they cannot move together or towards each other, cannot see or hear each other. In that sense walls charge space with distinctions between home and world, inside and outside. But walls may also encourage agency. They invite people to tinker with them. They lend themselves to be used as a medium or a canvas. And they can prompt counter-actions of scaling and tearing down. Etymologically words referring to walls in many languages draw from notions of strength, fortress and palisades. Walls are also referred to through terms that denote the process of building them (like ‘maur’ in German), emphasizing the importance of the process of ‘walling’ itself. Interestingly, the old Nordic word ‘vegr’ (like ‘væg’ in Danish) has a dif­ ferent meaning – probably referring to ‘tricks’ or ‘ruse’ and possibly relating to the practice of catching fish by making dams and traps. This double meaning of, on the one hand, to make walls that keep ene­ mies out, and, on the other hand, to make walls that trap fish in, is parti­ cularly interesting in relation to prison walls. It has namely been common knowledge that the 8,000 years old walls of Jericho, in present day Palestine, were the oldest known walls in the world, most likely built to encircle the city for protective-cum-ritualistic purposes. But in the mid1990s archaeologists excavated the mysterious complex of Göbekli in Turkey, 400 miles North of Jericho, of considerably older origin, which is now considered the world’s oldest walls. These walls were not made to keep people out, but – archeologist believe – to keep demons in. Akin to the etymological links between walls and traps, the walls of Göbekli were built to enclose and confine dangerous gods to protect society against evil (Horváth et al., 2018). So, we may presume that the practice of walling in and walling out; of building walls to exclude and, not least, to enclose has been a signifying trait of settlement culture for some time. In Greenland, however, the enclosing wall is a relatively new appearance. In line with a global trend to bring prisons up-to-date and fit-for-purpose, the Danish Prison and Probation Service launched a massive construction program in 1998. This major investment, unparalleled since the mid-19th century, resulted in the building and opening of Enner Mark Prison (2006), Storstrøm Prison (2017), and ‘Anstalten’ in Nuuk (2019). This building

Walls and islands 95 project has been significantly dedicated towards not only new legal re­ quirements and security concerns, but also architectural innovation aiming to make the new prisons habitable and spatially, materially and functionally modern and efficient. In some jurisdictions, like the US and the UK, new prison designs are directed towards crude incapacitation of prisoners in low-cost ‘warehouses’ (Jewkes, 2019) or punitive deterrence in supermaximum-security regimes (Moran, 2013; Reiter, 2016). Scandinavian states are often seen to promote a more ‘humane’ approach to imprison­ ment and to experiment with progressive architecture (Moran & Jewkes, 2015). The new carceral infrastructure in Denmark and Greenland is thereby tasked to both improve the state’s ability to incarcerate offenders by modernizing the security infrastructure and to spatially facilitate ‘the principle of normality’. This penal principle stipulates that deprivation of liberty is the punishment in itself, while rights to healthcare, education, family life, etc., should be available to prisoners in order for them to lead as normal a life as possible during incarceration – supposedly supporting their rehabilitation and ability to lead a life without crime. The major architectural innovations that underpin these conflicting aims include: campus-style layouts to increase a sense of village-like normality; flexible housing areas to separate prisoner groups; new materials that en­ hance homeliness and access to nature and light; and, last but not least, enforced perimeter security to enable mobility inside (Hoffmann, 2018; Kriminalforsorgen, 2000). Anstalten’s architecture is supposed to implement these ideas, but is also seen to contextualize them, geographically and culturally, to Greenland. Most notably, Anstalten is decorated by local artists – not only the wall itself, but the entire colorcoding is also selected to resonate with the locality in the sense that walls and surfaces are painted in nuances akin to local moss and lichens to connote Greenlandic nature. More technically, the architects have for instance come up with a way to tilt the cell windows so that all prisoners get ocean views to enhance ‘access’ to nature while avoiding prisoner-to-prisoner contact and communication. The architects have also tried to ‘hide’ the many barriers between sections and units in the stairwells to decrease the sense of manifest spatial control and thereby lessen the invading institutional feel of the place and, in turn, the “morti­ fying” effects of total institutions (Goffman, 1991). Furthermore, a lot of energy has been put into integrating the buildings in the sloping landscape to ensure that prisoners can look over the new wall and into the landscape from inside. In architectural language, this ambition of integration, comes out in the presentation of the new buildings in statements like this from the jury of the architectural competition: The idea is to allow for a contrast between the buildings and the landscape and exploit the strong encounter between the two to

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Figure 5.2 Plan drawing, Anstalten. Drawing: SHL/Friis & Moltke.

engender an aesthetic emphasis and experience in this clash. In this way, the architecture does not mimic the landscape, but rather submits to the grand scale of the hillside. (Justitsministeriet, 2013, p. 6, author’s translation) The question is: Does Anstalten submit to the natural landscape in Greenland or does the institution and the new wall rather impinge on the carceral landscape and transform it? The spatial facilitation and localization of the somewhat conflicting aims of normality and security has been central to the building of Anstalten. The evaluation committee of the architect competition that selected the winning firm stated: “What we have wanted to accomplish is a place that both lived up to the openness and freedom manifested in the Greenlandic people and lived up to the requirements of secure incarceration.” (Justitsministeriet, 2013, p. 5). The somewhat paradoxical logic is thereby to introduce a total institutional regime – with all the potential pitfalls of mortification and penal harm – to protect prisoners’ rights and enable normality. Aesthetics,

Walls and islands 97 architecture, art, cultural sensitivity and geographical contextualization have been employed to formally mitigate and affectively understate this paradox. Yet, the new wall remains the most vivid manifestation of carceral force and cannot but beg the perennial questions of whether incarceration will inevitably only produce normality on the outside according to bureaucratic rationalities and elitist sensibilities, and remain harmful and excluding and anything but normal for the enclosed.

Islands In late 2018, news about the tiny island of Lindholm went viral after its sudden appearance in the Danish Government’s 2019 Finance Act, which specified that a new deportation centre was to be established at the island (Regeringen, 2018). A deportation centre is a detention-like facility, run by Danish Prison and Probation Service, where rejected asylum seekers, foreigners expelled by verdict, or foreigners on so-called ‘tolerated stay’, are bound to reside while Danish authorities are waiting to be able to complete deportation.3 As part of the 2018 centre-right led Danish Government’s mission of relentless policies on immigration, poor living conditions in the deportation centres were expressed as a necessary means to the ends of ‘motivating’ people to leave the country. The centres provide different degrees of de­ tention and are placed either in old military barracks (Sjælsmark, Ellebæk) or prisons (Kærshovedgård, Vridsløselille until 2018) in relatively remote locations. The centres are surrounded by fences, some also with barbed wire, and access is restricted. Amenities and activities are reduced to a minimum. In present-day Denmark, these deportation centres are probably the only type of facility where space is designed to create desolation and anguish. As we have seen above, even prisons are designed with the well­ being of the incarcerated in mind through applying ‘principles of normality’ to their spatial layout. Still, the geography and history of Lindholm added a new dimension to the discourse and practice of Danish immigration politics. While the Danish People’s Party’s politician Martin Henriksen, after an inspection of the is­ land, stated that “We want to make it as intolerable as possible for them, so they go home” (Magnussen, 2018, author’s translation), the Radical Left’s Zenia Stampe strongly condemned the plans in the opinion piece “Nej til Alcatraz på Lindholm” (No to Alcatraz on Lindholm) (Stampe, 2018). Meanwhile, some detainees in Ellebæk were desperately expressing that they were being kidnapped by the Danish state, comparing it to Guantanamo (Herschend, 2019), while another swore “I would rather kill myself than go out there. This is not a joke. They are playing with people” (Færch, 2019, author’s translation). The massive attention caught by Lindholm indicated that the particular idea of a detention island was extremely evocative for its supporters and opponents alike.

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Figure 5.3 Approaching Lindholm in the ferry M/F Virus. Photo: Runa Johannessen.

Islands induce particular historical imaginaries. The pieces of subcontinental land surrounded by water that we call ‘islands’ has served as a key spatial figure for social and cultural imagination throughout human history. In the associated meaning of isolated sites, popular mythology cast islands as idyllic paradises, holding promise of the pleasures of withdrawal and solitude, while fictional islands like Plato’s Atlantis and Thomas More’s Utopia have held a fervent position in literature as allegorical images of civilization and societal formation. The island imaginary thus holds a broad spectrum of both affirmative, dissenting and bleak ideas about the island as a condition for life to unfold. In order to understand the political impetus of the Lindholm proposal, we look at discursive contexts connected particularly to islands used as sites for forced isolation. We posit that there is an interference created between these discursive contexts which is activated when designating carcerality to a location like Lindholm. By the concept of interference, we allude to the phenomena of constructive interference in physics in which superimposition of electromagnetic waves forms a reinforced resultant wave. Like super­ imposed waves, different ways of thinking about and making use of islands are layered and corollary amplified. Furthermore, we submit that what is activated and amplified is the re­ pository image of an ‘outcast archipelago’, that is, the idea of islands as ideal sites for abject bodies. We are intentionally leaning on other thinkers’

Walls and islands 99 conceptualizations of punitive systems that are typologically bound to is­ lands in our attempt to capture the features of the outcast archipelago: Notably, the concept of the ‘carceral archipelago’, which Foucault used metaphorically to describe the prisonization of society as a vast continuum of technologies, systems and mechanisms of disciplinary power (Foucault & Sheridan, 1977). Yet, the image of the archipelago can also be understood in the more literal sense of the plural of geographical islands of forced isolation, explored for instance by the geographer Alison Mountz, who conceptualizes the global emergence of island detention of migrants as the ‘enforcement archipelago’ (Mountz, 2011). What interest us in relation to Lindholm, are islands of forced isolation. In the imaginary of the outcast archipelago, the geography itself (land surrounded by water) is used to keep dangers away from the rest of society. Within the outcast archipelago, we find historical quarantines (e.g. Ellis Island), prisons and penal colonies (e.g Devil’s Island, Robben Island, and Alcatraz), and asylums for society’s pariahs (e.g. San Servolo), but also present day’s detention facilities for migrants (e.g. Nauru). These places belong to different discursive contexts: historically, quar­ antines limited the spreading of contagious diseases; prisons incarcerated criminals; ‘madhouse’ asylums detained the ostracized; and contemporary asylums confine asylum seekers and attempt to slow down the pace of migration. Between these distinct discourses and fields of application, there are interferences created by a combination of different histories, mythologies, and politics. What appears to take place is the historical use of islands as carceral sites materializing in the present as a spatial figure of separating the dangerous ‘them’ from the innocent ‘us’: the excluded from the included. With Lindholm, several of these disparate rationales and purposes co­ incide, blending fears of contagion and migration. Since 1926, Lindholm has served as a restricted site for research and experiments into contagious household animal diseases. At that time, there were significant and serious outbreaks of diseases, and it was believed that isolation on an island would protect against contagion. Although science proved this theory wrong in 1966 (it was found that many diseases are airborne), research activity on Lindholm continued as the highly specialized laboratories, stables and crematorium were already built and research practices well established. However, in 2018 the Technical University of Denmark relocated its virus research to mainland facilities because the island setting was too expensive, dependent as it was on the running of ferries for deliveries of everything from drinking water to transport of staff. The decommissioning includes decontamination of the whole island and its buildings, followed by half a year of quarantine. Trailing the idea of interference between discursive contexts, Lindholm’s particular history of virus research produces a metaphorical cross-over of contagion when it is coupled with contemporary discourse on migrants: as

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if the spreading virus is figuratively transferred from animal to human; as if there is a need for isolation of certain bodies that comes with invisible threats. This is not a novel idea. The use of islands for containment of society’s outcast has many precedents, also in Denmark. Between 1911 and 1961, the islands of Livø and Sprogø served as closed institutions for ‘imbeciles’, criminals, and antisocial and deranged men and women, from whom society had to be protected (Kirkebæk, 1997, 2004). Most of those who were deported to Livø and Sprogø, were from society’s lower classes. In the burgeoning phase of the welfare state, these institutions were seen as exemplary in the way they provided progressive and humane treatment of those considered defect, dangerous and undesirable human beings, by placing them in open yet still incarcerating disciplinary institutions. Beyond the goal of disciplining the citizen as a conscientious worker, sterilization and cas­ tration reflected an idea of social and mental hygiene through preventing the spreading of ‘bad’ genetic material. For the rest of society, the islands func­ tioned as disciplinary scaremongering (Kirkebæk, 1997). The objective of ostracizing particular groups of people to ‘deserted’ islands continually appear, only with different groups in focus at different points in time; the migrant, the criminal, the mentally ill, or whoever is deemed unwanted. Asylum territories on islands are proliferating around the world, from Manus and Nauru in the Pacific Ocean, over French Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, to Lesbos and other islands in the Mediterranean. According to Mountz, these islands form an ‘archipelago of enforcement’ that “function as key sites of territorial storage where nations-states use distance, invisibility, and sub-national jurisdictional status to operationalize ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’” (Mountz, 2011, p. 118). Although Lindholm is clearly part of Danish territory, the link between Lindholm and other islands of exclusion of migrants is significant. The ‘outcast archipelago’ conjure an image of the island as capable of keeping the migrant in an exceptional state; stranded, stored, captured and (possibly) outside of rights and jurisdiction. Lindholm as a political proposition for the practical execution of deportation policies escapes juridical, ethical and even financial rationality. As we untangle the superimposed layers that constitutes Lindholm as an island in the outcast archipelago, we discover that the dominant figures of interference are enmity and danger, which work to reinforce rationalities of separation and legitimize dehumanization of society’s unwanted. The plan for Lindholm as location for a deportation centre was aban­ doned by the subsequent government in 2019. We suggest that the use of the archaic (and technologically outdated) figure of the penal island over­ stated the expression of exclusion and isolation for the political practical purpose of managing deportees. It was simply too complicated and costly to carry out. Yet even if the project failed to be realized, it succeeded in normalizing the idea of excluding the excluded by means of designing intolerable conditions.

Walls and islands 101

Conclusion Walls and islands play different, interchangeable and complementary carceral roles. The wall is high-tech, human-made and modern. The island is low-tech, natural and archaic and they supposedly supplant each other accordingly. But in contemporary sovereign practices their polyvalent spatial force and deep symbolic power mesh and mix. The high-tech wall powerfully shows that modern sovereign practices of lawful carceral vio­ lence have come to Greenland. The re-vamping of the low-tech quarantine island shows that Danish politicians may still apply the archaic pains of the penal island to guard the autochtone Danes against new migrant threats. Both these showcases are highly affective as they foreground the fixating power of the state to protect the normal against the deviant. The merging of architectural and anthropological perspectives have in­ spired us to analyse Anstalten and Lindholm together to show how walls are put up and islands put to use to deal with unwanted non-state transnationals and intra-state transgressors alike. We point to the ways walls and islands spatially load up, sharpen and fortify of the state’s weaponry and ability to administer the monopoly of violence. The physicalist presence of these ‘loud’ spatial forms display powerful theatrics, but penal walls and islands do often not work in terms of reducing conflict, managing traffic or successfully cordoning off the good life. They rather risk creating the insecurity that they propose to protect against as people push back or perish and as the ensuing harm becomes socially and politically contagious. Penal walls and islands are nevertheless strikingly popular and effective in producing the political sub­ jectivity of those they encompass and exclude. This productive quality also spurs subversive tactics that challenge our immediate fear of (or hope for!) the intransigent separating qualities of walls and islands. Thus, we conclude that the carceral idée-fixe of walls and islands that we outline here also expresses a certain fragility. As Wendy Brown argues the hyperbolic expressions of sovereignty of the new border walls “reveal a tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness, or instability at the core of what they aim to express” (Brown, 2010, p. 24). This fragility was apparent and part and parcel of overstating the carceral force of Lindholm. Ultimately, this charged and crude project of exclusion seemed too irrational and costineffective for a new centre-left government and at odds with a durable and legitimated exercise of welfare state violence, which caused the project to implode. In Nuuk, however, the wall still stands as a lauded manifestation of how to square the circle of administering and promoting carceral violence as welfaring care.

Notes 1 With Moran, Turner, and Schliehe, we define carcerality as fluid “forms of confinement, be they state-sanctioned, quasi-legal, ad-hoc, illicit, spatially fixed, mobile, embodied or imagined, and in which the scale of deployment of carceral

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techniques and infrastructures demands critical attention” (Moran, Turner, & Schliehe, 2018, p. 668). 2 Johannessen’s work on the Lindholm island was part of her postdoctoral fel­ lowship within the project Spaces of Danish Welfare at the Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. 3 Tolerated stay is a juridical term for a person without legal residence who cannot be deported either because of the principle of non-refoulement or because the home country denies entry. Tolerated stay is granted to persons excluded from asylum on grounds of criminality, or persons expelled as they are considered a threat to state security.

References Brown, W. (2010). Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Zone. Candea, M. (2007). Arbitrary locations: In defence of the bounded field‐site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, 167–184. doi:10.1111/j. 1467-9655.2007.00419.x Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso. Easterling, K., & Hirsch, N. (2014). Subtraction. Sternberg Press. Engbo, H. J. (2018). Grønlandske anstalter for domfældte. Tidsskriftet Grønland, 2, 84–99. Færch, M. (2019). Hvad er det her? Sender de mig til en øde ø? Informatíon, 16 February. Foucault, M., & Sheridan, A. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Allen Lane. Goffman, E. (1991). Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Penguin. Graham, S. (2009). Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. Routledge. Herschend, S. S. (2019). Afviste sidder indespærret i Ellebæk i op til halvandet år: Det her havde jeg aldrig troet om Danmark. TV2 Online, 10 March. Hoffmann, T. (2018). Fængslets arkitektur påvirker indsatte. Videnskab.dk. Horváth, Á., Benţa, M. I., & Davison, J. (Eds). (2018). Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations. Routledge. Jewkes, Y. (2019). Just design: Healthy prisons and the architecture of hope. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 51(3), 319–338. Justitsministeriet. (2013). Ny Anstalt i Nuuk. Indbudt projektkonkurrence: Dommerbetænkning. Justitsministeriet. Kenzari, B. (Ed.) (2011). Architecture and Violence. Actar. Kirkebæk, B. (1997). Defekt og deporteret: ø-anstalten Livø 1911–1961. SocPol. Kirkebæk, B. (2004). Letfærdig og løsagtig: kvindeanstalten Sprogø 1923–1961. SocPol. Kriminalforsorgen. (2000). Analyse af kravene til et nyt fængsel: Kravspecifikationer. Retrieved from www.ejail.dk/pdf/10_Nyt_faengsel_2000.pdf Kriminalforsorgen. (2018). Den Nye Anstalt i Nuuk toner frem. Press release. Retrieved from www.kriminalforsorgen.dk/om-os/nyt-og-presse/nyheder/dennye-anstalt-i-nuuk-toner-frem Lauritsen, A. N. (2014). Den store grønlandske indespærring. Dansk Sociologi, 25 (4), 35–53.

Walls and islands 103 Magnussen, M. (2018). I land på ‘de udvistes ø’: Det skal være så utåleligt for dem, at de rejser hjem igen. Ekstra Bladet, 7 December. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multisited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. Moran, D. (2013). Carceral geography and the spatialities of prison visiting: Visitation, recidivism, and hyperincarceration. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31, 174–190. Moran, D. (2015). Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration. Ashgate. Moran, D., & Jewkes, Y. (2015). Linking the carceral and the punitive state: A review of research on prison architecture, design and the lived experience of carceral space. Annales de géographie, 702–703(2), 163–184. Moran, D., Turner, J., & Schliehe, A. K. (2018). Conceptualizing the carceral in carceral geography. Progress in Human Geography, 42(5), 666–686. Mountz, A. (2011). The enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands. Political Geography, 30, 118–128. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.01.005 Regeringen. (2018). Aftale mellem regeringen og Dansk Folkeparti: Finansloven for 2019 (30. november 2018). Reiter, K. (2016). 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Yale University Press. Skærbæk, M., & Klarskov, K. (1.6.2016). Støjberg vil “utåleliggøre” tålt ophold. Politiken. Stampe, Z. (2018). Nej til Alcatraz på Lindholm. Nordvestnyt Kalundborg, 19 December. Turner, J. (2016). The Prison Boundary: Between Society and Carceral Space. Palgrave Macmillan. Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet. (2018). Finanslovsaftale sikrer fortsat stram udlændingepolitik. Press release. Retrieved from https://uim.dk/nyheder/ 2018/2018-11/finanslovsaftale-sikrer-fortsat-stram-udlaendingepolitik Weizman, E. (2017). Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Zone Books. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for New Human Future at the Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

Part II

Urban space and public life Edited by Sten Gromark, Aina Landsverk Hagen, and Marie Stender

Urban space has typically been regarded as a key meeting place and melting pot of society, inviting people of various backgrounds to mingle and parti­ cipate in public life. In a context of increasing urban segregation and social polarization, it becomes crucial to scrutinize processes of inclusion and ex­ clusion in the socio-material environment of public spaces in the city. The following chapters demonstrate a wide range of cross-disciplinary strategies for studying and promoting inclusion in urban space and public life. As projected in this book, architectural anthropology can contribute a critical interpretation of such socio-material dynamics. It can also act as a complicit and interactive agent in the early stages and co-creative situations of urban architectural conceptualizations. This role can be performed by working with many different professionals to outline design orientations for cities, public places, and urban dwellings or by making so-called silent voices better heard, thereby potentially participating in the construction of new inclusive urban spaces. By taking these consecutive steps, the discipline is initiating a strong future inclination for cross-, inter-, and transdisciplinary encounters. Such en­ counters may amount to another kind of knowledge production emanating from reciprocal academic and professional transgression. This reorientation implies the application and adoption of a new set of unconventional modes of inquiry, including new forms of additional figurative empirical material. The following chapters present intriguing examples of what might be ahead. In the opening contribution by Lisbet Harboe and Hanne Cecilie Geirbo, Chapter 6, we are invited to take part in a cross-disciplinary dialogue unfolding on the high hills of Medellin, Columbia, between an anthro­ pologist and an architect. They are visually confronted with striking and quite astounding infrastructural inventions, such as new public spaces and unusual cable car public transportation, generated in a highly renowned sample of progressive urbanism on the world level. This project is aimed at empowering and strengthening the local identity amidst a disfavoured and poor favela population that is both socially excluded and distanced to a large extent. The authors demonstrate how narratives and built structures

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can be integrated into a mission to foster social cohesion in cities. Their exchange promotes a reinforced mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives. They argue in favour of working together in the field as a starting point of new collaborative patterns of commitment, searching for common ground and new modes of interaction between architectural design practice and reflexive anthropological interpretation. In Chapter 7, by Cicilie Fagerlid, Bengt Andersen, and Astri Margareta Dalseide, we are invited to share reflections on how the political ambition of promoting social inclusion among young people from underprivileged suburban areas transforms into a radical reconfiguration of the conven­ tional library space. The library is becoming a common living room for all, inviting young children to run freely along discretely reorganized shelves of books. For the regular visitor, this results in an ambiguous response and reception. All unfamiliar new clashes of sounds and disturbing movements in this sort of ‘cappuccino’ hybrid of library and activity house are observed with surprise and wonder by interviewees. In this piece, the actual voices of the involved local people are faithfully recorded to bring us an accurate account of how the contradiction between learning by reading in solitude or collectively participating in unexpected noisy cultural events, actually plays out in the minds of those concerned. It is an informative study on the nature of intricate relations between human acts and radically transfigured struc­ tures. Building on cross-disciplinary fieldwork involving both architectural and anthropological approaches, the authors demonstrate that, while mixed-use arenas are designed to afford meetings between different social groups, these hybrid libraries alienate and deter some users. This questions the dubious political starting point, formed by the contribution of involved architects’ strong design belief in interlaced and completely open spaces of ‘cross programmatic contamination’. The demands for new modes of inquiry following the reorientation of the discipline to go beyond academic borders necessitates the application of a broader repertoire of unconventional methods. In Chapter 8, by Aina Landsverk Hagen and Jenny B. Osuldsen, we are confronted with a com­ bined operations research team. Acting to initiate a participatory planning approach, in particular engaging young people in experimental pedagogical situations, they present the practical experiences of a method of their own design involving the researchers themselves in intense animated dialogues with adolescents. The two authors reflect on the method from their re­ spective anthropological and architectural perspectives and provide an in­ credibly fast-moving report from the field of academic interdisciplinary transgression and co-creative interaction. Working with a figurative selfrepresentation method, a visual laboratory procedure coined ‘splot’, they discover radically new ways of promoting user involvement and commit­ ment in co-design situations. Chapter 9, by Lina Berglund-Snodgrass and Ebba Högström, introduces and proposes the values of radically new modes of inquiry while using video

Urban space and public life 107 projections and film-making, promoting insight into three exceptional re­ sidential and urban architectural situations involving immigrants and asylum seekers. Introducing the unorthodox application of moving video in learning situations underpins a better-informed discussion or formulation of a strategy for fostering inclusion. The authors demonstrate that the methodological strength of film-making rests in its ability to tell complex and spatially interwoven stories that emotionally engage the audience. They argue that architectural anthropology can enable transformative social change in and through architectural practices that accommodate bottom-up spatial responses that make a positive difference to people. In the last chapter of Part II, Eli Støa and Anne Sigfrid Grønseth, Chapter 10, offer a detailed account of two competition-winning multiprofessional teams acting rather like anthropologists in the context of a prestigious cultural exhibition event, the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2016. The teams’ unusual or, for some, even disturbing approaches regard architecture not as a matter of mere buildings but more broadly as a rela­ tional phenomenon affecting citizens’ freedom to move in the city and their access to housing. They exceed the boundaries of the profession, inventing new paths of architectural interventions aimed at the inclusion of recently arrived asylum seekers in urban life, thereby also opening wider circles of academic and professional modes of collaboration.

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Interdisciplinarity on site Exploring the urban interventions ‘Unidades de Vida Articulada’ in Medellín Lisbet Harboe and Hanne Cecilie Geirbo

“This is Medellín at night”, says Horacio Valencia, chief architect in the public-private utility and hydropower company Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM) in Medellin, Colombia. He points to an aerial photo em­ bedded in the PowerPoint presentation. We are interviewing him about the company’s role in urban development and have asked him to tell us about the public spaces and community centres called UVAs – Unidades de Vida Articulada (Units of Articulated Life). The aerial photo was taken during the development of a master plan for the city’s urban lighting system. Valencia draws attention to the dense congregation of light in the bottom of the valley where the city centre is located: “If you see a point of light, you have a guarantee that there is public infrastructure.” With a pointer he traces the lights up the steep hillsides surrounding the city centre, showing us how ravines, cutting across the hillside neighbourhoods, are visible as dark areas in the photo. Then he draws our attention to dark patches far up in the hills. When Valencia and his colleagues initially matched the aerial photo with a map of Medellín, they found to their surprise that these dark sites were the property of their own company. They were the sites of water tanks placed high above the city centre to ensure water pressure. They once were far away from Medellín’s urban districts but had been encapsulated by informal settlements that grew as people fleeing the guerrilla wars found their way to the relative safety of the city. The EPM team counted 144 of these dark spots in the hillsides. Through the mapping of public lighting, the company stumbled across an important insight about their presence in the city. They realized that they had many infrastructural sites in informal settlements, representing unpopulated land in densely populated neigh­ bourhoods. In response to this discovery, Valencia and his team visited the sites and discovered something else. These unlit, fenced areas containing water tanks served many places as frontiers between the criminal groups that controlled the different neighbourhoods in the hillsides. Valencia explains how they presented their discoveries to the board of directors as opportunities for strengthening the presence of EPM in the city and con­ tributing to community facilities and public presence in dense informal

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areas. This is how the development of the UVAs – public spaces with community centres – started. The story of how dark spots in an aerial photo sparked a process, which by 2018 had led to the development of 14 public spaces with community centres in the hillside neighbourhoods of Medellín, is well known. It is told in lectures given by architects and urban developers in Medellín and retold by scholars and journalists describing the transformation from one of the world’s most dangerous places in the 1990s to a model city for social ur­ banism (see for instance McQuirk, 2014). The story is much more than a rendering of events in chronological order. It is told through different media and for different audiences, forming a narrative that is an integral part of an urban transformation towards equity and social cohesion. In this chapter, we will show how this narrative is linked with the ma­ terialization of UVA projects, and through this reflect on how to further develop an architectural anthropology of urban space. We will emphasize how both disciplines share a relational epistemology, and how they can complement each other by tuning into sensing the material and the social environments, respectively. We will discuss how this complementary epis­ temological commitment can contribute to understanding how narratives and built structures can be integrated in a mission to foster social cohesion in cities.

Figure 6.1 The city of Medellín with cable cars in the foreground. Photo: Hanne Cecilie Geirbo.

Interdisciplinarity on site 111 The material turn, with its attention to what the material environment does, rather than what it represents (Larkin, 2013; Ingold, 2011; de Laet and Mol, 2000), has sparked anthropologists’ interest in architectural approaches (Stender, 2017). Architects have taken up anthropological fieldwork methods to gain insight into how people experience built en­ vironments. While a mutual exchange of approaches can be enriching for both disciplines, there is more to be gained by going beyond the replication of methodological practices to also exploring the epistemological commit­ ments that underlie them. When architects and anthropologists expose themselves to each other’s way of perceiving the world, we can move beyond anthropology of architecture and ethnography for architects and develop an architectural anthropology. What we mean by relational epistemology is an understanding of knowledge as gained by way of relations (Mosse, 2006). What the architect and the anthropologist know about a place or a society cannot be separated from the relationships with the people and places through which they have generated this knowledge (Hastrup, 2004; Mosse, 2006). This relational epistemology is manifested in the methodological training in both dis­ ciplines. Architects and anthropologists alike use themselves as tools to generate insight during fieldwork. Students of architecture learn to develop a sensitivity to the material presence, practices, and atmosphere of a place (Zumthor, 2006), while students of anthropology are trained to be sensitive to human interaction and the social and cultural environment. In this shared focus on the fieldworker’s sensitivity to the environment lies a po­ tential for learning from each other. Stender (2017) argues that anthro­ pologists can learn from architects how to understand the spatial and material as part and parcel of what constitutes the social. Architects, on the other hand, can learn from anthropologists a theoretically informed ana­ lysis of social contexts. To unlock this potential, it is important to discuss how we gain knowledge of places as architects and as anthropologists. The authors of this chapter will contribute to this by reflecting on our joint fieldwork in a research project.1 Here the architect is both a practising architect and a researcher. In this project, we have explored the transformation of urban environ­ ments in Medellín, Colombia, such as public spaces, architecture, and in­ frastructure. The team who did the case study of Medellín included a political scientist (Kristian Hoelscher of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo) in addition to the architect and the anthropologist. Here we focus on the collaboration between the latter two. In August 2018, we spent nine days in the field. We visited various public space projects, including five UVAs. The visits included observations and informal interviews with citizens. Spanishspeaking colleagues translated the informal interviews. We interviewed key stakeholders in the fields of architecture and urban development, including those with central roles in designing the UVAs. In addition, we have drawn on information material published by EPM (Empresas Públicas de

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Medellín, n.d.) and previous studies of urban development in Medellín (Maclean, 2014; McQuirk, 2014; Perez, 2019; Doyle, 2019). Here we will focus on the narrative, the materiality, and the functional programming of UVA projects in Medellín, and discuss how the UVA pro­ jects have reinforced each other and added to a programme of urban re­ generation aimed at promoting social cohesion in Medellín. Simultaneously, our analysis is a reflection on how we developed our understanding of the UVAs by allowing our epistemological and methodological positions as ar­ chitect and anthropologist to interact and merge.

Creating connections across the city In the opening vignette, Valencia tells a story about how water infra­ structure offers an opportunity to establish relationships with marginalized neighbourhoods as part of a broader programme of urban development. This understanding of infrastructure as central in pursuing equity and co­ hesion is reflected in urban studies literature. In their seminal work ‘Splintering urbanism’, Graham and Marvin (2001) quote the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp who has described infrastructure networks as “the connective tissue that knits people, places, social institutions and the natural environment into coherent urban relations” (Perry, 1994, p. 1, in Graham and Marvin, 2001, p. 43). Graham and Marvin explore the role that infrastructure, such as electricity systems, telecommunication and transportation, has in scaffolding social cohesion, but also note its potential of causing fragmentation and inequality when infrastructural services are differentiated according to geography and consumer segments. This dual potential of urban infrastructure has caught the attention of anthro­ pologists, and there have been several studies of how infrastructure estab­ lishes and shapes relationships between citizens and the government in different societal contexts (see Anand, 2011, 2012; Larkin, 2008, 2013; von Schnitzler, 2008, 2013). We will contribute to this body of literature by discussing the UVAs as an example of an integrated approach to public space and infrastructure that uses narrative strategically to create connec­ tions across scales in the city. Social urbanism in Medellín “Sometimes you need a very bad situation to pull out the best of a people and a society”, the former mayor of Medellín, Aníbal Gaviria, told us in an in­ terview. The crisis he referred to unfolded in the period from 1970 to 1990, when Medellín saw an intense influx of citizens due to extensive domestic mobility and displacement. Informal settlements grew abundantly up the hillsides of Medellín. Criminal cartels controlled informal neighbourhoods, and the homicide rate was among the world’s highest. The city suffered a social, economic and political crisis. The shared experience of an intolerable

Interdisciplinarity on site 113 situation instigated collaboration between politicians, government em­ ployees, architects and activists (Maclean, 2014; McQuirk, 2014; Perez, 2017, 2019). To stop the downward spiral of criminality and instability in the city, a set of unified strategies and interventions, labelled social urbanism, were developed and implemented. Social urbanism is characterized by in­ terdisciplinarity and hinges on the working together of a variety of initiatives, such as the increasing public investments and the availability of public ser­ vices in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Particular emphasis is put on the building of mobility infrastructure and public facilities, and on choosing participatory approaches in local urban transformation projects (McQuirk, 2014; Perez, 2019). At the core of social urbanism is the effort to mitigate inequality. The former mayor, Gaviria explained it this way: “The biggest problem of Latin America is inequality. It’s not violence. Violence is big, but inequality is the root of violence, that’s why inequality is the first [issue we must address]”. A spatial feature of the inequality in the city has been urban exclusion reinforced by the division of the city into separate urban districts, distin­ guishing between formal wealthy and informal poor neighbourhoods. In line with this, Medellín’s social urbanism gives priority to projects that enhance the connectivity of spatially and economically marginalized people. The way Medellín has promoted social inclusion through transport infrastructure is well-known among urban developers and urbanists. The metro line running through the valley forms the infrastructural backbone of the city. The metro connects the poor districts in the northern parts with wealthy districts in the south, as well as connecting both north and south to what is Medellín’s institutional and commercial city centre. Cable car sys­ tems connect the urban residential hillsides, typically developed informally, with the metro line and through this the city’s central parts. This made it feasible for many more to commute to areas where they could make a living independent of the economy controlled by criminal networks. The mobility infrastructure not only constitutes a physical and practical connection between poor and wealthy districts of Medellín; it is also a symbolic con­ nection. The metro and cable car system is a visible expression of inter­ dependence between previously disjunct districts. Six cable-car lines were built successively, and in the meantime, the city of Medellín started developing a series of strategically coordinated inter­ disciplinary urban projects. These PUIs, Proyectos Urbano Integral (Integral Urban Projects) included a wide range of singular projects. There were infrastructural projects such as pedestrian bridges, pavements, walkways and stairs; public spaces such as squares, parks, football fields and play­ grounds; and public facilities such as school buildings, simple sports facil­ ities, libraries and community centres. These projects were developed through participatory programming processes, and are characterized by high material and aesthetic quality. An important feature of the PUIs is that public infrastructure and public space are treated in an integrated manner.

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These urban projects aim to contribute to connectivity and social inclusion in spatial as well as infrastructural ways. In our interview, Aníbal Gaviria emphasized this integration: “The most important public space in a city is the public space of mobility.” The operations of the utility company EPM (Empresas Públicas de Medellín) is also characterized by social urbanism. EPM is a publicprivate company wholly owned by the municipality of Medellín yet op­ erating as a private company. In its unique hybrid role as a public-private company, EPM also provides 30% of its revenues to social projects in the city. Acknowledging that utility infrastructure is not merely a technical matter but also a matter of belonging, security, identity, and other social and psychological issues, EPM uses interdisciplinary teams when they plan and implement water- and electricity infrastructure in the city. One example of this interdisciplinary perspective is EPM’s decision to connect households in informal neighbourhoods to the electricity grid. By con­ necting them to municipal infrastructure, EPM contributes to the legali­ zation of uncontrolled urban expansion. While this is problematic, Valencia explained in our interview, the disadvantage is exceeded by the benefit of acknowledging all inhabitants as citizens with a specific ad­ dress. This way, informal households are connected and incorporated into an urban community where they can enjoy privileges such as elec­ tricity access but also can be expected to adhere to the rules and norms of this community. Along with the mobility infrastructure projects and the PUIs, the EPM policy also has to be considered as a social inclusion measure in Medellín. Urban development and utility provision in Medellín are framed within a contemporary neoliberal city planning and management model. This model has been much debated (Graham & Marvin, 2011; Harvey, 2006). Professionals we interviewed in Medellín pointed out that the very poorest citizens cannot afford public transportation such as the cable car, and that this group has to pay for water use, yet at a reduced price. Within this frame, however, Medellín takes innovative measures to radically renew the neoliberal city model in order to repair inequality and social divisions.

Architectural anthropology on site in UVA de Los Sueños The UVA de Los Sueños is located in the Manrique urban district of Medellín. It includes an open public square surrounding the original water tank. On the one side, the square offers recreational spaces such as a lookout platform with a grand view of the Medellín valley, park elements and playful water fountains. On the other side, built into the terrain and designed as an integrated part of the hilly landscape, is the communitycentre-building with spaces for social and educational uses. UVA de Los Sueños appears as a joyful and beautiful urban space, well designed and with solid materials.

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Figure 6.2 UVA de los Suenõs, located in the Manrique urban district. Photo: Pepe Navarro.

The dark water tank sites represented available plots owned by EPM themselves. Due to criminality and lack of security in these areas, access to the sites for maintenance work demanded planning, contact with local leaders, and a group of guards. The majority of the UVAs have been built in poor and informal urban districts. With the UVA programme, the water tank sites transformed from empty, dark and unsafe spots to well lit, gen­ erous and activated places. All the 14 UVAs follow the same general design concept as UVA de Los Sueños: The main infrastructural element, typically a water tank, stands out as a sculptural element. Built into the hillside is the community centre, while a platform on the valley side provides for a spectacular view. With a shared design concept between all the UVAs, their belonging to EPM can be dis­ tinguished from other hillside community centres and parks, thus forming a connection across the city. The architect in our research team noticed the common design concept of the different UVAs and how this constituted a city-wide connection. She pointed out how the water tanks stand out as architectural sculptures defining each of the places and how water fountains form generous attractions across generations. The anthropologist’s atten­ tion was also drawn to the protruding water tanks. With anthropological theories of infrastructure (such as Anand, 2011, 2012; Larkin, 2008, 2013; von Schnitzler, 2008, 2013) as a lens, the anthropologist interpreted this feature of the UVAs as an intended communication of how all citizens of

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Figure 6.3 Water fountain in UVA de los Suenõs. Photo: Pepe Navarro.

Medellín are connected through water infrastructure. Moreover, the an­ thropologist read the prominence of the water towers in combination with the water fountains as a deliberate branding of EPM as a strong provider of utility services and social services in the community. Hence, in the eyes of the anthropologist, the design concept of the UVAs was one of many ways infrastructure is used in Medellín to foster a sense of community across social and economic divides. Through articulating our respective readings of the same environments as we walked around in the UVA, we were able to see more than we would otherwise have done. The joint explorations of the UVA became a reference point in our further collaboration as it provided us with a common ground of concrete experiences and examples to convey our respective disciplinary perspectives. In EPM’s view and within the concept of social urbanism, the UVA de Los Sueños is not only a building and square with a set of functions but also a catalyst of social change. Several elements of the UVA de Los Sueños, and the other UVAs, play a part in influencing change. First, the programme of functions gives people in the community the opportunity to learn, socialize or exercise in attractive and safe environments. Community library, access to computers, and rooms for rehearsing musical instruments are examples – or a rhumba class for seniors that we encountered in one of the UVAs. Second, the variety of uses entails that people of different ages and interests can enjoy the same place and meet. This might scaffold a sense of

Interdisciplinarity on site 117 community across subgroups in neighbourhoods. Third, the UVAs provide safe spaces in neighbourhoods where criminal networks are influential. Valencia shared the story of a working mother of two boys who had ap­ proached him in an UVA. She used to worry that her children might be recruited by criminal networks after school when she was still at work. Now her sons spend their afternoon at the UVA community centre, and she was much more hopeful. Despite being anecdotal, the story indicates how the UVAs can contribute to reducing the influence of criminal groups. Participatory processes and stakeholder collaboration have been a core adopted principle in planning and materializing the UVAs. Local grounding was a delicate and essential process led by EPM. The functional programme of each UVA was developed based on local participation to provide what was missing and desired in the neighbourhood. While the design concept is common for all the UVAs, the programme of functions differs. As a catalyst of social change, the UVAs are normative spaces where the visitors are met with EPM-branded signs that display the rules for appropriate behaviour. The presence of rules and recommendations for behaviour is also noticeable in public transport, where signs and loud­ speakers are used to guide the travellers. When we travelled by metro and cable car, we were struck by the absence of litter. We asked a woman who sold bracelets from a booth by the cable car station about this. She ex­ plained that people in Medellín are particularly disciplined. Moreover, travellers tell each other off for breaking the rules, and this keeps people in line. The team was subject to such collective disciplining when we unin­ tentionally jumped the queue of people waiting to enter the cable car. Our fellow travellers looked sternly at us when we moved from the outer to the inner line in a bend, instead of sticking to our place. Being trained to use the breaking of norms, intentional or unintentional, as a source of insight into culture, the anthropologist used this incidence to reflect on the UVAs as sites of explicit as well as implicit social control. When she shared this with the team, the architect added a different dimension to the discussion. She had paid attention to the material and aesthetic quality of the UVAs, and started contemplating the significance of high material and aesthetic quality in creating public spaces that influence people to behave with care for the built environment and other people. Due to Medellín’s history of violence, trust in public urban space as an open and socially inclusive space for different people and groups has not been much present and needs to be actively cultivated. The high quality and even elite architecture of the UVAs, as well as other new public spaces, shows a commitment from the city authorities to include all districts in urban regeneration. Moreover, the material quality in combination with good maintenance contributes to safe urban public spaces that encourage different people and groups to meet. Professional urban actors in Medellín, often with architects in the lead, share a clear strategic approach to urbanism, planning and urban

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development. In this strategic approach, narratives have a function. The opening vignette exemplifies this, where Valencia tells us a visual and verbal story of how a photo of Medellín at night triggered a successful initiative for social change. Both the architect and the anthropologist in our research team were intrigued by the story and inspired to explore the UVA projects on site. Valencia’s story also provided an example of how the narrative is used in mobilizing resources internally in EPM. His team presented the visual-verbal story to the board of directors, who saw the potential of the unused sites. They also detected an opportunity for strengthening the pre­ sence of the company in an underserved customer segment. In continuation of the UVA project, the narrative contributed to unite the different dis­ ciplinary sections in the company, such as infrastructural engineering, economy, architecture, anthropology, and sociology in joint efforts to make it work. The architect in the research team sees in the story a combination of beauty and function. In urban and architectural projects, narratives are used for their capacity to generate a shared understanding and common goal, commu­ nicating better across different actors and groups than written descriptions and architectural drawings. As in Medellín, narratives may forward a shared un­ derstanding of a project as contributing to equity, safety and development in the neighbourhoods and the city, continuing through phases of materialization and use (Harboe, 2012). The capacity of narratives to instigate a sense of community across diverse groups is also well known among anthropologists, for instance through multivocality (Turner, 1967), which is the ability of one object, or narrative, to trigger many different associations. A pertinent ques­ tion is who is invited to shape these narratives – the designers or the citizens? And further, do the grand narrative dominate other, parallel narratives? The story of Medellín’s trajectory from violence-ridden and segregated to safe and inclusive is the dominating narrative of the city, reiterated by authorities and people with influential positions in the city. The story has a seductive appeal that causes it to travel widely, and visitors to the city are likely to arrive with this narrative as a lens. A critical approach, looking for muted narratives, is not undue. However, the grand narrative of Medellín should also be read in light of the historical context of the city. A dominating narrative that invites mul­ tivocality but mutes conflicting stories, accompanied by public spaces that foster integration through social control, might be preferred to the risk of reverting to distrust and segregation. Such preference was indicated by people we randomly encountered on the metro, in the UVAs, and on the street in Medellín, who expressed satisfaction with how the city had evolved.

Concluding remarks In the case of the UVAs in Medellín, the narrative is an integrated part of working with infrastructure and urban space in an effort to create social cohesion. The story of how closed off areas constituting

Interdisciplinarity on site 119 neighbourhood borders fraught with danger were transformed into gen­ erous common spaces mirrors the overarching narrative of Medellín’s transformation from a dangerous city to a city of stability and optimism characterized by increasing equity and social cohesion. This way, the story provides a lens that each UVA can be seen through, and importantly, a frame that people using the UVAs can read themselves into. The archi­ tecture of the UVAs, with its generous programming and high material and aesthetic quality, substantiate this. Arguing that “the most intriguing contribution to be expected from ar­ chitectural anthropology lies in combining anthropology’s current material turn with an architectural approach to materiality”, Stender (2017, p. 28) emphasizes how anthropologists can learn to regard the spatial and mate­ rial surroundings as “part and parcel of what constitutes the social” (Stender, 2017, p. 33). Simultaneously, architects can learn from anthro­ pologists’ methods for understanding social contexts. Building on this, we will argue that the potential for these disciplinary understandings to merge constructively, rather than to merely complement each other, lies in working together in the field. This way, architects and anthropologists can guide each other’s attention and share their interpretations, and through this enrich each other’s experience of the same environment. The way the authors merged their different disciplinary perspectives on the form of the UVAs is an example of that. The anthropologist Holbraad (2011) suggests that we strive to listen to things itself, and not only to what people say about things. Building on this, Stender (2017, p. 32) raises the question of how we approach what the built environment itself might be doing or saying. Through working together in the field, we have found that archi­ tectural anthropology expands the capacity for asking new questions to the built environment, or to ask old questions in new ways. In this way the anthropologist’s use of casual interaction with people as a source of insight into cultural practices was productively merged with the architect’s sensi­ tivity to the material presence, to formulate a query about how materiality, functional programming and narrative can work together to design spaces that promote social cohesion. When architects and anthropologists work together over time, they will go through several cycles of exchanging perspectives and building upon them, and gradually incorporate the perspective of the other in their own practice. We do, however, argue that the most important aspect of ar­ chitectural anthropology is what is shared between anthropology and architectural research: The relational epistemology, where knowing cannot be distinguished from the relations through which you have generated this knowledge (Hastrup, 2004; Mosse, 2006), and, following from this, the training in using all senses as a tool for generating knowledge (see Geirbo, 2018). We find that our practice of interdisciplinarity on site gave us access to new ways of knowing urban environments, and in the future, we wish to

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explore this in more depth. We would also like to broaden this approach by investigating how we might include practitioners, stakeholders, and citizens in explorations on site.

Note 1 The project is named ‘Learning Flexibility – Complexity, Innovation and InterUrban Knowledge Transfer’, and is funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

References Anand, N. (2011). Pressure: The politechnics of water supply in Mumbai. Cultural Anthropology, 26(4), 542–564. Anand, N. (2012). Municipal disconnect: On abject water and its urban infra­ structures. Ethnography, 13(4), 487–509. De Laet, M., & Mol, A. (2000). The Zimbabwe bush pump. Social Studies of Science, 30(2), 225. Doyle, C. (2019). Social urbanism: Public policy and place brand. Journal of Place Management and Development. Empresas Públicas de Medellín. (n.d.). Bienvenidos al espacio de Participación ciudadana. Retrieved from www.epm.com.co/site/home/nuestra-empresa/partici pacion-ciudadana Geirbo, H. C. (2018). Knowing through relations: On the epistemology and metho­ dology of being a reflexive insider. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal, 38, 107–123. Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. Taylor & Francis. Harboe, L. (2012). Social concerns in contemporary architecture: Three European practices and their works. Thesis 53. Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Harvey, D. (2006). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Hastrup, K. (2004). Getting it right: Knowledge and evidence in anthropology. Anthropological Theory, 4(4), 455–472. Holbraad, M. (2011). Can the thing speak? Working Paper 7. Open Anthropology Cooperative Press. Ingold, T. (2011). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge. Larkin, B. (2008). Signal and noise: Media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria. Duke University Press Books. Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343. Maclean, K. (2014). The ‘Medellín Miracle’: The politics of crisis, elites and coa­ litions. The Developmental Leadership Program (DLP). McQuirk, J. (2014). Radical cities: Across Latin America in search of a new ar­ chitecture. Verso. Mosse, D. (2006). Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the eth­ nography of public policy and professional communities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(4), 935–956.

Interdisciplinarity on site 121 Perez, J. (2017). Medellín: An urban citizen project. Lecture at Oslo School of Architecture and Design, 16 February. Perez, J. (2019). Medellín: Urbanismo y sociedad. Turner Publicaciones. Perry, D. C. (1994). Building the public city: The politics, governance and finance of public infrastructure (Vol. 43). Sage Publications. Stender, M. (2017). Towards an architectural anthropology: What architects can learn from anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1), 27–43. Turner, V. W. (1967). The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. Cornell University Press. von Schnitzler, A. (2008). Citizenship prepaid: Water, calculability, and technopolitics in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies, 34(4), 899–917. von Schnitzler, A. (2013). Traveling technologies: Infrastructure, ethical regimes, and the materiality of politics in South Africa. Cultural Anthropology, 28(4), 670–693. Zumthor, P. (2006). Atmospheres: Architectural environments. surrounding objects. Birkhäuser.

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Engaging with mixed-use design The case of the urban library in Oslo Cicilie Fagerlid, Bengt Andersen, and Astri Margareta Dalseide

At half past two on a late summer weekday, the library is slowly becoming more crowded as pupils from the nearby schools trickle in. I can hear a baby crying, a lady saying “salaam” and youthful female voices speaking quite loudly from the stage area in the middle of the room. The younger pupils are quieter, trying to hide away in the inner corner, hunched around a table, sipping slushies. Some twelve meters away from me, a librarian is explaining the intricacies of book borrowing by machine to an elderly woman. More pupils enter the room and head straight up the internal stairs to the laughter and joyous noises of their peers. Now the sum of noises surrounding me reaches a level that makes me feel the weight of all seven hours of work in my day so far. From my big, comfy, second-hand recliner, I can see every sound emitter. Thankfully, I am surrounded by six pen­ sioners also in sofas and recliners, all of whom are silently turning newspaper pages, except for the one likely sleeping (architect’s note from cross-disciplinary field work at the Furuset Library, 19 August 2019). Contemporary public libraries are complex places, serving the private, professional, and civic requirements of people of all ages and backgrounds simultaneously (Aabø & Audunson, 2012). In several countries, politi­ cians and academics have increasingly emphasized libraries as meeting places (Aabø & Audunson, 2012; Jochumsen, Rasmussen & SkotHansen, 2012; Johnson & Griffis, 2009) or as “critical forms of social infrastructure” that provide “the setting and context for social partici­ pation” (Klinenberg, 2018, p. 32). This also holds true for Norway and its capital, Oslo. The Norwegian Library Act from 2014 states that “the public library should be a meeting place and arena for public debate” (Kulturdepartementet, 2014). Correspondingly, the Municipality of Oslo hired the Dutch interior architecture firm Aat Vos to refurbish its branch libraries. Vos’s projects accentuate libraries’ “third place” character (Aat Vos, n.d.a, n.d.b), the term used by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg (1989) for local community spaces distinct from both home and work. The meeting place function is particularly emphasized at the branches in the ethnically heterogeneous and socioeconomically disadvantaged neigh­ bourhoods of Furuset and Stovner, discussed in detail below. In addition

Engaging with mixed-use design 123 to Vos, the Norwegian architect firm Rodeo participated in the library redesign at Furuset (Rodeo Architects, 2017). This chapter explores how an increased use of continuous or open floor plans in libraries as well as the incorporation of mixed-use spaces, which have become the physical expression of the meeting place paradigm, transform library life. “Mixed use” stands in opposition to “the principles of functionalism”, which result in the separation of library uses (Hoppenbrouwer & Louw, 2005, p. 967). As a popular idea among ar­ chitects and urban planners for some time (e.g. MVRDV, n.d.), it has also been examined in academic scholarship (e.g. Filion, 2001; Manaugh & Kreider, 2013). Rodeo’s description of its strategy when planning the li­ brary redesign at Furuset illustrates the concept of mixed use: “The initial aim of the project was to collect a number of municipal public activities under one roof” (Rodeo Architects, 2017). Library leaders argue that mixed use of the library space widens the horizon of visitors who initially enter, for example, to read a newspaper but stumble upon a book launch with a leading author. Visitors do report this kind of serendipitous usage, but not as frequently as they complain that events and noise disturb their intended errand or that inconsiderate passersby distract them from the event. Our findings suggest that the public’s in­ terest in and benefit from these libraries dominated by mixed-used and meeting spaces are – at best – ambivalent (see also Audunson et al., 2019).

Research strategies This chapter draws on anthropologist Fagerlid’s two months of participant experience and observation at Furuset Library in 2012 and ten months at the same library, refurbished and renamed Fubiak, as well as other Oslo library branches, including Stovner, in 2017–2018.1 Anthropologist Andersen and architect Dalseide undertook a shorter period of joint field­ work visits to Fubiak combined with observations and interviews with re­ sidents in the surrounding neighbourhoods in the summer and autumn of 2019. In sum, we interviewed or talked to more than one hundred library visitors aged 15–88, members of staff and middle managers, and social workers and police officers working at Furuset. Through engaging atten­ tively with the environment, a huge variety of different and at times in­ congruous library usages became apparent. Dalseide and Andersen’s project was to study the many arenas and localities at Furuset. Dalseide examined relevant planning documents, like site and location plans. Inspired both by the REAP methodology (Taplin, Scheld, & Low, 2002) and the architect’s interest in materials, building heights, topography and so on, Andersen and Dalseide mapped and recorded Furuset’s physical and social environments. In addition to their own readings of these spaces, different strategies – such as ob­ servation of use, a survey to residents,2 conversations and interviews and

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readings of documents – were used to generate knowledge on how the residents and visitors perceived and used areneas like Fubiak. Document analysis has also been important in order to understand what the architecture firms were assigned to design and what they themselves expressed as design goals and methods when planning and designing the refurbishments.

The library as a mixed-use meeting place in a segregated city The dualism between the affluent, ‘white’ West Oslo and the disadvantaged, ‘immigrant’ East Oslo is well-recognized in the Norwegian capital and evinced by research (e.g. Wessel, 2015). Furuset and Stovner in the Grorud Valley in East Oslo, both score among the lowest areas in Norway in terms of life expectancy, level of education, and literacy and numeracy; they have high school dropout rates, levels of unemployment, traffic injuries and noise, and poverty (Ljunggren, Toft, & Flemmen, 2017, pp. 370–376). Furuset is often associated with gangs and criminal activity that takes place in public spaces. While the police do not view the area as “dangerous”, some local residents feel unsafe after dark (cf. Andersen, 2012). To remedy this situation, since 2007, Oslo politicians have turned to “area-based in­ itiatives” in eastern parts of Oslo, including Furuset and Stovner (Andersen & Biseth, 2013, p. 9). In implementing these initiatives, planners view the establishment of “meeting places” as a key tool to facilitate interactions between neighbours. These interactions are presumed to increase local so­ cial cohesion and result in the “integration” of ethnic minorities into mainstream society, particularly the job market (Andersen & Brattbakk, 2020). Though the origin of the “meeting place” concept in Norwegian urban planning strategies is difficult to pinpoint, planning authorities have nevertheless considered it a useful tool in eastern areas like Furuset since at least the 1990s (Johnsen, 1999). In 2016, Furuset Library became a multifunctional locale, “coorganized” by the youth club and volunteer centre (Rosten, Hagen, & Tolstad, 2019, pp. 19–20), forming Furuset Library and Activity House (Fubiak). Fubiak is described as “a strategic arena” in the area-based strategy at Furuset (Arkitektur skaper verdi, n.d.). Explaining the ideas behind Fubiak, the architects from Rodeo observed: “There is a need for meeting places, localities for happenings and arenas for integration. In brief, places where people can meet and where things happen […]. The library at Furuset is one example of such an arena” (Rodeo Architects, 2017). Similarly, in 2018, Stovner Library was relocated from its old, rundown locale next to the Stovner shopping centre to the top floor of the newly remodelled mall, where it was baptized a “social library”. It is worth noting that prior to its relocation and redesign, Stovner Library was a slightly rundown yet popular place for many Stovner residents (Andersen, Brattbakk, Dalseide, Mæhle, & Ruud, 2018).

Engaging with mixed-use design 125

Figure 7.1 Furuset Library before the 2016 refurbishment. Photo: Cicilie Fagerlid.

The idea of Norwegian libraries as meeting places and arenas for events and social activities gained strength with the 2014 amendment to the Library Act. Interior architect Aat Vos’s subsequent revamping of Oslo branch libraries resulted in the removal of internal walls and sectioning shelves higher than hip level and the allocation of the events area to a central position in a practically entirely open space. The libraries have be­ come airier, and assorted seating facilities invite to prolonged stays. The continuous floorplan and mixed-use space are most thoroughly im­ plemented at the Furuset and Stovner branches, where the entire – though substantially reduced – literature collections are placed on wall-mounted shelves. Serving as both an activity house and library, Fubiak also contains multipurpose rooms of various sizes that can be reserved without fee for music, dance and exercise classes, parent and baby activities, language training, lectures or studying. Some of the rooms have transparent walls so that the activities in session can be observed from the library room, en­ couraging the onlooker, according to the architects’ plan, to engage with someone or something new. “The need for imperfection” is, according to Aat Vos’s blog (Aat Vos n.d.b), an essential idea of their work. The ar­ chitect explains that “the strength of the imperfect is that people feel safe. Informality has a tendency to bring people closer to each other”

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(Arkitektur skaper verdi, n.d.). According to the interior architects, they have succeeded because Furuset House is now a library that dares to stray far away from the classic white-walled environment and demands to be enjoyed longer than planned. This public space is a home away from home that invites you to stay, to meet people and to enjoy. The Furuset House is now a cultural hotspot in an Oslo suburb. (Aat Vos, n.d.a) The result of the redesign at Furuset and to an even greater extent at Stovner is fanciful design, great publicity, overwhelmingly positive media coverage and huge increases in visitors (see Arkitektur skaper verdi, n.d.). But nowhere do library users of all ages and backgrounds complain more about noise. While more people are spending more time in both branches, some former users are travelling elsewhere, and others are avoiding the local amenities altogether.

“Who can imagine that the youth of Stovner have the brains for studying?” We suggest that the politico-material restructuring of the library as primarily a social infrastructure in socioeconomically disadvantaged and ethnically heterogeneous East Oslo is counterproductive to the library’s traditional quality as a “complex” (Aabø & Audunson, 2012), “heterotopic”, “con­ tradictory” and “transboundary” place (Engström, 2019, pp. 47–50). More precisely, the social emphasis in open floorplans is detrimental to the library’s potential to bring together different people with dissimilar and, at times, incompatible needs. The mixed-use design and the increased noise that it creates are unfavourable to the library’s function as a quiet place for well­ being and reading. This result is a political paradox because Furuset and Stovner are areas where facilities that afford tranquillity and study en­ vironments helpful for social mobility are most needed; in Furuset, around 40% of adults have only a primary school education, in comparison to 10% in the West End neighbourhood of Slemdal (Ruud et al., 2019, p. 44). Maintaining a quiet space in the library is arguably crucial to creating an environment conducive to activities that allows residents to further their education and improve their socioeconomic position. Astrid, 47 years old and from nearby Furuset, and Torbjørn, five years older and residing in Stovner, are both teachers in immigrant adult edu­ cation. As they regularly pursue further education, both Astrid and Torbjørn try to use the library for reading and writing term papers. They also attend literary events and debates in their spare time. They are, moreover, concerned about their adult students and the students’ “second generation” children, who are typical users of the Stovner and Furuset

Engaging with mixed-use design 127 Libraries. We contacted Torbjørn after reading the frustration that he aired on his Facebook wall when attempting to study at Stovner Library: No quiet space, no reading room. But a cosy corner, literature forest, bar stools and a sound volume at the level of a central city coffee bar at lunchtime. For who can imagine that the youth of Stovner have the brains for studying? (Torbjørn, aged 52, Facebook, February 2019)

Figure 7.2 Fubiak – with its open space – invites children to run. Photo: Cicilie Fagerlid.

In our conversation shortly afterwards, Torbjørn and Astrid compared the different effects that “having books all around” as in “a classic library” and “the big open space of Furuset and Stovner” have on users’ behaviour. Astrid likens the two branch libraries to Espresso House, a slick Scandinavian Starbucks-style coffee house chain that somehow conveys, as a witty friend once remarked, a sense of “sitting in the midst of capitalism”. Astrid’s critique thus appears harsh. She elaborates: I think Espresso House is delicious. One just wants to enter and have a coffee. So, it isn’t only a critique. But it is something about the intentions here. And if it is only Espresso House and no reading room, then that’s different. I’ve been taught that in libraries one should be quiet. Bookshelves remind you that this is a library. But when the

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Fagerlid, Andersen, & Dalseide library no longer looks like a library, then you’re no longer reminded that this is a place where we should read. […] Kids like to run in an open space. It’s an invitation to run! (Astrid, aged 47)

Astrid emphasizes that as a child she too had to learn how to use the library and to handle library books: “It isn’t care to say that anything goes. Care is to guide and help people.” Sofia, seventeen years old, came to Norway from East Africa through family reunification four years ago. She studies for long hours, weekends included, in the popular twelve-seater “quiet room” at Fubiak. If the tiny quiet room is full, “there’s no point”, and she must go home “and listen to daddy’s noise” or travel to quieter libraries elsewhere: Because in the library outside the quiet room, it is noisy. Bad, to be honest. I won’t lie about it. It ought to be the kind of library that is quiet. If there is an event, that’s nice, but to do it simultaneously with the library [functions], that’s not so smart. It might be smart, in a way, because those who come for the event suddenly, one day, change their mind and start to read. I haven’t met anyone who started reading because they came here, but it can happen. I wouldn’t have started coming to the library if my teacher hadn’t taken me that day. I wouldn’t have had as good grades. I didn’t know about the library before. (Sofia, aged 17) Sofia talks about how she, like many others who stay at home – as un­ employed or “school drop-outs” in small, overcrowded apartments at Furuset (Ruud et al., 2019) – was “depressed, with many negative thoughts” before she discovered the library. In such cases, it is better, she reasons, to go out and perhaps become acquainted with new people at Fubiak. She adds, “but it’s bad, too. So many come [to the library] only to sit”. They may even encounter unsavoury people; recently, a stabbing oc­ curred right outside the library entrance. Sofia further remarks, “I used to know some of them. They were so kind, but they didn’t know right from wrong.” Like Astrid, Sofia stresses that at the library, “there ought to be limits or stricter rules”. Sofia epitomizes thus the immigrant population’s concern for and success in education (see also Kindt & Hegna, 2017) as well as Torbjørn and Astrid’s worries, and Astrid’s point about how im­ portant it is to instil appropriate library and study comportment into younger generations. Sofia’s analysis of Furuset encapsulates to what extent “social libraries” and the “concept of mixed use is … ambiguous” (Hoppenbrouwer & Louw, 2005, p. 968). Sofia therefore illustrates the importance of libraries though also the crux of our argument about “social libraries” in a disadvantaged area. With sufficient space for quiet concentration, she, like Torbjørn and

Engaging with mixed-use design 129 Astrid, would contribute positively to an inclusive yet regulated library atmosphere. Instead, they retreat, leaving the space to noisier activities and those who “come only to sit”. Gradually, the library space changes, alienating and deterring former and potential users in search of peace. “This place is worse than a nightclub,” lamented a local university stu­ dent on Fubiak’s Facebook wall in May 2018. “I do not know why they call it a library. Perhaps the person who designed it has never been to a library?” Sofia, Torbjørn and Astrid are not exceptions. Young people miss li­ brary order as much as older ones. Many of those we talked to associate the “classical” library structure with mild but persistent compulsion. Jamila, aged nineteen, reminisces about Furuset, before it was redesigned, that “we had to leave with three books. We were sort of forced. I loved it! I was looking forward to it”. Now, smartphones, social media and tele­ vision series replace reading in her and many others’ lives. Jamila and her friends Erwin and Nisrin, gap year students who occasionally use the li­ brary to improve their grades to gain access to university, point to a si­ milar change in emphasis from books to screens in Oslo’s libraries. They remark that before there were fewer people at the library, but they came there to read; now it has become a “place for loitering” for the many. “The library was the library”, Jamila says. Erwin adds: “Now it is more, ‘oh, we can be at the library, hang around there’.” An elderly Furuset regular regrets how the library has become “an all-purpose room”. “In our society”, she says, “where there’s so much information and noise that distract, one ought to have a place to, literally, rest in one’s own thoughts and experiences”. The perception of library space is however subjective, with features that disturb or annoy some being highly appreciated by others. Neither age, class nor ethnic background seem to correlate with attitudes towards and perceptions of the new libraries, as exemplified by Liv, a recently retired pharmacy technician and labour unionist, and Ola, a former economist on long-term sick leave. Liv regularly attends the book club, the knitting café and various literary events at Furuset. While listening to a local rapper before a Meet the Author event she expressed a sensation that “even at Furuset something is happening! Culture! Oh, my!”. Ola travels forty minutes by bus and metro to Furuset where he spends whole days and evenings. The library’s life, noise and momentary outbreaks of chaos, which may disturb others, amuse and intrigue him. “The physical conditions are very good”, he exclaims, further noting that compared to “big and airy” Furuset, he finds other libraries “too narrow, compact and quiet”. At Furuset, he even saw someone bicycle inside during staff-less opening hours. With a calm, perhaps slightly amused voice, he insists that he personally does not find such incidents unpleasant. Neither Liv nor Ola require the library for calm and concentration, instead attending in part for its entertainment value.

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Figure 7.3 The open floorplan of Fubiak, with the make-shift event area at the centre. Photo: Cicilie Fagerlid.

Complex and changing library space Contemporary public libraries are “super-diverse “(Vertovec, 2007), “hyper-diverse” (Tasan-Kok, Kempen, Raco, & Bolt, 2013) and unusually “multivocal and polyvalent” (Bender, 2002) places. They simultaneously serve the private, professional and civic needs of people of all ages and backgrounds (Aabø & Audunson, 2012). In addition to the regular news­ paper readers, young students and book borrowers, the unrestricted access and supervised, safe space of libraries attract the homeless for warm rest, eastern European Rom skyping home on free WiFi and minor drug dealers finding protection from rivals (for some similar observations from Sweden, see Beutgen, Lundgren, Fjelkegå rd, & Patel, 2020). The library space thus caters to exceptionally different needs and holds different meaning for people in diverse life circumstances. Over the last 30–40 years, Norwegian library architecture has increasingly tried to accommodate this tre­ mendously varied usage in the library’s physical form. Previously a quiet and slightly stern fortress of knowledge and Bildung dominated by tall, narrow shelves, the architecture now signals a democratization of access to information (Gullestad, 2003). Rows of computers, cosy sofas and long tables replace the increasingly trimmed collections. Stand-alone shelves are truncated to enable a view (and video monitoring during staff-less opening hours) of the whole library room.

Engaging with mixed-use design 131 The public’s interest in the library as a meeting place appears however to be ambivalent. A North European survey among library users and non-users ranked the library’s functions as a meeting place and arena for debate as the least important out of twelve possible legitimations for upholding a public library service. At the same time, more than half of the respondents using the library reported having had unplanned exchanges with acquaintances or strangers there (Audunson et al., 2019). Our observations and conversations with library visitors confirm these contradictory tendencies. Undoubtedly, the patrons of Oslo Libraries constitute a highly heterogeneous user group in terms of age as well as socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious background. Brief encounters occur, particularly around the printer, in the children’s section and the newspaper corner. Many people, perhaps particularly those who feel lonely, say they find such ephemeral exchanges highly meaningful (Fagerlid, 2016, 2020). The dominant pattern in Fubiak, however, was that visitors tend to keep to themselves. Local youth would often greet each other yet still practise a social or socio-spatial avoidance. As two teenage girls sitting by the entrance explained to us when we asked them why they did not walk over to the staircase where the other teenagers were congregating; the other youths belonged to a different group with a lifestyle our two inter­ locutors considered different from their own. Sofia said she knew most of the youth at the youth club at the first floor, she would however “never come to the library to just sit up there.” Furthermore, in response to our survey, few people living in the adjacent neighbourhoods responded that they visited Fubiak. Such observations make it challenging to argue that the redesign of Fubiak works as intended. Open floor plans and mixed-use space might make people see and hear each other, but not necessarily make them talk to each other. Furthermore, social activities in an open floor plan necessarily eclipse other essential aspects of the library, including being a unique place for quiet coexistence (Fagerlid, 2016, 2017, 2020). The fact that Norwegian libraries are diversifying their activities and accentuating the social aspects of their services at the same time as political and architectural trends are leaning towards opening up and spatially integrating or desegregating different uses presents a quandary.

Concluding remarks In Oslo, a restructuring of library space has taken place, where the physical separation of activities has been succeeded by an “intermingling” (Rodeo Architects, 2017) of different activities, so that sound replaces quietness, and sociability replaces concentration. Through political decisions, planning strategies and architectural changes, the library as “social infrastructure” (Klinenberg, 2018) slowly displaces the library as infrastructure for culture, knowledge and information. As “mixed use” is said to be “a mantra in contemporary planning” (Grant, 2002, p. 71, quoted in; Hoppenbrouwer & Louw, 2005, p. 968), there are reasons for scholars to critically examine this

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concept and the designs informed by this “instrument” (ibid.). The mixedused design is certainly favoured by some. Ola preferred Fubiak to the more “narrow, compact and quiet” types of library. Yet while many people do use and enjoy Fubiak, some react negatively to its hustle and bustle, and others avoid it altogether. While these mixed-used arenas are designed to afford meetings between different social groups, serving, as Grant (2002, p. 80) has noted, as “a means to social integration”, we have demonstrated that the new libraries alienate and deter users in need of quietness and concentration. From a policy perspective, favouring a mixed-use design, thus seems coun­ terproductive. According to many of those that we met, there was, para­ phrasing the architect Aat Vos, something “imperfect” about the library. However, there are reasons to be optimistic. The most recent rumours from Furuset suggest that users and librarians will be heard in their wish to re­ introduce sufficient separation of activities, thus making it easier to live with difference (Peterson, 2017) or at least for people to engage in different activities without bothering others.

Notes 1 Fagerlid’s fieldwork in the Oslo Libraries was part of her postdoctoral fellowship within the Archives, Libraries and Museums, digitalization, and the Public Sphere (ALMPUB) programme, financed by the Norwegian Research Council. 2 Unfortunately, the survey had a low response rate: 205 respondents from a po­ pulation of 10,091.

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Johnson, C. A., & Griffis, M. R. (2009). A place where everybody knows your name? Investigating the relationship between public libraries and social capital. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 33(3/4), 159–191. Kindt, M. T., & K. Hegna (2017). Innvandrerdriv på Oslos østkant: Aspirasjoner om høyere utdanning blant yrkesfagelever og elitestudenter med innvandrerbakgrunn i Oslo. In J. Ljunggren (Ed.), Oslo – ulikhetenes by (pp. 277–292). Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Klinenberg, E. (2018). Palaces for the people: How social infrastructure can help fight inequality, polarization, and the decline of civic life. Broadway Books. Kulturdepartementet (2014). Lov om folkebibliotek (folkebibliotekloven). Retrieved from https://lovdata.no/dokument/NL/lov/1985-12-20-108 Ljunggren, J., Toft, M., & Flemmen, M. (2017). Geografiske klasseskiller. Fordelingen av goder og byrder mellom Oslos bydeler. In J. Ljunggren (Ed.), Oslo – ulikhetenes by (pp. 359–376). Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Manaugh, K., & Kreider, T. (2013). What is mixed use? Presenting an interaction method for measuring land use mix. Journal of Transport and Land Use, 6(1), 63–72. MVRDV. (n.d.). Mixed Use. Densification for the city. Retrieved from www.mvrdv. nl/themes/5/mixed-use Oldenburg, R. (1989). The great good place: Cafes, coffee shops, bookstores, bars, hair salons, and other hangouts at the heart of a community. Marlowe & Company. Peterson, M. (2017). Living with difference in hyper-diverse areas: How important are encounters in semi-public spaces? Social & Cultural Geography, 18(8), 1067–1085. doi:10.1080/14649365.2016.1210667 Rodeo Architects. (2017). Furuset Library and Activity Centre, Oslo. Arkitektur, N(2). Rosten, M. G., Hagen, A. L., & Tolstad, I. M. (2019). Samskaping og usynlige barrierer i et åpent hus. evaluering av partnerskapet i Furuset bibliotek og akti­ vitetshus (FUBIAK). Nova Notat 3/19. Ruud, M. E., Andersen, B., Berge, S., Dalseide, A. M., Staven, H. D., Mamelund, S.-E., & Skogheim, R. (2019). Spenninger og harmoni – Sosiokulturell stedsanalyse for Furuset. Retrieved from https://fagarkivet-hioa.archive.knowledgearc.net/bitstream/ hand 2019le/20.500.12199/2977/2019-18.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Taplin, D. H., Scheld, S. & Low, S. M. (2002). Rapid ethnographic assessment in urban parks: A case study of independence national historical park. Human Organization, 61(1), 80–93. Tasan-Kok, Tuna, Kempen, Ronald, Raco, Mike, & Bolt, Gideon. (2013). Towards hyper-diversified European cities: A critical literature review. Retrieved from https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685.4902&rep=rep1 &type=pdf Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024–1054. doi:10.1080/01419870701599465 Wessel, T. (2015). Economic segregation in Oslo: Polarisation as a contingent outcome. In T. Tammaru, S. Marcińczak, M. van Ham, & S. Musterd (Eds), Socio-economic segregation in European capital cities: East meets West. Routledge.

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Urban youth, narrative dialogues, and emotional imprints How co-creating the ‘splotting’ methodology became a transformative journey into interdisciplinary collaboration Aina Landsverk Hagen and Jenny B. Osuldsen

“I am from Tøyen” The first time I, a social anthropologist, approached city youth as a pro­ fessional researcher, I was terrified. And with good reason it turned out. We had gathered 40 kids from the age of 10 to 18, to ask them what they wanted in their neighbourhood Tøyen in Oslo, Norway, as a means to make it a better place to live. It was not a success. One young boy just looked at me and said “are you saying that Tøyen isn’t a good place to grow up?” I immediately realized I had asked the wrong question. And then he added: “People ask me where I am from. When I say I am from Tøyen, they say, “no, where are you really from? And they won’t give in until I say Somalia. Or Iraq. Or Pakistan. Why should I care?” The majority of the kids we meet in our research on urban development and participation (Brattbakk et al., 2015) are of multicultural background, they are born in Norway, most of them have grown up in Oslo, in these neighbourhoods and yet their stories tell us they are not allowed by others to belong here. And then we, the adult professionals, landscape architect and anthropologist on commission from the municipality, come in on top of that and ask them how they want to change their neighborhood, into a better place to live. They refused. They refused to cooperate and through this act of subversion they refuse the world that deny them their kind of belonging. That’s what they are really telling us. This experience made us stop, and reflect on our own work, position and methods. What is important to these urban youth in their everyday lives? How can we find out without alienating them and their everyday experi­ ences of belonging in urban spaces? How can urban planning processes include their perspectives, embodied knowledge and experiences, when designing public spaces?

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We know that very few belong to one place only, even though this is requested by a lot of people (Rosten, 2015). To be a human being in the world is to be in continuous movement (Ingold, 2011) rather than your identity being firmly connected to the identity of a place, in the way that Norberg-Schulz’s (1980) ideas about genus loci, ‘a unity of place and identity’ emphasizes (Møystad, 2012). We see spatial belonging as also relational belonging, like Lefebvre (1974/1991) realized: Space is being constituted by social relations, rather than “its territorial, physical, and demographic characteristics” (Fainstein, 2014, p. 1). An emerging collaboration with landscape architect Jenny B. Osuldsen enabled me, the anthropologist, to connect these insights with the work and thinking of planners and architects. I introduced her to the methodology of ‘splotting’ (Tolstad et al., 2017), a simple mode of inquiry where we use drawing and words to map places where one feel one belongs, without privileging one place over others. A pen and a piece of paper is all you need to splot. This chapter presents the story of an interdisciplinary collabora­ tion (Fokdal, 2020) emerging between a landscape architect and a social anthropologist, inventing, testing and experimenting with new methods and approaches together.1 It is a story of continuing dialogues. In this way it is also a story about how architectural anthropology can be done, in practice. What do you do? Where to start? We start with the stories, the narrative dialogues and a visualization method called splot. Later Jenny realized the acronym could incorporate the notions of space, people, learning, observation, and tracking (SPLOT), all integral to explore within the framework of this methodology (Hagen & Osuldsen, forth­ coming). After the initial confrontation with the youth in Tøyen we started to ask different questions. Questions that were not about ticking a box or fulfilling a task for a research contractor. Yet, we still struggled with what we had discovered, to articulate it to each other and to find use for it in our respective disciplines: Aina (anthropologist):

Jenny (landscape architect):

People clearly connect with many places at once, and over time. This is true also for inhabitants in cities, as they move through urban settings and make meaning and experience what we can call ‘temporal belonging’. To get a grip on what this meaning making consists of, is difficult. People’s stories are so diverse. Atmosphere, character and identity of public space is difficult to explain in physical terms and even harder to make a design that people feel belonging to.

The concept of ‘temporal belonging’ as an integral and positive act of claiming ownership to common, urban realm, where you spend time in

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Figure 8.1 A young girl drawing her ‘splot’. Photo: Karoline Hjorth.

everyday life, challenge classic urban theory, where urbanity is connected to the identities of ‘the stranger’ (Bauman, 1991) and the non-places of supermodernity (Augé, 1995/2008). Belonging can be endured ‘out of time’, and as such defy understandings of linear temporality and the singular self

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(May, 2016). The narrative about oneself usually incorporates a travel in time and space, like one of the youth in Oslo describes: “The nice thing about splotting was that it brought me back to my childhood.” Building on a positive psychology approach and appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999), we choose to focus on what feels good and strengthen these traits in collaboration with others, rather than dive into the challenges and problems. This works especially well with youth that are deemed ‘trouble’ by others, a trait that plays out in public space regularly. We discovered that as people construct their multifaceted and multidimensional selves, they repeatedly construct a sense of space(s) that encompasses this diversity within and between us. Learning from the interaction with our young participants, our questions aim straight for the heart and does not take their perception of belonging for granted. So, we ask: where do you feel good? What places do you carry in your heart? A paper and a pen, and some simple instructions. People are ready for action. The splot is almost a comical opposite to the architectural rendering. In every architectural competition, regulation plan and student work, an illus­ tration of atmosphere is included, a visualization. This representation of vo­ lume, materiality, the recognizable (connected to belonging) and seasonal factors, are integral to ‘sell’ the project to a jury, teacher or the public – the latter is usually illiterate when it comes to plans and sections. A rendering is supposed to, simply put, portray where it is ‘nice to be’. A global industry of rendering producers has emerged the past decades and contributes to the fact that architecture and renderings have turned into a sort of similar ‘global aesthetic’. Or rather, they have such a real-life quality to them, that they are tricking the viewer into appreciating an ideal place where everything is generic and unrecognizable, “people are happy”. The messy realities of trash, conflict or poverty, is wiped out. Scholars within environmental architecture have shown how architects’ preferences diverge from the public, probably due to the architectural training that focus on aesthetic standards (Devlin & Nasar, 1989; Gifford et al., 2000). This creates problems when architects and planners are unable to vision what people prefer when designing a public place. *** I, the landscape architect, was some weeks later invited to join in on a workshop with youth in Tøyen, to test a new methodology for involving users in participatory activities. I teach a third year studio course in land­ scape architecture on how to design public spaces. Here people’s use of and feeling of belonging to public spaces are integral parts of the curriculum. In Norway, landscape architects work with all types of landscapes and en­ vironments between the buildings; planning, designing, or maintaining our common ground, such as urban spaces, streets, roads, and parks. The Norwegian Planning and Building Act (2008) regulates the planning pro­ cesses and the processes of building applications for public spaces and user

The ‘splotting’ methodology 139 participation is required by law. Particularly the environment children and youth grow up in and “the aesthetic design of project surroundings” are to be taken into account (Planning and Building Act, 2008, section 1.1). The desire for public involvement is to better understand the users’ needs, knowledge and requirements in the design process. The challenge is to create involvement and to catch the personal stories about ‘good sites’, translate the reflections and use the information as a tool for designing more inclusive and better places. Another challenge for future landscape architects when designing urban areas with a diverse population is that the students are predominantly majority Norwegians of middle class background, many from rural, or small towns in Norway, about 70–80% female and most of them youth in their mid-twenties and with few visible markers of ‘difference’. Aina:

We struggle with finding methods on participation in urban development that produce data material, or rather ‘traces’ of inhabitant’s perception of their current and future surroundings, that will actually be used by public officials. We don’t get results that speak the planners’ ‘language of power’. Jenny: We haven’t been too successful applying methods for participation in our design processes. So why not try a different angle, with dialogue as core of the method? And let’s focus on young professionals and youth as users, that both can make a difference in the long term perspective.

A tool for participant listening Here is a story of a sailboat and two young women with very different background, yet both grew up in the same country, Norway. We put to­ gether a group of teens with a group of students in landscape architecture. Future planners and designers. Most of the students have not interacted much with kids of a transnational background, or users of public spaces in general. We train them in participatory observation and fieldwork methods, using the splot as a dialogue object, a sort of visual interview guide. The students met the teens in a classroom and started to engage in conversation. One of the students drew a sailboat in her splot, as she grew up in the south of Norway, on the coastline. She explained how she loved being on that sailboat, that’s a place she felt good. The young girl from an urban innercity area in Oslo just responded with a “wow”. That is exotic. Diversity is everywhere. We all have it in us, even though it doesn’t always show on the surface. Splotting is both a mode of inquiry, and a concrete visualization tool created in collaboration to strengthen the ability of anthropologists, ar­ chitects and all disciplines in between to engage in what we call participant listening (Hagen, 2014). Our initial intention was to test the method on

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Jenny’s students at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences at Ås (NMBU) to see if it could be used as a dialogue object in transferring people’s stories of everyday life and belonging, to eventually become a design parameter. One of our struggles in this endeavour was to figure out: What do our disciplines have in common, so we can bridge our work and collaborate? Jenny:

Aina:

When I was introduced to the student’s curriculum, there was too little focus on the user. Landscape architecture is, like anthropology, a holistic endeavor, emphasizing the many layers to a site and aspire to have a humble take on public space to include ‘everybody’ in everyday life. When I was studying the Tøyen area, I was introduced to the concept of socio-cultural site analysis (Ruud et al., 2007) as a mode of inquiry, where you do a 360-degree investigation of a limited area in a city to look for diverging interests regarding place, images of place and use of places. It was an epistemological eye-opener for an anthropologist used to doing topic-focused ethnography in urban settings.

The splot and how to do it We have defined the splot method as the process and time it takes to draw a heart, representing your own heart, on a piece of paper, before drawing the wobbly ‘splot shape’ around any number of miniature drawings or key words that answers the question “where do you feel good?” – and then to share the thoughts and reflections behind this simplistic drawing. Every individual creates and defines their own splot and choose how and how much they would like to tell others. It aims to expose personal, not private, stories of temporal belonging, envoking positive affects to transient ex­ periences in urban spaces. The inspiration for the wobbly shape came from previous anthropological research on collective creativity among architects, where we found that even experienced architects in the company Snøhetta, (where Jenny is a partner), are afraid of drawing a circle, or ‘the first line’, in fear of being critiqued by peers (Hagen & Rudningen, 2012). But to draw the first line also gives you power. To find a form that can be described and subject to instruction, but never be perfect, was therefore decisive for inventing the method as a drawing exercise, as a way of transferring power between the design expert and youth. The heart in the middle of the splot shape is the reminder of the focus of the task: Your own emotional gravitation. The process is open-ended, as you can draw or write names of concrete places, or associations that remind you of a place, including abstract experiences like reading books, listening to music, be alone or with others – allowing for a disarray of words and sketches of no hierarchical or prioritized order. It could also be an activity,

The ‘splotting’ methodology 141 like soccer, that transforms every soccer field into a good place, regardless of where it is located. The stories emerging from the splot don’t presuppose a linear structure or hierarchical logic. There is a generosity for more places, rather than the one place that is the only good or qualified place to belong to. This gives the method immense flexibility and opens for both the concrete and abstract in the conversation. We have witnessed the positive effect of this particularly when working with children, youth or adults that struggle in communicating abstract notions like space, place, identity and belonging. This is also the case in design processes where it often is hard to transform the abstract into physical form. Let’s hear another story to explore this further.

The moment of magic and finding eutopia – the good place Meet Wisdom, as we called him. We met in a classroom in Hersleb high school in Grønland. He was 30 minutes late and his body language was screaming, I do not want to be here (not an uncommon first reaction when we work with youth). Then we got him into the splot exercise. And he melted. We melted. We started to share stories. That is what we call ‘the equalizer effect’ (Tolstad et al., 2017). When we discover his passion for music, his love for his mum, the importance of Islam in his life. And he discovers us. He gets curious about our passions, music, books. And then the stories that are important to us emerges. In a moment of serendipity, my colleague, local artist and pedagogue Nina Vestby asks him to embroider his splot on a small piece of canvas, stitching his transnational identity. Vestby introduced an additional layer to the paper and pen approach, she calls it ‘narrative embroidery’ (Vestby, 2020). Here we ask the participants to transfer their personal splot shape to an embroidery canvas. They choose the colour of thread and start the process of translating meaningless form (the splot) to meaningful, identity-dense visualizations. No rules. This engulfs us all in a ‘slow space’, defined by the rhythmic movement of the thread and the needle, where young men like Wisdom and landscape architect students both seem to thrive. The personal stories and dialogical reflections follow. This is when the magic of slow space and safe space takes hold. And this is one of the more surprising findings from experimenting with this tool. It is the young, restless boys who just keep on going with the needle and the thread. Defining their splot as their narrative identity. They don’t want to go home, they want to sit there – in that slow, meditative space and talk about everything and nothing. What matters. To splot someone, provides an immediate gate opener into the subjective world of others. In our repeated engagements with youth of minority background from urban areas in Oslo and students of landscape archi­ tecture we see how the narrative dialogues that naturally emerges through asking each other “where do you feel good”, leaves an emotional imprint. It has an immediate affectional dimension. People share their personal stories.

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Figure 8.2 Transferring the splot from a piece of paper to an embroidery canvas. Photo: Karoline Hjorth.

They are moving each other, engaging with each other through stories of everyday life encapsulating both solidary sameness and radical difference. We learned quickly that the method has to include everyone present, including the facilitator, interviewer or researcher, bringing their personal splot into the conversation. This way both parties may learn something new; what one has in common and what is different. It also has this equalizer effect, building both relations and trust, breaking down barriers between professionalism and amateurism. Jenny:

Aina:

It is a crucial task for a designer to get people to stop, linger, dwell and feel safe in new, outdoor spaces. People watching is maybe the number one activity we should design for. As designers we have a social responsibility to create beautiful, everyday landscapes where people feel good and want to belong. The need to find, define or recognize ‘eutopias’ (from Greek εὖ τόπος meaning ‘good place’, in Bauder 2015), places where we feel good, instead of searching for perfect utopias that we will never reach, is pressing. Particularly in deprived neighboorhods in dense inner-city areas.

The students’ understanding of what participation is, and what public space can be, is rapidly expanding in these meetings with youth. The applied

The ‘splotting’ methodology 143 methodology enables reflection of one’s preconditioned understanding and prejudices, while also being a tool for building new mental models for all involved (Kaplan & Kaplan, 2009). How do I understand the world and how do I learn something new, that makes me see the world in a different way? For architects and planners to be able to plan for inclusive and diverse public spaces, they need access to a broad range of information on its current and potential users, including social and cultural phenomenon (Tolstad et al., 2017), but also to this phenomenon of temporal belonging. But we wanted to find out if this mode of inquiry can be more than a dialogue object. Could the findings be used in the design process of urban spaces? Would the students make use of the splot methodology in their assignements?

The reflection and theorizing The second time I, the landscape architect, was invited to test the newly invented splotting methodology, was at a co-creative workshop with the landscape architect students and local youth in Tøyen. The students had been introduced to splotting in a lecture and testing splotting 1:1 at the campus in rural Ås, in the outskirts of Oslo. The students were open, positive and curious towards the method and the area in downtown Oslo, where they were going to do the seminar assignment. Aina, the anthro­ pologist, had a contact in Tøyen, a young person with a broad network that had promised to gather young users of the area in the age group between 16 and 19 years. We had spotted a location in the area where we could meet up. All the students were well prepared, brought their own personal splots, sketch books and noted down questions in case the dialogue with the youth would halt. 30 minutes in we realized. None of the youths showed up! The influencer had decided not to come and shared this info on her personal Facebook page. Aina explained to the students that unexpected things like this is part of doing fieldwork (you cannot control the field) and we changed the focus of the workshop. This incident made us realize that the insights we got from testing and improving this applied method, would be useless if we didn’t start to address another more pertinent question: How to get young people interested and involved in these creative processes to raise their voice about public space in the first place? We needed methods to find out what aspects of urban space are relevant to them. *** This is a general challenge in urban planning and research that requires participation. In order to create inclusive public space, we need to com­ municate with a diversity of inhabitants and what architects call ‘users’. But what if people are not interested, or not even showing up, like these youth in Tøyen? Many planners tick off the box after having tried and often failed to get in touch with the locals, or ‘silent voices’ of a community, as if the

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intention is enough to call it participatory design. Our lack of interaction with youth, when we obviously failed to make it relevant to them, forced us to reflect further. How effective are our methods and questions, and do they sometimes work against the intended purpose of assembling people, stories, threads and embodied knowledge, to transform insights into design form? Carr et al. (1992) argue that if we understand how meanings are created and why people form relations to specific settings or areas, it can offer us directions for design and management policies for public spaces: “Individual connections emerge in a number of ways – from a person’s life history and personal experiences, from a tradition of use of an area, and from special events in a place” (Carr et al., 1992, p. 239). Places are created in relations, through sensemaking and movement (Feld & Basso, 1996; Ingold, 2011), and thus as fluid and relationally conditioned as people’s complex and compound identities. Designing and place making is a continuous process where the analysis of site, context, uses and program is synthesized and transformed into a new physical form. The representation of the design is often shown as a concept with a series of graphical diagrams. The more technical information is often shown in plans, sections, text and diagrams. The visualizations of the plans are often translated into atmospheric renderings to show the sense of the place so it’s easier for everybody to relate to and sense a place to be with trees and buildings, a place at late night, with snow in January or a rainy afternoon in the fall. Jenny:

Aina:

The students transform sketches, notes and stories into a new design narrative, using all information available. We still have not seen too many of them transferring the splot-information to actual design, but it is often referred to in the reflections from the students’ design process. They comment on the dialog with the youth, the stories of the place or the notion of belonging to a place. This is good! Drawing a simple sketch as a representation of a place as architects do, was a new tool for me as social anthropologist and forced me to make visual narratives to communicate ideas.

This is exactly the co-creation process and tool swapping acitivity that we have come to realize defines architectural anthropology. Drawing as a technique can help us reach new analytical understandings (McNiff, 2008), and is a central tool for landscape architects. Introducing drawing to an­ thropologists give us a shared instrument for collective engagement and multisensory dialogue (Knight et al., 2016). We can thus facilitate for cog­ nitive mapping of a humans’ life in addition to a specific area, like we do in a socio-cultural site analysis. Introducing the anthropological documentation tool of field notes on top of the splotting methodology for the landscape architect students to describe in words their findings, surprising observations

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Figure 8.3 Landscape architect student in action together with pupils from a school in the neighborhood, using their personal splots to make a common splot for the new programme for Schous plass in 2018. Photo: Wanda Nathalie Nordstrøm.

and reflections for further study, helped in the processual development of the projects they have been conducting as part of the seminar.

Co-creating processes and possibilities Many describe heights, hills and viewpoints as good places to be, where one can orient oneself and get an overview, while others describe the work bench or hammock as the good place, all resonating the theories of Juhani Pallasmaa on the atmosphere of places as an immediate and intuitive feeling that people have (Tamari, 2016). Through years of testing and trying, we have realized that more important than bringing substantial information that can be used as evidence of peoples’ needs and wants, the splot method gives us the simple portrayal of an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980), the complex web of what is of emotional importance in people’s everyday lives. Existential questions like where do you feel good are the core of what it means to be a human being. It speaks to our abilities to always and over and over again find good ways to live our lives, together with others in all its variety. Such questions bring us closer to the creative aspect of being

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human and our common need for meaningful co-existence – and co-existence is a core issue when designing for behavior in public space. Can the architect get a hold on something other through these experimental methods than what they get from their more conventional methods? What would that ‘otherness’ be? Jenny:

Aina:

By introducing a social anthropologist to the students, it was important to let Aina lead the process focusing on interview as a tool to get information about belonging. Through splotting the students became aware of themselves as users with preferences to belonging and to be prepared to share their own stories. I needed to articulate the tacit knowledge on how to document participant observation through field notes to the students. It seemed to provide the students with a tool that engaged them into deeper reflection, although the inner anthropologist in me screams in terror of reducing the precious inarticulate methods we learned in university.

Creativity is a fundamental capacity in human beings, and the methodology of splotting is a generic tool to get creative processes going, through dia­ logue and sharing. This resonates with the way that we see planning, as a process of assemblage, of pulling together. Transforming participation into actual co-creation or co-design (Sanders & Stappers, 2008), implies that a diverse group of people work together on a topic, without pre-defining the resulted outcome. The utopia portrayed in architectural renderings made by professionals in design and planning is a stark contrast to the eutopia of the splot, a simple hand-drawn diagram made by amateurs. The drawing is a storyteller, a representation for short memory images (Rogers, 1964) of physical or mental conditions. We see it as one method of many, a process on the way, a collective work in progress. It is a tool for dialogue more than a game changer. Aina:

Jenny:

So, how do we conclude? There seems to be many dilemmas, challenges, pitfalls and potentials with this method and the interdisciplinary exploration it inspires. Anthropologists love dilemmas, ambiguity and paradoxes, so this gives energy to our further work. As it is inherently co-creative, I really don’t know what impact and outcomes to expect, even though each interaction with participants and this mode of inquiry bring new insights. The findings from any method processed into a design tool, is a lot about decision making, testing form, materials, proportions and a holistic design. The constant process of reinvention push us further – and splot help us to push further based on the stories that humans dare to share. This we all can learn from.

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Note 1 The methodology is developed within research projects funded by The Research Council of Norway, Dam Foundation and Save the Children Norway.

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May, V. (2016). What does the duration of belonging tell us about the temporal self? Time & Society, 25(3), 634–651. McNiff, S. (2008). Arts-based research. In J. G. Knowles, & A. L. Cole (eds), Handbook of the arts in Qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues, 29–40. Sage. Møystad, O. (2012) The spirit of place in a multicultural society. Arkitektur N. Retrieved from https://architecturenorway.no/questions/identity/moystad-on-cns/ Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. Rizzoli. Planning and Building Act (2008). Act of 27 June 2008. No. 71 relating to Planning and the Processing of Building Applications (the Planning and Building Act) (the Planning part). https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/planning-buildingact/id570450/ Rogers, C. R. (1964). Toward a modern approach to values: The valuing process in the mature person. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(2), 160–167. Rosten, M. (2015). ‘Nest siste stasjon, linje 2’: Sted, tilhørighet og unge voksne i Groruddalen. PhD dissertation, University of Oslo. Ruud, M. E., Brattbakk, I., Røe, P. G., & Vestby, G. M. (2007). Sosiokulturelle stedsanalyser. Akershus fylkeskommune/Husbanken. Sanders, E. B.-N. & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18. Tamari, T. (2016). The phenomenology of architecture: A short introduction to Juhani Pallasmaa. Body & Society, 23(1), 91–95. Tolstad, I., Hagen, A. L., & Andersen, B. (2017). The amplifier effect: Youth cocreating urban spaces of belonging through art, architecture and anthropology. In S. Bastien & H. Holmarsdottir (eds), Youth as architects of change: global efforts to advance youth-driven innovation for social change, 215–242. Palgrave Macmillan. Vestby, N. (2020). Eutopia – where the heart matters. In K. Bergaust, R. Smite, & D. Silina (eds), Oslofjord ecologies: Artistic research on environmental and social sustainability. Renewable Futures, Issue 3/Acoustic Space, Volume 18. IXC Center for New Media Culture (Riga, Latvia) & Oslo Metropolitan University.

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What makes spatial difference? Conceptualizing architectural anthropology through filmmaking Lina Berglund-Snodgrass and Ebba Högström

Filmmaking constitutes an inquiry and form of representation that cap­ tures, creates, and transmits emotions. Due to these characteristics, it has long been used as an effective device for advocacy purposes such as pro­ paganda and conveying information from the state (Sandercock & Attili, 2010). Since the 1920s, film has purposely been used in urban planning for advocating to the general public the possibilities of social change through expert-governed architecture and urban planning solutions. For example, advocating the benefits of the post-war New towns (Huntley Film Archives, 1960), the need of demolition of perceived rundown urban areas (AB Kinocentralen, 1957), or for advocating the benefits of future archi­ tecture and planning solutions as for example exhibited in international housing exhibitions (Leacock, 1952). While this movement, which has been referred to as “town-planning cinema,” (Ciacci, 1997) celebrates the ar­ chitect as an ‘almighty’ expert, this chapter presents an alternative and more inclusive trajectory of using film in urban planning and design (see for example Peterson & Farsø, 2017; Sandercock & Attili, 2010). Using film in design processes can bring forward the questions that – in our understanding – an architectural anthropology specifically seeks to address, i.e. what architecture and for whom? To us, film-making as a methodology in this context implies a mode of inquiry that understands architecture beyond the building project and that directs the attention to what archi­ tecture does in concert with its human and non-human inhabitants, and the affective dimensions of spatial practices. By attending to these possibilities, filmmaking comprises a transformative potential of what (spatially or socially) could be otherwise (Sandercock & Franz, 2010). A significant challenge to such an architectural anthropology concerns the representation dilemma since important parts of human experiences don’t lend themselves to be represented through the means of architectural drawings, sections and plans (Burns & Kahn, 2005). Film holds the po­ tential of both capturing and conveying a wide range of experiences as well as acting as a forceful device that provokes attention and engagement by its

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audience – also in an architectural context. This chapter seeks to contribute to the formation of an architectural anthropology by bringing forward the potential in film-making for identifying different ways spatial difference can be made. We will empirically illustrate this by three key dimensions of such practices; storytelling, emotions, and identification.

Conceptualizing architectural anthropology and the potential of filmmaking It is our belief that the potential in architectural anthropology sits between its interest in people and their socio-cultural practices and meaning-making, its interest in spaces and places and their productive and relational potential, as well as its interest in social transformative change, e.g. change and/or con­ testation from the bottom-up (Sandercock, 2003) or collective emancipation (e.g. Friedmann, 1987). Coupling architecture with anthropology, enhances in our view the notion of reflexivity in architecture. When using the term ‘architecture’, we here refer broadly to the making disciplines of architecture, including urban planning and design. The focus is to develop knowledge that embraces the ways in which space hinders or supports spatial practices, as well as the ways in which people’s spatial practices make places emerge and subsequently develop meaning from them. In addition, this knowledge is set in motion in future-oriented practices that target social transformative change, which is hinged upon the creation of possibilities for each and every one of us to form an active part in decisions that concern our living en­ vironments (Nuñez‐Janes, 2016). Here we position ourselves with the post­ modern objective of developing pluralism in ways of knowing and prescribing future(s) in architecture, so as to enable more just outcomes (Friedmann, 1987; Huq, 2020; Sandercock, 2003). To enable social transformative change through architecture, i.e. en­ abling change that makes a positive difference to people in their everyday life, knowledge of how space, place and people interact must be transmitted to the actual agents in this making, but also find its way to engage politi­ cians, urban planners and other stakeholders. To convey the agency of the spatial dimensions and/or the feelings of for example belonging, exclusion and indifference which humans develop over time and by everyday spatial practices, is however not so easily done. This requires a form of re­ presentation that not only does justice to the sensory elements of the in­ quiry, but also demands attention of, and engages the public and those in decision-making positions. While there have been experiments with forms of representation (e.g. mental maps, collages, diagrams and drawings) (Stender, 2017), this chapter will demonstrate the potential filmmaking holds. By setting out this proposition, we recognize that we owe our pre­ decessors in visual methodologies a great deal (Pink, 2012; Rose, 2014; Ruby, 1995). These ethnographers and geographers highlight the possibi­ lities to visually capture and convey a wide range of experiences, while

What makes spatial difference? 151 recognizing ethical questions related to space, place and people, e.g., a si­ tuational ‘care ethics’ (Lawson, 2008; Sandercock & Attili, 2010). We consider film-making as a mutual learning process, where the role of the film-maker is not to ‘discover a story’, but to – in concert with others – tell stories of the complexity and interwovenness of human life (Sandercock & Attili, 2010; Skjælaaen, Bygdås & Hagen, 2020). Such a practice is per­ formative and “help[s] to enact the world that they describe” (Law, 2009, p. 249) and thus “mak[e] things visible” (Rose, 2014, p. 27). By bringing together the dimensions of storytelling, emotions and identification in filmmaking, we argue that a potential for social transformation through ar­ chitecture unfolds. To illustrate this potential, we draw from examples of films that master students in urban planning and design produced between 2017 and 2019 in a studio course organized in the intersection between anthropology and architecture. The course objective was to interrogate ev­ eryday life situations in an architectural context of life in and between the buildings, to deepen the student’s knowledge of architectural experiences, and to use such knowledge as point of departures for socio-spatial propo­ sitions with social transformative potentials. The students chose ‘what and where’ to inquire, and the teachers provided methodological guidance to their investigations including ‘going out in the field’, analysing, identifying, and telling stories, as well as guidance to shooting and editing film. In the following sections, we will present these films and discuss them in relation to the three dimensions of film making. We will conclude the chapter by highlighting the ways in which the film-making in our examples make visible an array of architectural responses that can make spatial difference to people.

Storytelling In any form of communication of anthropological experiences, storytelling constitutes a neglected but key dimension (Maggio, 2014). In filmmaking, the content in storytelling is understood as a story, told by combining images, text, sound and moving images (ibid.). A story can consist of a core story and multiple minor stories embedded in the core story. The plot comprises the se­ quence of events that is put together to form the stories. In the film literature, there are vast categories of different forms of plots (e.g. classical plots, mini­ plots, antiplots) which can be open-ended, comprise internal conflicts, multiple, parallel events and characters or contain a grand story that subordinates all events into one explanatory rationale. While the classical plot resembles the storytelling of the ‘almighty’ architect,1 the other examples of plots are more aligned with the epistemological position of architectural anthropology. Storytelling comprises furthermore a relational dynamic between the people involved, the storyteller(s) and the spectator(s), but also the entities who take the role of characters (Maggio, 2014). The politics of voice and the issue of authorship is here of pertinent importance, which requires careful reflection of research design and methods, authorship and

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ownership, trust and reciprocity (Ruby, 1995; Sandercock & Attili, 2010). This points to the need of recognizing that symmetrical power relations never will manifest, instead striving to accommodate such should be the guiding facet. Storytelling constitutes a collaborative learning endeavour where the storyteller and the entities who take the role of characters are mutually engaged in the process, as are the future spectators. In the documentary film, The people’s house as a meeting place, produced by Daniela Edvinsson and Felicia Torffvit (Edvinsson & Torfvitt, 2017), we are invited to partake in daily activities at the Swedish Social Democratic party remnant institution, the so called “People’s House” (Folkets hus) in a Swedish small town. The core story concerns the ways in which the institution operates both as an enabler and an inhibitor of societal togetherness and civic identities. The institution operates in such ways through its symbolic representation of embracing and equalizing individuals in society by referring and welcoming “the people,” and through its built fabric comprising a two-storey brick ar­ chitecture located centrally in the town. The building is organized in two floors and a basement, framed in the film as ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’. The film begins by welcoming us ‘upstairs’ through a major entrance hall from which the library, two restaurants, a cinema, and a large hall utilized for theatre, concerts and other community activities are accessed. The spaces are portrayed as full of life of all ages where for example elderly people host folk dancing events in the major hall, people dining their lunch in the restaurant, or reading newspapers in the library – all appearing familiar with the spaces and with each other. Thereafter, we are introduced to the ‘downstairs’ which is accessed

Figure 9.1 At People’s House the elderly meet every week for dancing, not aware of what is going on in the basement of the same building. Photo: Daniela Edvinsson & Felicia Torffvit.

What makes spatial difference? 153

Figure 9.2 In the basement of People’s House, the people involved in the integration project are playing table tennis and learning to bike. Above their head, elderly people are dancing. Photo: Daniela Edvinsson & Felicia Torffvit.

through a separate entrance next to the main entrance, and thereafter wel­ comed to its open spaces with moveable chairs and tables as well as its intimate spaces with heavy brown leather furniture. Here children run around, and women sit and laugh. We notice posters on the wall highlighting this as a religious and politically independent space, but also posters that call everyone to clean up. We are informed that downstairs constitutes the location of the so-called “meeting place” – a municipal integration project. Here are ‘newly arrived Swedes’ welcomed with the local council’s ambition to initiate processes of integration. The corridors in the basement with low headspace and limited daylight serves the emancipatory purpose of women learning to bike, and the simple kitchen constitutes the first professional space for ‘newly arrived Swedes’ who are responsible for organizing nibbles and coffee to the visitors. The activities downstairs are portrayed in the film to be surrounded by the daily lives of people pursuing their everyday activities – a mother who swings her child in the park or a bored youngster – but who maintain emo­ tional distance to the activities in the basement suggesting that they are aware of the meeting place but it doesn't concern them. The downstairs represents a place of community and empowerment at the same time as it appears as a place of alienation to the society in which it is embedded. The plot of the film concerns the different civic identities (e.g. immigrant, refugee, citizen, people) and the ways in which they are performed through and in concert with the architecture. It also concerns the implicit and for the audience perhaps disturbing matter that ‘the downstairs’ and ‘the upstairs’ never really meet. How is integration performed in a building that hosts activities that take

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Figure 9.3 The spatial organization of the People’s House. A is the assembly hall where the elderly meet to dance. B is the basement premises where the integration project hosts their activities. Arrow 1 is pointing to the stairs in the main entrance which leads to the assembly hall, while arrow 2 shows the entrance which leads to the premises in the basement. Drawing: Andrea Gimeno Sanchez.

place in parallel, in different spaces separated by walls and floor levels? This dualism and parallel sensations of both community and conflict, which the ar­ chitecture and participating subjects perform, is particularly well brought to the fore through the storytelling techniques of filmmaking. It allows for telling the story of conflicting albeit simultaneous experiences of togetherness and aliena­ tion, through the ways in which it moves between spaces within the building, and its ability to juxtaposition the sense of conflict with the sense of community that is performed within and through the building. At the same time, the story comprises hope, where the conflict between the two floors as well as between the downstairs (i.e. the integration project) and the perceived alienation towards the society which it is embedded – appears in the film as solvable and possible to change. An example of this is a scene where the women leave the basement and proudly walk in the adjacent park, or a scene where the manager states – by recognizing the institution’s historical function – “everyone is welcome here.” As a spectator, one is compelled to intervene, take down a wall, or schedule events in somewhat different orders. This points to the social transformative potential of storytelling – through its specific ability to develop multi-layered plots of events through careful use of sound and moving images.

Emotions In every human activity, emotions play a role. Emotions is a situated social practice that connects the body, the mind and the social in tandem with

What makes spatial difference? 155 material and spatial situations and constitute something people do in spe­ cific social and cultural contexts (Davidson, Bondi, & Smith, 2007; Prestel, 2017). By referring to ‘doing emotions’, we direct the attention towards the subjects and their specific settings. In the repertoire of visual methodologies, film-making is particularly powerful in representing and evoking emotions. Spectators are immersed into an emotional landscape by the means of the story told in close collaboration with the film media (i.e. moving images, sound, rhythm and speech) and feelings such as fear, joy and thrill are evoked as they engage emotionally in the story. Such feelings could also be evoked in the film-maker during the film-making process. However, if emotional engagement is “an inevitable and necessary aspect of doing re­ search” (Bondi, 2007, p. 243) somehow emotional aspects of the reflexivity remain to a great extent neglected in existing literature. In the documentary film, At your neighbour’s house, produced by Victoria Alstäde, Sofia Hjort and Oskar Mikaelsson (Alstäde, Hjort & Mikaelsson, 2019), we are invited to a Syrian family that live in two apartments in a residential block in a Swedish small town. This is the home for the extended family Alheeb after having fled the Syrian war. In this story, mixed emotions like sadness and gratitude, loss and hope, frustration and adaptability are evoked. All of them are deeply caught in a web of memories of a lost past, expectations of a better future and a confusing present. These emotions are played out in two different architectures – the Swedish rental apartment and their Syrian house. “We all gather here,” says Hazeem, one of the adult brothers, while showing us the living room in one of the apartments. “Here” refers to one of the family’s living room, but also to the two ordinary twobedroom apartments from late 1960–early 1970s. Each apartment consists of two bedrooms, one kitchen, one living room and a balcony. They all move easily between the two apartments and the stairwell and the courtyard be­ come part of their living space. The adult brother, Firas, shows us the other living room which is furnished with a sofa, three armchairs and a television. An oriental rug covers the floor and a small coffee table is placed in the middle of it. The seating is placed along the walls “so there will be room for my guests,” as Hazeem puts it. Sometimes we notice the adjacent buildings through the windows, sometimes the blinds are drawn closed. The story directly concerns the interior life where the family is cooking and eating, talking, and laughing, where the kids always are present around them. Through the use of a subjective camera position, we experience and feel the warmth, lively and vibrant atmosphere inside the family’s two apartments. This kind of apartment was designed to suit a typical Swedish nuclear family consisting of two parents and two children, which the family adjusts to better accommodate their way of living. No major spatial reconfiguration is needed as the rooms are relatively spacious and generic, also demonstrating their adaptability to new contexts. The key is the door to the stairway leading to the courtyard and to their other apartment. The courtyard acts as the med­ iating space ameliorating the transformation of the two-bedroom flat to a

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Figure 9.4 The surrounding residential areas is viewed from inside the apartment. Inside we notice ongoing activities in and with the space. Stills from the movie. Photos: Victoria Alstäde, Sofia Hjort and Oscar Mikaelsson.

four-bedroom flat. Through the spatial practice performed between the two apartments, a new spatial relationship emerges. The rationalistic and func­ tionalistic residential block is turned into a series of new connections through the courtyard, resembling the spaces of their Syrian ‘liwan’ house. After four years in Sweden the Alheebs haven’t made any Swedish friends: “I try to meet and talk to them, but unfortunately, they don’t want to,” says Hazeem. He and his father describe their home in Aleppo, the “liwan house” – a traditional Middle East house sheltered from the street, centred around a generous inner courtyard with a tree in the middle. Hazeem draws the layout and we see the space for the kids to play, the many living rooms as well as the covered terrace, the ‘liwan’, that opens up to the courtyard. In such a house, Hazeem tells us “you see women sitting together talking, you see men gathering and perhaps playing cards, and all the children are playing with each other.” We sense his emotional attach­ ment to the place as Firas states how he misses his house, his bakery, and his neighbours. At the same time, Firas emphasizes that he is emotionally at home in Sweden too since almost all his relatives are here. This also is reinforced in the film by their younger sister Suhaila who states directly into the camera that ‘home is where her parents are’.

What makes spatial difference? 157

Figure 9.5 To the left the plan of the Syrian Liwan House where A is the ‘liwan’ – the covered terrace, and B is the courtyard enclosed by the more or less private rooms. To the right the residential block where the Syrian family now lives. C marks the two apartments that house the extended family, D marks the connecting courtyard. Drawing: Andrea Gimeno Sanchez.

Throughout the film, we engage in conflicting and parallel emotions which are spatialized and juxtaposed. The warm and vibrant interiority of the Syrian and the Swedish homes is set against the confusing and ambig­ uous exteriority; the view from the window of the elusive and reticent re­ sidential area, or dangerous and shocking surrounding shown in the film of the Syrian home in total ruins. As a spectator, one identifies with the warmth and openness the family transmits and acknowledges the affor­ dances of the liwan house. At the same time, one wishes them to find friends to socialize with in their new country. The story’s emotional practice pro­ vokes questions of agency. For example, what agency do architects have in making a social difference in a society which is ambiguous in its role in welcoming newcomers? What agency do the architecture and design enact for making it possible to live together – as an extended family, or in a local community? The film provokes these ‘bigger’ questions while simulta­ neously evoking emotions of sadness, joy and hope as one is immersed into the lively discussions when the family gathers around the kitchen table.

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While we as spectators struggle with our emotions regarding the characters’ past and present situations, the modernist architectural interior organiza­ tion appears able to fit new contexts of living together regardless of its inhabitants’ mixed emotional practices – it may just be a matter of claiming the Swedish 1960–1970s version of the core of the ‘liwan’ house – the courtyard. The everyday spatial practices performed by the family is an example of such claiming, but it also comprises a potential for design interventions that better accommodate the social component in these practices.

Identification To identify oneself with other people’s life situations is crucial for developing empathy and solidarity. It is furthermore foundational to constructive dia­ logues between parties in urban planning contexts, and engagement in common causes, may they be political or social (Sandercock & Attili, 2010). Empathy with others is therein a fundamental trait which urban planners, who have ambitions to develop planning interventions that make a difference to a community or a local context, must possess. An important starting point here is to recognize and acknowledge similarities instead of differences, in what perhaps appears at a first glance as ‘foreign,’ or merely as a disparate life situation. Such a starting point can instead generate and evoke recogni­ tion, empathy, and solidarity. To recognize and render something familiar in, for example, everyday life ‘doings’ (Högström, 2017) opinions, emotions, choices or life situations, is crucial for processes of identification to take place. Film, with its combination of moving images and sounds, is especially powerful in paving the way for engaging “with individual subjectivities and with individual bodies in space and the sociality between them” (Rishbeth & Rogaly, 2018). In the documentary film, Our meeting place: the E-hall Emmaboda, produced by Emma Bäcklund and Marcus Hellberg (Bäcklund & Hellberg, 2017), we are invited to identify with the struggles of wanting and fighting for something and with the companionship of a cross-generational com­ munity. The film begins with a man that is introduced as Alexander saying: “one has to fight for it, if one puts it like that.” He speaks about ‘E-hall’ a venue for skateboarding located in an abandoned industrial area in a Swedish small town, a place he developed and is responsible for. Alexander is in his 30s, wears street clothes and a knitted hat, and loves skateboarding. We learn that his objective is to give the opportunity to people of all ages to skateboard or perform kick-biking. We are introduced to the story by following two boys in their pre-teens moving through the small town with their kick-bikes. The camera takes us over railway tracks, through com­ mercial buildings, into an abandoned industrial area. Via an outdoor steel staircase and door, the boys enter a three-storey typical industrial building

What makes spatial difference? 159 from the 1970–1980s, clad with sheet metal with few windows. In a theatrical manner, lights are lit, and we are introduced to a big open space filled with ramps of different sizes and shapes of various levels of difficulty, graffiti inspired wall paintings and a sofa to chill in. This is the ‘E-hall’, a meeting place for a group of adults, teenagers and children to skate and kick bike, as well as learn from each other, united by the love and en­ gagement for skateboarding. Alexander comes here every day to care for the place and the members of this community. Yet, he has limited support from the municipality which is putting pressure on his engagement. As this narrative unfolds, we recognize the pleasure and satisfaction he gets from running the facilities. At the same time as we are applauding their joint achievement, we acknowledge that Alexander is losing his engagement. As it is cumbersome to run such a place on a voluntary basis, we ask ourselves what will happen to this community if he stops? The film opens up several possibilities of identifying and recognizing what architecture does in tandem with the people inhabiting the space, e.g. by identifying with the thrill and joy the boys experience when skate­ boarding across town, to be part of an urban subculture and hang out in an old industrial venue, to share the same interest across generations regardless of age and life situation. The film also presents the possibility to identify with lacking ‘things to do’ at a certain age in a small non thriving town, but also the joy of moving between the ‘greyish’, quite cold early spring out­ doors of such indifferent environment to the warmth and welcoming atmosphere inside the ‘E-hall.’ The performative character of the ‘E-hall’ – that if this specific activity stops the space will no longer exist – is well portrayed through the film. This ‘minor architecture’ (Stoner, 2012) is recognized as a crucial partner for the skateboarding subculture to emerge. Even though the place hinges upon the engagement and creative force of Alexander and his group, we start to recognize that it shouldn’t be in any other way. This place is so intertwined with its conditions, activities and people so it appears in the film that if the council would respond to Alexander’s cry for help by constructing a skate­ board park somewhere close, this particular space would disappear. Even though Alexander speaks about the need for help, we sense that there is an undertext of threat if the council would take over the responsibility. So, how can one appreciate the transformative potential here? Entangled with points of identification in the film, which comprise an intricate web of contra­ dictions of independence, creativity, and ‘sub-enculturalization’ is played out. What perhaps would make most difference to the community is simply to give recognition of the work they put in and its importance in the local community. The film as a form of inquiry and representation paves the way for making not only an anthropological, but also an architectural response of recognition, by having brought forward the story itself – ‘see us’ – where ‘us’ also incorporates the recognition of the spatial setting of the rough steel-clad building and the run-down industrial area.

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Figure 9.6 The two boys’ journey to the E-hall, passing a run-down industrial area, entering through pre-fabricated steel stairs and expanded metal landing a dark and empty E-hall, turning on the lights and the starting to ska­ teboard in the place which they call theirs. Stills from the movie. Photos: Emma Bäcklund & Markus Hellberg.

Developing spatial agency through architectural anthropological filmmaking We have now elevated three dimensions central to film-making in archi­ tectural anthropology – storytelling, emotions and identification – and ex­ plored them in films produced by urban planning students. By enabling emotions and identification through storytelling techniques, we have de­ monstrated that it is possible to tell complex and spatially interwoven stories that open up spaces for social transformative change within the context of architecture. By social transformative change we refer to changes that make a difference to people in their everyday lives and which includes people’s experiences of and in space as its point of departure. Social

What makes spatial difference? 161 transformative change, is not necessarily about engaging in new construc­ tions, it is rather about paying attention to what makes spatial difference, and could include making minor adjustments to the existing, or giving re­ cognition with no specific material change. The films inform us of the im­ portance of developing ‘spatial agency’ (Awan, Schneider & Till, 2011), as well as the different ways the everyday life of people produce spatial dif­ ferences. We have seen examples of this in films where spatial agency can be transformative in a material sense (e.g. adjusting the built fabric). This could include, for example, the yielding capacity of an ordinary Swedish apartment for being adjusted to a multi-generational family’s way of living. Spatial agency can also be transformative in a more immaterial sense (e.g. use, memories, symbolism, expectations) where existing spaces are trans­ formed into emancipatory spaces through new functions. Here we are thinking of the rough empty industrial hall finding new purpose to the skateboarding community. Another example of what makes spatial differ­ ence that is elevated in the films is the context of where the buildings are situated. For example, the central location of the People’s House enabled the immigrant women to literally step into public life, whereas the journey through the partly abandoned industrial landscape for visiting the skate­ boarding hall contributes to forming the identity of a skater. We have demonstrated that film has the potential to act as a device that can transform what architecture could or should be (Berglund-Snodgrass & Högström, 2018), which resonates with the call for ‘other ways of doing architecture’ (Awan et al., 2011) that is better equipped to respond to ur­ gent societal issues of our time. The potential of film-making sits in the understanding and learning about spatial situations where people, spaces and places interact and make meaning. Thus, for enabling social transfor­ mative change that makes a positive spatial difference to people in their everyday lives, it becomes crucial to find ways to engage – not only the practitioners of the making disciplines – but also the politicians, civil ser­ vants, and other stakeholders, those who have the political or adminis­ trative power to not only initiate but also lead process of changes. Through its ability to speak directly to its audience’s cognitive processes, and its ability to convey spatial experiences in ways that make more justice to the architectural settings than what photos and drawings do, film-making constitutes a methodological device that has potential to pave the way for such an ‘other way’ of doing architecture.

Note 1 An example of the ‘almighty architect’ is the main character, Howard Roark, in the film The Fountainhead (1949) based on the novel by Ayn Rand from 1943 with the same name.

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References AB Kinocentralen (1957). Gävle-1957 års stadsfilm [Gavle-Town movie of 1957]. Retrieved on 14 October 2020 from www.filmarkivet.se/movies/gavle-1957-arsstadsfilm Alstäde, V., Hjort, S., & Mikaelsson, O. (Producers & Directors). (2019). Hemma hos din granne [At home at your neighbour’s]. Sweden: Blekinge Institute of Technology. Retrieved on 14 October 2020 from www.youtube.com/watch?v= 7ByepKU0A8I Awan, N., Schneider, T., & Till, J. (2011). Spatial agency: Other ways of doing architecture. Routledge. Bäcklund, E. & Hellberg, M. (producers & directors). (2017). Vår mötesplats: Ehallen Emmaboda [Our meeting place: The E-hall, Emmaboda]. Blekinge Institute of Technology. Retrieved on 14 October 2020 from www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2rgVkyB86zE Berglund Snodgrass, L., & Högström, E. (2018). Planerarrollen i samtid och framtid: Kunskaper, förmågor och färdigheter [The role of the planner: Knowledges, capacities and skills]. Nordic Journal of Architectural Research, 30(3), 135–156. Bondi, L. (2007). The place of emotions in research: from partitioning Emotion and Reason to the Emotional Dynamics of Research Relationships. In: Davidson, J., Bondi, L. & Smith, M. (Eds), Emotional geographies (pp. 220–246). Ashgate. Burns, C. J. & Kahn, A. (Eds) (2005). Site matters: Design concepts, histories, and strategies, Routledge. Ciacci, L. (1997) Il Cinema degli Urbanisti, Vol. 1. Comune di Modena. Davidson, J., Bondi, L., & Smith, M. (2007). Introduction: Geography’s emotional turn. In: J. Davidson, L. Bondi & M. Smith. (Eds.), Emotional geographies, (pp. 1–16). Ashgate. Edvinsson, D. & Torffvit, F. (producers & directors). (2017). Folkets hus som mötesplats [People’s House as a meeting place]. Blekinge Institute of Technology. Retrieved on 14 October 2020 from www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BUPKe5aSjY Friedmann, J. (1987). Planning in the public domain: From knowledge to action. Princeton University Press. Högström, E. (2017). Translating spatial experiences to design recommendations: A mission impossible? In: Nord, C., & Högström, E. (Eds), Caring architecture: Institutions and relational practices (pp. 149–168). Cambridge Scholars Publishers. Huntley Film Archives (1960). New towns Roehampton/Alton. Film no. 94051. Retrieved on 14 October 2020 from www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jUCoKJh6eI Huq, E. (2020). Seeing the insurgent in transformative planning practices. Planning Theory 19(4), 371–391. Law, J. (2009). Seeing like a survey. Cultural Sociology, 3(2), 239–256. Lawson, V. (2008). Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97, 1–11. Leacock, P. (director). (1952). Festival in London. Crown Film Unit. Maggio, R. (2014). The anthropology of storytelling and the storytelling of an­ thropology. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 5(2), 89–106. Nuñez‐Janes, M. (2016). When ethnography relates: Reflections on the possibilities of digital storytelling. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 47(3), 235–239.

What makes spatial difference? 163 Petersen, R. M. & Farsø, M. (2017). Resonance and transcendence of a bodily presence. How a filmic mapping of non-visual, aural and bodily relations in space can strengthen the sensory dimension in architectural design. In: Campbell, H. & Troiani, I. (Eds), Architecture filmmaking. Intellect Books. Pink, S. (Ed.) (2012). Advances in visual methodology. London: Sage. Prestel, J. B. (2017). Emotional cities: debates on urban change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860–1910. Oxford University Press. Rishbeth, C. & Rogaly, B. (2018). Sitting outside: Conviviality, self‐care and the design of benches in urban public space. Transactions of British Geographers, 43(2), 284–298. Rose, G. (2014). On the relation between ‘visual research methods’ and con­ temporary visual culture. The Sociological Review, 62, 24–46. Ruby, J. (1995). The moral burden of authorship in ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review, 11(2), 77–82. Sandercock, L. (2003). Cosmopolis II: Mongrel cities in the 21st century. Continuum. Sandercock, L. & Attili, G. (2010). Digital ethnography as planning praxis: An experiment with film as social research, community engagement and policy dia­ logue. Planning Theory & Practice, 11(1), 23–45. Sandercock, L. & Franz, J. (2010). ‘And action!’ New roles for film in engagement. In: Sarkissian, W., & Wenman, C. (Eds), Creative community planning. Transformative engagement methods for working at the edge (pp. 117–132). Earthscan. Skjælaaen, G. R., Bygdås, A. L., & Hagen, A. L. (2020). Visual inquiry: Exploring embodied organizational practices by collaborative film-elicitation. Journal of Management Inquiry, 29(1). Stender, M. (2017). Towards an architectural anthropology-what architects can learn from anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1), 27–43. Stoner, J. (2012). Toward a minor architecture. MIT Press.

10 ‘After Belonging’ A study of proposals for architectural interventions for arrival of refugees in Oslo, Norway Eli Støa and Anne Sigfrid Grønseth After Belonging invites architects and other professionals from around the world to engage in a debate concerning our changing condition of belonging and the contemporary transformation of residence. (OAT’s call for interventions, 2015)

This chapter explores two proposals for intervention exhibited at After Belonging, part of the Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT)1 of 2016. Both proposals involved architectural interventions in relation to a specific site: the Torshov asylum-seekers’ reception centre in Oslo, Norway. The proposals were authored by two teams, RuimteVeldWerk (RVW) and OPEN trans­ formation (OT), the first based in Brussels, Belgium, the second in Bergen, Norway. Our interest stemmed from the research project ‘What Buildings do’,2 which investigated the effects of the physical environment on the quality of life for asylum-seekers in Norway. The research demonstrates how the architecture of reception centres became an instrument of exclusion (Hauge, Støa, & Denizou, 2017), due not only to the features of the centres them­ selves, but equally to how the accommodation system maintained a state of ‘arrival in between’ (Thorshaug, 2019). However, the research left us with questions regarding how relations with local communities outside reception centres affect processes of inclusion or exclusion. This was what the RVW and OT teams explored through their proposals to the OAT in 2016. Rather than approaching the issues of inclusion and exclusion from an academic perspective adopted in our research, the two teams merged ar­ chitectural and anthropological approaches in practice. Recognizing that architecture and the built environment can often be seen as enforcing exclusion, RVW and OT explored how architecture might enhance in­ clusion instead. Here, architecture was not perceived as a matter of buildings alone but was understood more broadly as a relational phe­ nomenon affecting citizens’ freedom to move in the city and their access to housing. As such, we regard the teams’ working processes and resulting interventions as blending materiality (architecture) with processes of ex­ ploration (anthropology).

‘After Belonging’ 165 While recognizing refugees’ particular circumstances in having escaped war, social and family ruptures and fragmentation, and in facing the uncertainties surrounding asylum and resettlement procedures (Kissoon, 2010), both teams saw a need to treat refugees as fundamentally equal human beings. Acknowledging a need to engage actively with asylum-seekers’ current life cir­ cumstances and experiences, both teams conducted close observations of places and buildings, as well as interviews with their residents. Based on this, they adjusted their approaches and searched for new forms of architectural practice. The chapter discusses how transformations in belonging are conceptualized, described and objectified by the two teams. We also consider what characterizes the architectural and processual interventions, how these interventions are seen to interplay with one another, and how the two proposals merge academic re­ flection with professional practice. Based on this, we reflect on how this study can further develop an architectural anthropology (Stender, 2017) of everyday urban life and senses of belonging, particularly in the field of migration and refugees. We argue that the study sheds light on how architectural anthropology has relevance not only as a fruitful contribution to an academic discourse, but also as an approach that may further develop professional architectural practice.

Architecture and belonging: theoretical perspectives Having done research together on the interplay between housing, belonging and well-being in the particular context of Norwegian asylum-seekers, we, the two authors, share perspectives on the relationship between architecture and materiality, as well as senses of belonging and well-being (Grønseth & Støa, 2020). Importantly, in its engagement with materiality like buildings and outdoor spaces, we see architecture as constituted by an inherently relational quality that exists between practice, materiality and the social environment (Ingold, 2007; Larkin, 2013). Although built and constructed by materiality and technicalities, houses and spaces are imaginaries that interact with meaning-making and worldshaping (Strauss, 2006; Salazar & Graburn, 2014), being related to everyday ‘being with others’ and the experience of ‘lived life’ (Grønseth, 2013). This is a view that includes the physical, the psychological and the social, being inspired by a phenomenological understanding in which materiality and images are perceived and experienced as constituting senses of belonging, self, home and well-being, as well as estrangement, discomfort and illness. Not only do migration and movement challenge and offer new senses of belonging and well-being, belonging itself appears to be dynamic and flexible. Understanding belonging as a sense of being as well as becoming (Leach, 2003), the term comes to reflect the human condition, as it extends to the struggle to fight alienation, discrimination, injustice, degradation, and social suffering. Moreover, the concern with belonging, including degrees of aliena­ tion and marginalization, is also triggered by an acknowledgement of citizens’ different levels of access to the city. This again depends on the individual’s

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ability for movement and participation, in which perceptions and experiences are directed and regulated through the materiality of urban spaces. Within architectural discourse, the concept of place attachment, defined as an affective bond between people and certain places, strongly connotes involvement and the sense of belonging (Hidalgo & Hernández, 2001). While the term may be said to draw on rather static notions of rootedness, identity and ‘dwelling’, it has recently been further developed through the concept of place-making, understood as dynamic and strategic processes involving several actors, both professionals and non-professionals. Through material interventions, social activities and interpersonal relations, placemaking creates personal connections with specific places (Teder, 2018). In the context of migrants, the idea of place-making thus makes possible a stand on belonging that is both pluralistic and inclusive. While place-making and processes of belonging are shaped by materi­ ality, the complexity of the role of architecture in this context is what OAT 2016 aims to explore.

After Belonging: engaging with festival, competition and the architectural teams Since its inception in 2000, OAT has become a major architectural institution in Norway, the largest architectural festival in the Nordic countries, and has made its mark as an important international stage on which to discuss and disseminate architecture and urban planning. In the fall of 2014, OAT published an inter­ national open call to curators for the event to be organized in 2016. In December 2014 a jury selected the ‘After Belonging Agency (ABA)’ as Chief Curators for the 2016 Triennale with the theme of ‘After Belonging: A Triennale in Residence, on Residence and the Ways We Stay in Transit’. After the call was launched in the fall of 2015, 127 teams took part in the competition, and five winners were selected by an international jury in January 2016 (NAL/OAT, 2016), two of them for their proposals for the Torshov site in Oslo. In the period from February to November 2016, we carried out eleven interviews with team members, the architectural firm commissioned as ‘reporter’ for the Torshov site, the jury, and the OAT organizers. In addition we conducted informal conversations, e-mail communications, visits to the site and the exhibition itself, and collected written material about the two projects.

The OAT curators: a call for a broader approach to architectural practice The curators of ‘After Belonging’ raise questions about how processes of globalization and migration, and new ways of understanding residence, have created what they call a ‘transforming condition of belonging’ and a ‘crisis of belonging’ (Blanco et al., 2016, p. 12). They emphasize that their use of the term ‘after’ in the title of the Triennale does not mean looking

‘After Belonging’ 167

Figure 10.1 Torshov asylum seeker reception centre in Oslo, Norway. Photo: Eli Støa.

back to something lost that needs reviving, but rather refers to a search for or pursuit of new and changing ways of belonging in contemporary society (ibid., p. 23). They question how movement and temporality influence and affect our environment of residence and public spaces: What we are trying to examine is how we establish relationships in communities and alongside territories considering the contemporary conditions of circulation of population, things, information, images, and knowledge. We believe that these transformations are redefining what we conventionally understand by belonging. In a certain way, belonging and architecture have been many times associated with ideas of permanence, enclosure, and stability. We are trying to see how those concepts are being redefined. (Korody, 2016, referring to the Chief Curating Team ABA) While acknowledging that much of the circulation of goods, images and individuals is fuelled by a demand for greater freedom, opportunities and access (such as work possibilities and tourism), the curators stress that not everybody moves on a voluntary basis. Moreover, they observe that “cir­ culation also promotes growing inequalities for larger groups, kept in precarious states of transit” (Blanco et al., 2016, p. 13). In our interview with two of the curators, they emphasized that the refugee situation was

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essential in this context, but instead of examining the situations of the re­ fugee camps in Turkey or Lebanon, they wanted to explore the implications of the refugee situation within the Northern European city of Oslo. The curator team emphasized the urgency of architects engaging in pressing social challenges such as the huge numbers of asylum-seekers ar­ riving in Europe in 2015–2016. They also expressed a wish to expand forms of architectural practice in order to “regain relevance for the analysis and transformation of the architecture at stake” (Blanco et al., 2016, p. 22). Both the curators and the representatives of the jury saw the proposals from RVW and OT as demonstrating particular sensitivity to how architectural expertise can be used to connect asylum-seekers more fully with the city.

The winning team proposals: Modes of Movement and Open Transformation The team RuimteVeldWerk (RVW) was founded in 2013 as an Antwerp-, Leuven- and Brussels-based interdisciplinary collective dealing with the urban environment and its users. The team consisted of four architects and a psy­ chologist. Being concerned with issues related to minority populations in public spaces, RVW told us that they aimed to trespass on architectural boundaries in order to rethink the architect’s role. They explained that, by implementing ar­ chitectural strategies or scenarios as layers onto urban contexts, they activated and intensified social networks and made socio-spatial frameworks negotiable. In their winning proposal, RVW employed an intervention strategy they call ‘Modes of Movement’ as they explored how asylum-seekers might participate in the cultural, social and economic life of the city. ‘Modes of Movement’ invited refugees to find places or atmospheres within Oslo’s public spaces with which they might connect. By confronting the collection of sites and being exposed to them, RVW aimed to enhance asylum-seekers’ sense of belonging while at the same time increasing their visible presence within the city. The proposal was explained as being “an instrument to absorb and (re)present the city through a subjective reading and become a platform that not only (re)produces interactions between the asylum seekers and the citizens of Oslo, but also facilitates these connections” (Ruimteveldwerk, 2016, p. 375). The ‘Modes of Movement’ intervention was initially manifested as a City Guide platform. However, during the process, this was transformed into the form of a ‘Stack of Playing Cards’ that presents a series of public spaces selected by asylum-seekers: shelter/housing, health/administration and cul­ ture/sports. As part of their research, RVW visited the Torshov reception centre several times and on one occasion spent three days there in order to increase their understanding of the asylum-seekers’ situation. The City Guide platform was meant to serve as an instrument for asylum-seekers to find their way around Oslo. Creating the platform, Norwegians and earlier generations of migrants were also approached and asked to contribute to the Guide in complementary ways.

‘After Belonging’ 169 The team OPEN transformation (OT) started in Bergen as an interdisciplinary team consisting of two architects and a sociologist, in response to the OAT 2016 competition call. Using the concepts of bnbOPEN, OPENhouse and OPENhousing, the project explored how to transgress the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ both symbolically and practically by renewing the ways in which Norway receives asylum-seekers. They conducted mappings among local re­ sidents at Torshov and interviewed people with special expertise on asylumseekers’ situations, including the asylum-seekers themselves. OT proclaimed a vision in which asylum-seekers might freely choose places to live other than the reception centres without losing their social and economic welfare benefits.3 To do this, the team developed a prototype of a digital platform, an app called bnbOPEN, to facilitate access to accommodation offered by the local popula­ tion. OT also envisaged shared arenas that could facilitate encounters between the local population and the newly arrived asylum-seeker through OPENhouse. Such arenas might, for instance, be an expansion of an already existing library, a municipal meeting house or other buildings and could provide, for instance, open-access web, a café, a repair garage, yoga classes and exchanges of skills that may contribute to an open meeting arena. OPENhouse should be de­ signed as a tool-box of useful functions adjustable according to local needs and to be anchored in the local community and the neighbourhood’s various agents of co-operation. Finally, through the concept of OPENhousing, OT sought to challenge the hegemony of market forces in the housing sector.

Figure 10.2 RVW installation with a table showing a map of Oslo and stacks of playing cards. Photo: Istvan Virag.

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Figure 10.3 OPENTransformation concept drawing showing its three strategies. Illustration: OPENTransformation.

Here, they investigated alternative housing models to those dictated by the current dynamics of the real estate sector, thereby aiming to present the ar­ rival of migrants and asylum-seekers as an opportunity to “re-imagine housing policies and regulations in Norway” (Søiland, Klepsvik & Hagen, 2016, p. 361).

From ideas to interventions While the curators focused on concepts such as identity and belonging, the teams were more oriented towards practices and interventions to stimulate ‘integration’ and how to create connections between newcomers and local communities. They questioned distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and dealt with how to engage with and include refugees in urban spaces and everyday spatial practices on an equal basis as local residents. Both together and separately, the two teams expressed ideas and values they sought to communicate through interventions such as ‘movement’, ‘making connection’, ‘opening up’, ‘participation’, ‘reciprocity’ and ‘equality’, all of which spoke of identity and belonging. From such ideas, both teams stretched their interventions beyond buildings and material structures to speak more about the networks, applications and entries that provide possibilities for new belongings and identities.

‘After Belonging’ 171 Movement: making connections RVW emphasized how movement is essential for integration, as well as for a sense of belonging: You cannot belong without being able to move freely. […] Belonging depends on contacts. … a need for free movement, to make connections, to be visible. […] Movement is not only moving around in the city, it is creating contact, making connections visible. Then you belong. In some countries, asylum seekers are not admitted to the city center, free movement is not allowed. Integration is about making connections to the local. (RVW, March 2016) The proposed stack of playing cards was meant to be a practical tool allowing people to give their reasons for connecting, and not only to obtain information: We do not want make a book or booklet. This becomes too static. Our idea now is to present the guide as a stack of playing cards […] It is much more flexible. Each card [52] presents a place with photo and a brief text. The place can also be located on a map. The point is, the card can be used as an excuse to make contacts, the asylum seeker has to ask someone where the place is. […] In addition, the cards can be played with. Playing cards are something most people can relate to and know how to use. (RVW, May 2016) The stack of playing cards illustrates the changeability and instability of be­ longing, as it relates to a selection of current urban spaces, as well as access to and the quality of health and welfare services. Forced migration instils a feeling of being torn away and discarded, while paradoxically also being thrown open to new possibilities and connections. As such, we understand RVW’s ideas and interventions to be in line with Cresswell’s (2006) argument that mobility in­ volves both the body and society, as well as the city and its infrastructure (Graham & Marvin, 2001). Moreover, the intervention suggests that belonging is related to cultural continuity, not to be understood as being attached to places alone, but as something dynamic and connected to routes rather than roots (Appadurai, 1996). The stack of playing cards captures how living and dwelling are conceived as a mobile habitation of time and space, not as fixed and closed structures, but as supplying an opening and a movement in what constitutes our senses of belonging. Opening up: equality, reciprocity, participation OT stated that they preferred the term ‘opening up’ to ‘integration’ and that integration and belonging are about “providing access to public spaces”, “being able to participate”, “[using] one’s own capacity and knowledge” and “being able to be part of society”: “It [OPENHouse] has to build on

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local involvement […] It’s a lot about reciprocity, which means that Norwegians are not there to provide help but because they want to get something in return” (OT, August 2016). OT explained that their three strategies are stages in a process of integration, starting with living close to locals in temporary accommodation (bnbOPEN), followed by providing arenas for social encounters in a larger context (OPENhouse), and then finally being offered permanent housing on similar terms to the local po­ pulation (OPENhousing). They saw in the concept of ‘opening up’ a statement acknowledging that it is more about ‘us’ than about ‘them’: How can we make a concept that makes the Norwegians open up? I would have loved to use more time on creating social arenas […] For me, how people meet has been the most important issue […] as a process towards the more permanent, to normalize the situation for the asylum seekers. (OT, September 2016) The question of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is connected with discussions about how dif­ ferent levels of outsideness and insideness affect place-making processes (Teder, 2018). This further relates to place attachment and belonging, as these require a degree of insideness. However, too much insideness on the part of some groups may lead to the exclusion of others. As such, ‘belonging is a measure at once of inclusion and of exclusion’, as Scott (2016, p. 24) has pointed out. OT’s focus on opening up in terms of providing places and arenas for participation and making use of “one’s own knowledge” goes beyond the usual categories such as ‘labour migrant’, ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum-seeker’ and towards belonging based on reciprocal and mutual humanity, rather than classifications and distinctions associated with the ideas of assimilation and integration. This echoes a view of identity and belonging as being created in the course of social life, rather than in an ‘ethnos’ that is often designated as an indisputable ‘biological fact’ (Baumann, 1997, p. 213). Thus, OT’s in­ tervention suggests a human disposition for connecting in everyday life and creating future visions that includes new senses of belonging and identity that embrace the other as part of the self (Grønseth, 2013). “You can’t solve anything by building buildings” Being given the challenge to create interventions that may support processes in which refugees might gain a sense of belonging in their new country and city, both proposals argued that this could not be answered by merely building a house. What is architecture? The city is architecture – all is about architecture. [… Architecture] is a method. It is a process of examination, which can serve as a starting point for a building, a program, or some participa­ tion. [… We] want to add layers of activity to the architectural model

‘After Belonging’ 173 or map. Movement takes place in physical spaces […] We don’t think you can solve something by building buildings. (RVW, March 2016) Instead of thinking of architecture as buildings, therefore, the two proposals approach architecture as a mode of inquiry, much like the anthropology-bymeans-of-architecture proposed by Ingold (2013). Architecture here, rather than built entities, becomes a tool for exploring cultural possibilities (Lefebvre, 2002). The proposals thus represented alternatives to the ma­ jority of suggestions for resolving the ‘refugee crisis’ that architects and the building sector in general presented in 2015 and 2016. Mostly these sug­ gestions consisted of design proposals intended to improve the life situa­ tions of the newcomers and to support the integration process by means of ‘high-quality’ shelters and temporary structures (e.g. Schmal et al., 2017). Although the teams advocated a broad approach to what architecture is or should be, there was a certain ambivalence, especially on the part of OT, expressed in an underlying presumption that all architects basically dream of building something: We were afraid that architecture was not present enough in our proposal; our project was more tuned towards a reflective process. […] Architecture is important, but it can also play a larger role. In a way, what we do is a kind of exploration that can work as a starting point for architecture. Ideally, we would like to build something in the continuation of this. (OT, April 2016) In their original proposal, OT floated the idea of building a pavilion as part of OPENhouse. The fact that the jury advised against this was due not only to limitations of time and money, but also because it was not regarded as essential in order to create the discussion they were aiming at. Ideally, however, OT hoped to be able to build something in the aftermath of the Triennale, perhaps together with architectural students: “We would like to engage architects and are a bit afraid that there will be too much focus on the app” (OT, April 2016). The ambivalence voiced by OT was also present in the jury’s discussions on the submitted proposals. While one of our interviewees appreciated the projects including a sophisticated architectural discussion and regarded the winners as having interesting architectural ideas, others were more sceptic: There were several tough discussions, mainly regarding the under­ standing of the role of architecture. Several proposals were character­ ized by a lack of understanding of their role as architects. They don’t know what their contribution is. You have to know what your competence is as an architect. […] Architects should improve their skills to build. (Jury member, August 2016)

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In reviews of After Belonging, moreover, a similar scepticism was ex­ pressed, not particularly related to the two proposals for the Torshov site, but rather to the whole event. The lack of ‘new architectural ideas’ was interpreted as a sign of the profession’s experience of powerlessness and lack of identity (Brochmann, 2016) as well as of “an underlying academic fear of architecture in itself” (Braathen, 2016). In line with current debates (e.g. Awan et al., 2011), RVW and OT share an activist approach to their role as architects. They both have a social commitment and see participation in OAT as an opportunity to have a say in public. Both teams question the understanding that the role of architects is limited to designing buildings. Rather than just presenting ‘new archi­ tectural ideas’, they are entering into a larger debate on urban space and housing. They see the exhibition entries as a way to challenge existing immigration policies limiting asylum-seekers’ senses of identity and be­ longing, and their links with the larger society. This reflects an approach to architecture and urban spaces as not just autonomous products and objects, but as continuously changing entities entangled in and dependent on social, cultural, economic and political contexts. It further sees materiality as being agentive in itself, that is, as having the capacity to change everyday urban life (Latour & Yaneva, 2009; Doucet & Cupers, 2009).

Concluding remarks: towards an architectural anthropology of urban space and senses of belonging Our aim in this chapter has been to explore how the RVW and OT proposals perceived the interplay between architectural interventions and sociocultural change with a special focus on the field of migration and refugees. More spe­ cifically, we have looked at how both teams conceptualized and objectified transformations in belonging by addressing asylum-seekers’ movements in urban spaces, as well as their access to public arenas and housing. It is becoming more evident than ever that architecture and urban struc­ tures, such as the kind of accommodation and access to public spaces, can be used to exclude people and control migration. The RVW and OT proposals are examples of how perspectives from architectural anthropology may en­ force architectural practice in its striving to make cities more inclusive. Considering how both teams see architecture as a relational process which may provoke public debates about social and political issues, indicates new ways of practicing architecture. Hereby the discipline demonstrates similar engagement and reflections, that are at heart of anthropology. Furthermore, we argue that both teams not only expand their own practices but merge the roles of academics and practitioners within the two disciplines. Launching an endeavour to engage and reach out to marginalized others, here asylumseekers, it appears that the RVW and OT teams both run the risk of mar­ ginalizing themselves within their profession. As they respond to new social and architectural landscapes, we suggest that both teams are advocating new

‘After Belonging’ 175 modes of inclusion and belonging for asylum-seekers, while simultaneously challenging their profession to develop new forms of architecture. This effort both engages and inspires a mode of inquiry that has been put forward by architectural anthropology, as it stimulates critical exploration of citizens’ experiences of urban lived spaces.

Notes 1 http://oslotriennale.no/en/ 2 The project ‘What Buildings Do: The Effect of the Physical Environment on Quality of Life of Asylum Seekers’ was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI) for the period 2012–2017. It was led by the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Arts, NTNU. Other partners were SINTEF Building and Infrastructure, and Lillehammer University College. 3 According to Norwegian immigration regulations, asylum-seekers lose the right to benefits such as financial support if they choose to leave the reception centre.

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Hidalgo, C. M., & Hernández, B. (2001). Place Attachment: Conceptual and Empirical Questions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 21, 273–281. Ingold, T. (2007). Lines, Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making, Routledge. Kissoon, P. (2010). From Persecution to Destitution: A Snapshot of Asylum Seekers’ Housing and Settlement Experiences in Canada and the United Kingdom. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 8, 4–31. Korody, N. (2016). Home Away from Home: An Interview with the Curators of the Oslo Architecture Triennale. Archinect Features, 21 July. https://archinect.com/ features/article/149958919/home-away-from-home-an-interview-with-the-curatorsof-the-oslo-architecture-triennale Larkin, B. (2013). The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343. Latour, B., & Yavena, A. (2009). ‘Give Me a Gun and I Will Make all Buildings Move’: An ANT’s View of Architecture. In Geiser, R. (ed.), Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research (pp. 80–89). Birkhauser. Leach, N. (2003). Belonging. In London: Postcolonial City (pp. 82–86). AA Files, 49. Lefebvre, H. (2002). Critique of Everyday Life. Verso. NAL/OAT (2016). Jury report – Oslo Architecture Triennale: Open call for inter­ vention strategies: ‘In Residence’. Norwegian Architect Competitions no. 464. Ruimteveldwerk(Brosens, P., van Duppen, B., van Duppen, S., Beelen, L., & Cloeckaert, P.) (2016). Modes of Movement. In Blanco, L. A. C., Galán, I. G., Carrasco, C. M., Llopis, A. N., & Vezier, M. O. (eds), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (pp. 375–378). Oslo Architecture Triennale & Lars Müller Publishers. Salazar, N. B. & N. H. H. Graburn (eds.) (2014). Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches. Berghahn Books. Schmal, P. C., Scheuermann, A., & Elser, O. (eds) (2017). Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country. Atlas of Refugee Housing. Deutsche Arkitekturmuseum/Hatje Cantz Verlag. Scott, F. D. (2016). Taking Stock of Our Belongings: Preface. In Blanco, L. A. C., Galán, I. G., Carrasco, C. M., Llopis, A. N., & Vezier, M. O. (eds.). After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (pp. 24–32). Zürich: 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale & Lars Müller Publishers. Søiland, E., Klepsvik, S., & Hagen, Å. (2016). Open Transformation. In Blanco, L. A. C., Galán, I. G., Carrasco, C. M., Llopis, A. N., & Vezier, M. O. (eds.), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (pp. 361–365). Oslo Architecture Triennale & Lars Müller Publishers. Stender, M. (2017). Towards an Architectural Anthropology: What Architects can Learn from Anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1), 27–43. Strauss, C. (2006). The Imaginary. Anthropological Theory, 6(3), 322–344. Teder, M. (2018). From Outsideness to Insideness: Placemaking in Public Space. PhD dissertation, NTNU. Thorshaug, R. Ø. (2019). Arrival in-between: Analyzing the Lived Experiences of Different Forms of Accommodation for Asylum Seekers in Norway, in Meeus, B., Arnaut, K., & van Heur, B. (eds), Arrival Infrastructures Migration and Urban Social Mobilities (pp. 207–227). Palgrave Macmillan.

Part III

Processes of creativity, participation, and design Edited by Eli Støa and Aina Landsverk Hagen

What is an idea – and how are ideas part of the creative processes of architects and anthropologists alike? As ‘master builders’,1 architecture is about meeting the needs of future occupants, taking on societal challenges, and enchanting audiences, be it juries, collaborators, clients, the media, or the public through words, miniature models, sketched lines, and design choices into believing that the impossible is possible and that the future is almost already here. From the viewpoint of anthropologists, architects are powerful shamans of our public and private spheres, with the buildings and landscapes they make, the changing aesthetics they promote, and the materiality they invoke. Nevertheless, architecture is not just about seducing an audience (or each other) with innovative design concepts or stunning visualizations. It is also about juggling the conflicting interests of clients, future occupants, commis­ sioners, contractors, and collaborative domains, such as engineering and construction work, or the ever more pressing demands of involving a diverse audience as participators and severe environmental and social challenges. A building or landscape is never one object or surface. Layers of functions and structures comprise what appears to be a unity. The same applies to organizations, institutions, collectives, or groups of people, as anthro­ pologists are aware. Human beings are involved in a multiplicity of material actors and phenomena throughout all phases of the creative process from idea to construction and beyond. Different versions of the same object (e.g. renderings, pilot buildings, and design concepts) coexist through relations of practices and are simultaneously multiple and fluid. Thus, one should never take them for granted, and this should also be reflected in our analyses. Both researchers and practitioners frequently encounter dilemmas in dealing with humans, materials, machines, physical and digital objects, software, and organisms. The questions that arise in every social, relational, or physical in­ teraction are crucial in shaping idea creation and the processes of designing, building, and testing/using structures, landscapes, and public spaces. The chapters in Part III address different phases of creating built spaces – from the early stages of involving future user groups in the design and

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construction phases to the operation of completed buildings and public spaces. The chapters are organized according to these phases, starting with Chapter 11 by Ingrid M. Tolstad and Astri Margareta Dalseide. They present examples of how perspectives and techniques from anthropology and architecture contribute to reassessing and exploring existing and po­ tential notions and practices of youth participation in urban development processes. An emphasis is placed upon how methodological explorations in the intersection of architecture and anthropology can introduce modes of inquiry that encourage and facilitate creative capacities and the courage of youth, expanding beyond the immediate context of participation. Chapter 12, authored by Drew Nathan Thilmany, examines the an­ thropological fieldwork and interdisciplinary design process conducted within the Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects for a university building in Toronto, Canada. Focusing on how anthropological methods and insight become architectural design drivers within the project, the author explores how the concept of ‘inclusivity’ emerged as a design dimension, became a research object, and was transformed into a spatial concept that circulates throughout the design process. This chapter illustrates how anthropology can help solve complex design issues in practice. Chapter 13, authored by Anette Stenslund and Mikkel Bille, discusses the credibility of architectural renderings. The authors emphasize the need to understand the complex social construction of renderings as a creative process, where credibility is more dependent on how it feels than by what one can merely observe on the rendering. They highlight how the rendering of atmosphere leads to a transformation of feelings. In their chapter, they illustrate how the atmosphere is embedded in the processes of rendering itself and that the appreciation of atmospheric qualities determines the correspondence between rendering architects and materialities. In Chapter 14, Silje Erøy Sollien and Søren Nielsen analyse the re­ lationship between the architectural design and a changing constellation of actors in an ongoing, innovative, and collaborative housing development process in a medium-sized Danish city. They describe how the building cooperative meets many challenges, including a construction process set up for certain types of professional actors and how a different client organi­ zation must be developed to finance the project. Their analysis of the process depicts how an architectural anthropological research approach can unlock some of the ‘black boxes’ of the legal-financial structures strongly influencing housing and building projects. Finally, Chapter 15, authored by Ruth Woods and Thomas Berker, presents an analysis of two pilot projects that failed to reach the set ob­ jectives. They argue that one reason for the failure is that the projects fol­ lowed the technical logic of testing and demonstrating the feasibility of new sustainable technologies, while the building occupants were reduced to passive recipients. The resulting open or hidden resistance towards new technologies caused the pilot buildings to perform poorly. In what the

Creativity, participation, and design 179 authors call architectural anthropological navigation, pilot buildings should instead become ‘lived spaces’, where outsider perspectives embodied by new technologies and architectural solutions are combined with the occupants’ experiential knowledge. They call for pilot buildings that are designed, implemented, and used as spaces where engineers, architects, and anthro­ pologists become co-designers of future building solutions in collaboration with future users.

Note 1 Etymologically, the term architect derives from the Greek arkhitecton: arkhi-, chief + tekton-, builder (source: Online Etymology Dictionary, www.etymon line.com).

11 Architectural anthropologists in the making? Paths to creative youth participation in local urban development Ingrid M. Tolstad and Astri Margareta Dalseide In recent years, Norway has seen an increased focus upon and demand for user and citizen participation in urban development. A particular emphasis is placed upon the importance and significance of taking the perspectives of young people into consideration, for instance in terms of how children’s and youth’s participation is required by law in all officially funded urban devel­ opment projects through the Norwegian Planning and Building Act (Hagen, Brattbakk, Andersen, Dahlgren, & Ascher, 2016). This legal implementation of youth’s right to participate is in line with the UNs Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states “that any child capable of forming a view has the right to express views freely in all matters affecting him or her” (Hodgkin & Newell, 1998, p. 149). However, despite this rising attention towards the significance and applicability of citizen and youth participation, actual participation beyond verbal input recorded in official reports is hard to come by. The perspectives and input from youth rarely have any real impact in planning processes (Falleth, Hanssen, & Saglie, 2008, 2010), and the youth participation processes conducted often ends up as a means towards allowing public officials to ‘tick the box’ for having listened to youth and thus meeting their lawful requirements. Participation in urban development is still largely based upon a market and consumer logic, where the intended outcome of involving local citizens or residents (as consumers) is to optimize the ability to deliver these in­ habitants the built environment that they need and want. Many conducted participation processes must thus be said to fail in the ability to account for the ‘customers’ needs and desires. However, a more serious consequence might be the lack of experiencing any tangible results in one’s local sur­ roundings after repeated involvement in participatory processes. This might lead to what we refer to as ‘participation fatigue’ (Hagen, 2017), defined as “tiredness which often happens when people absent themselves from par­ taking in the political and democratic processes due to unmet expectation/ empty promises and a non-responsive government” (Tshishonga, 2020), making people, and especially youth, hesitant and unwilling towards future participation. Simultaneously, the market logic of urban planning processes implies an inherent reluctance towards allowing and facilitating for (youth)

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participation, in terms of how it might interrupt the designated budget and schedule for the planned project. Drawing on experiences from a Norwegian research and innovation project on the involvement of youth in local planning processes, this chapter combines perspectives and techniques from anthropology and ar­ chitecture towards rethinking and exploring existing and potential notions and practices of youth participation in urban development processes. A particular emphasis is placed on how the exploration and combination of methodological approaches from architecture and anthropology brings forth a mode of inquiry that opens up, encourages and facilitates the creative capacities and courage of youth that moves beyond the immediate context of participation.

The Y-House project In the project “A Place to be Young: Methods and framework for in­ novative participation in the development and establishment of youth places (Y-House)”,1 researchers from the Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) along with practitioners have teamed up with eight Norwegian municipalities and boroughs2 to explore and test how youth can be in­ volved in the development of local youth places. The project’s approach on methodological development is highly explorative, and unfolds in close collaboration with (and drawing on experience from) specific local con­ texts, and their local inhabitants and municipalities. We consistently work with and through creative, visual, and tactile mediations, such as drawing, embroidery, and photography. As elaborated on below, youth are given training in ethnographic as well as architectural methods, which they apply in the accumulation of knowledge integrated in their participatory activ­ ities, and make use of maps, observational tools, interview guides and physical models to understand and explore existing and potential built environments. The Y-House project thus positions itself in the intersection of anthropology and architecture both in terms of drawing on and com­ bining the respective disciplines’ methodological approaches, and through a shared ontological perspective concerning the relationship between people and their material (and other non-human) surroundings. The youth that are invited to participate in the project’s activities primarily range from 13 to 19 years of age, while young adults up to 25 have also been involved. These youths are recruited in a range of ways, depending on various aspects within the municipal context, related to local demographics, ambitions and abilities to reach specific target groups, and the specific anchoring of the YHouse project within the municipal organization. While the composition of the project team has a leaning towards anthro­ pology (such as the first author of this chapter), it also includes researchers from disciplines such as psychology, history, human geography, and demo­ graphy. The scope of the team is further widened by the involvement of an

Paths to creative youth participation 183 artist, a photographer, and an architect (second author of this chapter), who take an active part in the development and implementation of participatory methods. The co-creative action taken is here aimed both at facilitating or­ ganizational change – in terms of re-organizing the ways in which munici­ palities involve youth, and at empowering youth towards becoming local architects of social change (Bastien & Holmarsdottir, 2018). The efforts made towards achieving these aims are firmly grounded upon a perspective that identifies and emphasizes the need to build, release, and facilitate for creativity as a core competence in and for youth.

An ANT take on youth participation Ontologically, our perspective is founded upon the notion that being a human in the world is based upon the primacy of perception (MerleauPonty, 1964), i.e. our bodily interaction with our material surroundings through our senses. The act of sensing, through sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, can be thought of as “bodily ways of gathering information” (Geurts, 2002, p. 3), and the embodiment of knowledge as “a process that is integral to the relationship between humans and their environments” (Pink, 2009, p. 24). This implies that the material contexts that we live our lives within play a fundamental role for how we understand the world, and for how we can live our lives within it. Simultaneously, moving around in the world with our bodies, we in­ evitably leave our marks, as when repeated movements leave traces in the shape of pathways in the landscape. We also use tools and materials to deliberately shape and change our surroundings, towards practical use or aesthetic pleasure. Within what is often referred to as the material or posthumanist turn, attention is thus turned not only towards the significance of non-human entities, but also towards the interconnectedness and interac­ tion between all kinds of entities – human and non-human alike. In Bruno Latour’s terms, any thing or any one can (and should) be analytically ap­ proached not in terms of their inherent qualities, but rather as “made to exist by its many ties” (Latour, 2005, p. 217), i.e. through their relations and connection with a range of others. According to Latour, connections are established through the ways in which such someones and somethings act upon each other, i.e. do things that produce effects in others. This approach allows us to delve into the question of what youth par­ ticipation in urban planning might actually entail. Latour (2005) refers to actors that are tied into another actor-networks as participants in that as­ semblage. In this sense, participation implies being connected into some­ thing that unfolds through the effect one can produce within it over time, thus contributing to the way it is being assembled. This further resonates with the Norwegian word for participation as being ‘medvirkning’, which translates directly as ‘co-effect’.

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Participatory entanglements – facilitating creative competence and courage The methodological explorations presented here unfold in the intersection of anthropological and architectural traditions and perspectives, in terms of how they emphasize the sociality and materiality inherent in the interconnectedness and interaction between human and non-human actors. As Culhane (2017) points out, ethnographic research operates beyond the re­ searchers as such, and can be approached as the ‘entangled relationships’ of humans, non-humans, natural, social and virtual environments – in its very essence representing a co-production of knowledge. It thus contains a (co-) creative aspect that goes beyond the premise of creativity as a fundamental human capacity that enables people to “create the new, new forms of re­ lationships and new forms of common life” (Carrithers, 1992, p. 70), embracing our interaction with our non-human and material surroundings. For architects, the exploration of an idea is in many ways not initiated until that emerging ‘something’ makes its way from thought or conversa­ tion into some kind of material form – i.e. someone starts drawing it. Not until it has become something visible, tangible, touchable, can the creative process move forward. As described by Hagen and Rudningen (2012), the lines that architects draw are not merely something they sell to make a living; the ability to turn these lines on paper into actual buildings and landscapes holds a strong potential to affect clients and audiences. Considering the element of power that thus resides in the initial material conceptualization of urban development projects, inviting youth and other citizens into the tactile exploration and physical materialization of a local area’s imaginable possibilities clearly expands the notion of what it means to participate in urban development. In the Y-House project, we have consistently been exploring, developing, and testing tools and methods that can enable youth to connect with and into their local environments, communities and ongoing local planning processes. This work unfolds in a shared creative space in which architects, anthropologists and others draw, experiment, reflect, and not least laugh (Morreall, 1991) together. A central aim has been to provide youth with competence and knowledge that allows them to continue to expand and explore the potential range of themselves as actor(-network)s and the tra­ jectories they move along, also beyond the immediate scope of the desig­ nated participation process. Such an approach has in part emerged as a reaction towards traditional participation processes where asking youth ‘what they want’ tends to be the starting point, without first opening up rooms for reflection and imagination that allow participants to explore what might actually be possible and desirable within their local context and beyond. We argue that this is required in order not merely to provide ‘thicker’ answers for municipal planners, but to enable and empower youth as creative (local) citizens in their own right.

Paths to creative youth participation 185 Conducting participatory work within a societal and educational context that seems to emphasize convergent rather than divergent thinking (Akbari Chermahini & Hommel, 2012) we have repeatedly met youth who in various ways share how they ‘didn’t know they had ideas’. For us this amplifies the need to focus on creativity, and the ambition to play a part in building youth’s competence for creative thinking. Drawing on Ingold’s notion that it is through meeting each other, or crossing paths, that the lives of human and non-human inhabitants such as local youth, existing physical structures, municipal planners, and prospective building projects become “bound up with the other” (Ingold, 2011, p. 148), we might be said to facilitate encounters, i.e. “multiple interface meeting points where some­ thing different from something else meets that something else and some­ thing happens” (Bateson, 1980, emphasis added). This resonates with a fundamental understanding of creativity as a social process – as something that is not located within people, but rather unfolds as entanglements be­ tween us within specific social and cultural contexts (Sawyer & DeZutter, 2009; Amabile, 1996). In our joint practical methodological efforts as an­ thropologist and architect, we are thus driven by the question of how we can facilitate processes that releases youth’s creativity on several levels. Below we present four sequential modes of inquiry that have been tested out in the Y-House project and discuss the ways in which they might contribute to creative youth participation in local urban development.

Mapping The participatory sessions we facilitate are usually always initiated by use of the SPLOT method (Hagen & Osuldsen, forthcoming) – an exercise aimed towards establishing trust as we start working with a group of young participants in the establishment of a local youth place. This has repeatedly been followed by an exercise where the youth are asked to conduct an in­ itial mapping of their local communities. Aerial photographs of the neighbourhood are printed on large cardboard posters (A1) and laid out on a table that the youth gather around, either plenary, or in groups. They are provided with a box of pins in different colours and are asked to use these pins and mark sites according to the pins’ color-coding. Yellow might designate ‘places that we/youth like to hang out’, green ‘here we/youth do sports/activities’, purple ‘places we/youth avoid’, pink ‘here there should be something for youth’, orange ‘here youth are allowed to decide’, and a grey flag pin ‘this is an important place because …’. The youth are then en­ couraged to pin down their own ideas for specific locations in the neigh­ bourhood. Confronted with the clean map, the youth will usually start out by finding out where they live and sharing this information with each other. While reserved at first, the process of physically putting down pins (en­ couraged by a ‘competent adult’ present) and seeing the map slowly

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changing before their eyes, due to what they are doing, seems to heighten their courage and increase the speed of creative interaction with the map. They might start drawing on the map, becoming increasingly bold in what they dare to imagine and wish for. This exercise inspires conversations about how the area is internally connected, as well as exchanges of ex­ periences, preferences, and new insights. Through interacting with the physical map, the youth can thus encounter their local area in other ways than they have previously done, allowing them to draw (new) connections between their lived sociality and the surroundings they move about in. The fact that the process becomes visible through tactile interaction with the map, that they can observe in real time how they are making their mark on it, seems to help them along in the creative process. Having something to show and compare with the work of others seems to build courage, and thus becomes a fruitful starting point for what is to follow. A colleague who conducted this exercise in smaller groups than usual, with smaller maps (A3) and with stickers representing fewer categories, could report that this did not produce the same level of engagement and group interaction as we usually experience. It would thus seem that both the size of the group working together, the size of the map and the 3D effect of flag pins on the map influences the creative potential of the exercise.

Figure 11.1 Youth marking significant locations on maps of their local area. Photo: Karoline Hjorth.

Paths to creative youth participation 187

Trailing After training the youth in ethnographic observation and interviewing, we send them out into their local community to do ‘tråkk’, which can be translated to trailing in English. In the initial training we emphasize how to ‘turn on the gaze’ on surroundings that are familiar to us, the im­ portance of reflecting about what it is that we are observing based upon our own positionality, and the empirical richness that comes with coming up with and asking good questions. The youth then go out in small groups to ‘trail’ the neighbourhood. Depending on the size of the overall group of youth, we might provide each group with a specific lens to go out and explore their neighbourhood, such as a ‘food trail’, a ‘sports trail’ or a ‘public transportation trail’. They are asked to observe for a while, before coming together in the group and form a set of questions based on what they have seen. They will then conduct short interviews with people they meet ‘in the field’. Before initiating an interview, we ask them to present themselves, explain what they are doing, and to ask permission from the potential respondent. We then gather in a plenary session where they present their findings to each other. In these sessions, we tend to experience well-reflected discussion concerning what they have actually observed, what might have influenced the results, and ethical conundrums they had to face. Having conducted trails that required them to take on a different perspective or position than their own, they also tend to bring back insights into what matters to bi­ cyclists, parents with strollers or the elderly. Through the activity of trailing, the aim is to not only accumulate context-sensitive and inter­ subjective knowledge about their own localities but youth are also equipped with skills as to how to acquire such knowledge. This exercise resonates with how a part of architectural practice is the inspection of the actual site where one plans to build, as well as the sur­ rounding area. The focus is here on the materiality of what you see, hear and smell – and otherwise take in with your senses. Forming an image of what kind of place this is, and the context it is situated within, provides input into the issue of what can and should be built there. An architect would most likely start drawing out sketches or diagrammatic maps on site, to provide a foundation for the creative process lying ahead. This focus on the physicality of a place can trigger creativity in intuitive ways, producing tactile, rather than verbal, ideas about what could and should be there – and not. While we have thus far not asked the participating youth to draw or sketch on site, being there and observing seems to make it easier to turn on memories and references. The conversations between the youth tend to revolve around what they see and not, and comparisons made to other places they know of. This mode of inquiry thus seems to open up a room of imagination about what might be, in itself a strong prerequisite for creativity.

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Scouting All of the youth groups we have worked with in the Y-House project have been on excursions to other youth places, in an exercise we here refer to as scouting. After preparing them in advance, the visiting youth start out by going around and observing the location in question, noting down their observations and reflections along the way in a designated ‘excursion booklet’. Based on their observations, they compose a short interview guide used to interview local youth present. Asking questions related both to the physical layout and the ongoing activities of a location, the youth thus acquire an impression not only of the materiality of the house, but also of how it is socially organized. Throughout the project period it has become increasingly clear that this type of peer-to-peer observation and inter­ viewing not only gives a much better insight into what actually matters to local youth, but also contributes to more nuanced perspectives of what aspects of the youth place in question functions well for the local youth and not. This has perhaps been particularly noticeable when visiting a renowned co-location and co-organization of a local library, youth club and volunteer centre in one of the Oslo boroughs, which is repeatedly referred to by adults as ‘the ones who have really made it work’, implying that it is something to strive towards replicating in their own district. The youth who have scouted these facilities have been more critical, for instance pointing out the interior as being ‘too adult’, and that they would want their own youth area to be more secluded from the rest of the house (using curtains or doors) providing ‘time off’ from adults. Each excursion has been concluded with a shared summing up of and reflection upon the findings they have made, as well as a brainstorming of ideas for their own place. Here we have made use of a variation of the SPLOT exercise, where they first gather all their findings in an ‘excursion site SPLOT’, then transfer elements they like to a ‘home site SPLOT’ which is added on with new ideas they have come up with during the scouting. Allowing the youth to experience and engage with other youth places’ material surroundings and to explore the perspectives of those habitually dwelling within them, has seemed to enable them to imagine themselves within similar settings, to consider what elements from it they would bring into their own youth place or not, and to inspire new ideas about what they can create within their own context. In our experience, scouting is one the most powerful tools for motivating youth to parti­ cipate and to empower them to demand more. Scouting a different youth place enables them to turn on the gaze and ignite imagination around their home site in very hands-on ways. The feedback provided to the (deciding) adults becomes stronger and clearer through the youth’s realization of what is possible and what others have received, and that these are things that they cannot merely wish for but also demand from decision-makers.

Paths to creative youth participation 189

Modelling Facilitating for the youth to engage further with the potentiality of their own youth place, they are given architectural foam board models of the planned facility or of the existing location to be used, depending on the local context. The youth work on them in groups, with free reigns as to what they want to put into them, and how they want to modify them. They are provided with colour pens, patterned paper, fabrics, photo­ graphs, stickers, and little figurines that represent people that they can use in any way that they want. The models are made to scale (1:50), and the youth also get properly scaled printouts of the floor plans for some of the places they have scouted. This allows them to make assessments as to what there might be room for in a given part of the space, and to play around with their placement. The fact that the references are rea­ listically scaled seems to give the youth an even deeper understanding of the architectonic aspects of the space in terms of enabling them to ex­ plore and test the actual room of possibilities. Municipalities are often concerned with communicating the realistic expectations that youth might have for what they can participate in the decision of. The mod­ elling work constitute a space for play and creativity in which youth are allowed to think outside the immediate realms of the boundaries that are outlined. Engaging with physical representations of not yet built spaces with their hands and additional senses, places the youth in the very intersection of what is and what might be – of what they can ob­ serve and what they can creatively imagine. The high level of con­ creteness involved in modelling seems to require more creative courage from the youth than some of the other modes of inquiry do, as they often censor themselves creatively due to fear of making mistakes or ‘destroying’ the model. This is juxtaposed with a sense of relief, con­ fidence and pride as the model is finalized, as the tangible result of what they have done is made visible to others, emphasizing an experience of having made a contribution.

Continued paths for creative youth participation The perspective that is presented here, promoting a methodological ap­ proach to youth participation in the intersection of anthropology and ar­ chitecture, aims at challenging the predominance of consumer and market logic within urban planning. Rather than aiming towards and failing to identify and meet the needs of residents as ‘users’, we argue for an approach that facilitates for heterogeneous encounters that can produce effects in unforeseen ways, flattening the landscape towards participation in its broadest sense. In terms of youth participation this implies allowing, as­ sisting and encouraging youth to explore and act upon their surroundings and their own position within them based on their own perspectives as

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Figure 11.2 Youth working on an architectural model of their planned local youth place. Photo: Astri Margareta Dalseide.

humans rather than as invited participants in (parts of) planning processes. It also entails enabling the creative making and reshuffling of new and existing human and non-human actor-networks, in ways that allow for continued and sustainable interaction and co-creation.

Paths to creative youth participation 191 The modes of inquiry that have been presented must along with the ex­ panded arsenal of tools and methods for creative participation applied in the Y-House project be considered a work in progress. Indeed, a funda­ mental aspect of our methodological approach is the ongoing exploration and adjustment of a toolbox that continues to be ‘in the making’. We present others, such as youth, municipality workers and fellow researchers, with tools in a specific form and descriptions of how to use them. We both encourage and strive to enable our collaborators to continue the explora­ tion and adjustment of these tools to their own specific needs and contexts. The efforts to do so are in themselves grounded in a creatively aimed combination of the anthropological practice of reflexivity and the archi­ tectural nerve to draw the first line. We share reflections and ideas, verbally and tactically, in preparation and execution of participatory sessions, and exchange our experiences as we debrief a completed session together. Through such interactions we learn how bringing a foam board model on the table can awaken the youth’s motivation to participate, ‘finally some­ thing is happening!’, as such tactile exercises adds an element of fun that is not always prominent in participatory processes. It makes us realize that not all exercises work equally well with all youth, and that taking them through a variety of approaches increases the chances that the experience of entering and exploring one’s own creative space is more widely distributed within the group. Involving different age groups, it becomes clear that working with scale is more suitable for the older youth, while the younger ones get less out of working with specific references to scale. In order to maintain the youth’s creative courage, we have learned that they benefit from a present adult that can support them along the way. Based on these shared insights, we can bring out our markers and re-sketch the toolkit needed for the next session. There is considerable variation in the extent to which the participatory work we facilitate has an actual effect on the specific planning processes in question. Some youth have played a major part in seeing their local youth club being established and continue to be involved in the everyday running of it. Others have seen their efforts dwindle as a project comes to a halt due to political, economic, or practical issues, something which is far from uncommon in planning processes that unfold over long-time spans. However, we consider these participatory sessions to have potential ef­ fects on several levels, whereof the establishment of the specific youth place is but one. We see that building creative capacity and competence in youth also holds the potential to make them more competent and courageous as participants in their local communities (and beyond). Having acquired a set of creative skills in the intersection of the social and the tactile that can be actively applied in their becoming with society, youth can – as architectural anthropologists in the making – make crea­ tivity a foundational element in the processes of youth participation in urban planning.

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Notes 1 The project is financed by The Research Council of Norway, through their program “Democracy, innovation and renewal” (FORKOMMUNE). 2 Five boroughs in Oslo (project owner Østensjø, St Hanshaugen, Alna, Grünerløkka, and Vestre Aker), as well as Tromsø, Drammen, and Moss muni­ cipalities.

References Akbari Chermahini, S., & Hommel, B. (2012). Creative mood swings: divergent and convergent thinking affect mood in opposite ways. Psychological Research, 76, 634–640. doi:10.1007/s00426-011-0358-z Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in context. Westview Press. Bastien, S., & Holmarsdottir, H. B. (Eds) (2018). Youths as architects of social change: Global efforts to advance youth-driven innovation. Springer. Bateson, G. (1980). Interfaces: Boundaries which connect. Audio tape. Big Sur Tapes. Carrithers, M. (1992). Why humans have cultures: Explaining anthropology and social diversity. Oxford University Press. Culhane, D. (2017). Imagining: An introduction. In D. Elliott & D. Culhane (Eds), A different kind of ethnography: Imaginative practices and creative methodolo­ gies (pp. 1–21). University of Toronto Press. Falleth, E. I., Hanssen, G. S., & Saglie, I.-L. (2008). Medvirkning i byplanlegging i Norge. Report 37/2008. Oslo: NIBR. Retrieved on 25 March 2015 from www. nibr.no/filer/2008-37.ny.pdf Falleth, E. I., Hanssen, G. S., & Saglie, I.-L. (2010). Challenges to democracy in market-oriented urban planning in Norway. European Planning Studies, 18(5), 737–753. Geurts, K. L. (2002). Culture and the senses: Bodily ways of knowing in an African community. University of California Press. Hagen, A. L., & Osuldsen, J. (forthcoming). Splotting som erfaringsbasert verktøy for medvirkning og stedsforståelse ved byromsutforming. FormAkademisk. Hagen, A. L. (2017). Å høre til og bli hørt: Et notat om ungdom og involvering i kommunal planlegging. R&D result 04:2017. Work Research Institute. Hagen, A. L., Brattbakk, I., Andersen, B., Dahlgren, K., & Ascher, B. (2016). Ung og ute: En studie av ungdom og unge voksnes bruk av uterom. Report 6/2016. Work Research Institute. Hagen, A. L., & Rudningen, G. (2012). Den første streken: Materialitetens makt i et arkitektfirma. Norsk antropologisk tidsskrift, 23(3–4). Hodgkin, R., & Newell, P. (1998). Implementation handbook on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. UNICEF. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-networktheory. Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The primacy of perception and other essays on phe­ nomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics. Northwestern University Press.

Paths to creative youth participation 193 Morreall, J. (1991). Humor and work. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 4(3–4), 359–373. Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sage. Sawyer, K., & DeZutter, S. (2009). Distributed creativity: How collective creations emerge from collaboration. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, 3, 81–92. doi:10.1037/a0013282 Tshishonga, N. S. (2020). Forging Civic and Democratic Governance from Below Through Virtual State and Communities: Case Studies of Communities of Practice. In Chhabra, S., & Kumar, M. (Eds), Civic Engagement Frameworks and Strategic Leadership Practices for Organization Development (pp. 67–95). IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-2372-8.ch004

12 Questioning the shape of social concepts Transforming anthropological insights into architectural design drivers Drew Nathan Thilmany In 2017, I began my doctoral research studying how architects and building occupants approach community development and notions of shared space in architecture. Over three years, from 2017 to 2019, I conducted the fieldwork for my dissertation within the Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects.1 Within the company, I became the first anthropologist in the Research and Development Department. From this position, my role was to solve specific architectural design problems while developing anthro­ pological components for the overall design methodology being practiced by the company. This was accomplished by collaborating on active design projects, where I represented the anthropological component of an inter­ disciplinary and often international design process. This chapter focuses on the first project I participated in at Henning Larsen Architects, an approach I developed, and how I apply anthro­ pological research to help develop architectural design tools within the firm. When I joined the project, the design team was in the process of developing a new building for the Science Faculty at Ryerson University, located in downtown Toronto, Canada. The anthropological fieldwork I designed for the project focuses on both the design team and current and former students at Ryerson University.2 What I learned over the course of this project led me to frame what I do within the company as questioning the shape of social concepts. Initially, I found it very difficult to explain to my colleagues at Henning Larsen that there is not a “one size fits all” solution to developing a socially-driven architectural design process: unpacking the relationship between a design concept and spatial experience requires investigating specific processes, in specific places, with specific people. As I will demonstrate below, communicating this idea through empirical material helps clarify how anthropology can expand and qualify different elements of architectural design by adding evidence, data, and narrative that informs the design process and helps the team communicate the reasoning behind design choices.

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You don’t know what inclusivity means to us 10 February 2017, 10:04 a.m.: “She basically looked at us and said, ‘As a group of white Danish men, I don’t think you know what inclusivity means to us here at Ryerson.’” Clustered around an ink-stained table in the atrium of Henning Larsen’s Copenhagen headquarters, David, Søren, and Nikolaj introduce me to one of their current projects: the future home of Ryerson University’s Science Faculty, the Innovation in Science Building in downtown Toronto. With its proposed location at 202 Jarvis Street, the building will become the cam­ pus’s southeastern gateway: a portal between the urban public realm and campus life. With the intention of creating an iconic urban boundary and modern science facility, the client has requested that the building exemplify three core values: innovation, diversity, and inclusivity. David is midanecdote, recounting a recent meeting with Ryerson University’s Dean of Science: “I think we’re quite inclusive,” David brandishes one hand in a ninety-degree arc, indicating the two-story office wrapped around the at­ rium, “We don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, lesbian, man, woman, trans: it’s not what’s most important to us. We all work together.” “How did you respond?” I’m jotting notes quickly, my left hand cramping up. “Louis3 talked about transparency and space,” Nikolaj says, “but they were not convinced.” “Diversity is so important in Canada and the US – this hyper-focus on external differences – it’s just not how we think in Denmark,” David ex­ plains, “It makes it very hard to communicate with the client. What do we do? Do I need to wear a shirt that says: ‘I’m gay’?” Half-laughing, David throws his hands up in frustration.

Unpacking the design problem Inside this discussion there is a tangible design problem: how can the team create an inclusive building if they don’t understand what inclusivity means to the people who will use it? Addressing this problem requires dealing with a more fundamental issue: how does one sense inclusivity? Is it located in labels, or in their absence? Can it be found in recognition, or anonymity? Is it purely visual, detectable through contextual differences in melatonin or identifiable sex characteristics? What spatial registers facilitate or impede its manifestation? When, where, why, how, and to whom does it appear? This dilemma opens a gap in the architectural design process that allows anthropology to enter. Within this context, locating inclusivity is not a matter of finding an ideal definition, but of sensory recognition: it is a question of how inclusivity emerges as a phenomenon through embodied human experience. As Merleau-Ponty argues, “It is a question of uncovering the idea in the Hegelian sense, not something like a physico-mathematical

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law, accessible to objective thought, but rather a unique formula of behavior toward others, Nature, time, and death; that is, a certain manner of ar­ ticulating the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, p. lxxxii). In other words, I aim at inclusivity, not as an abstract universal, but as it appears or fails to appear before particular individuals.4

Approaching inclusivity as a phenomenological essence As an anthropologist, I tend to develop concepts through the study of practice. The architects I work with tend to begin with the conceptual and install it through the negotiation of shape and material. As I develop an­ thropological components for Henning Larsen’s architectural design pro­ cess, my intention is always to produce social insights that architects can work with. In this context, I argue that phenomenology provides a theo­ retical lens capable of generating data that bridges both disciplines. Taking aim at the phenomenological essence of inclusivity shifts my analytical gaze towards what Merleau-Ponty describes as “the sense that shines forth at the intersection of my experiences and the intersection of my experiences with those of others through a sort of gearing into each other” (1945/2014, p. lxxxiv). From this perspective, inclusivity does not emerge before an abstract or general body: the phenomenon is always perceived through a specific body, at a specific moment, in a specific way. As an analytical lens, this approach makes it possible to foreground both the body and the spatial characteristics of an experience, because, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty (1945/2014), the body is always somewhere, being someone: always placing and always placed. I begin by exploring the conditions under which a phenomenon appears and then work on elaborating the ways in which it can be absent. This leads me to approach the emergence of a phenomenon as an event. Exploring these events allows me to interrogate the conditions that allow the phe­ nomenon to appear – to study how and why it emerges – a process that helps me understand the ways in which a community or group recognize something, in this particular case inclusivity, as itself. A sense of nuance “Do you want the official definition, or my personal definition?” Sitting in a room skinned in fluorescent orange glass, feet scuffing orange shag carpet, we’re two minutes into my first focus group in the Ryerson Student Learning Center. Six people from different backgrounds, pursuing different degrees, with different gender identities, look at me expectantly – and I realize I’ve made my first mistake. “I definitely want to hear your personal definitions – but, briefly, could you tell me what the ‘official’ definition is?” The first thing I discover is that a complex and nuanced vocabulary exists around inclusivity at Ryerson. While members of the design team at Henning

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Larsen approach inclusivity as a singular concept that can be installed in the design, the students I meet with have a complicated and articulate relation­ ship with various definitions and approaches – when they assemble a per­ sonal definition they do it in relation to perceived public definitions. These are reinterpreted and modified through the lens of personal experience, al­ lowing them to locate what they perceive as inclusivity in their own lives. Although personal definitions vary, important themes emerge. A sense of visibility Several days later, I’m conducting a series of go-along interviews with in­ dividual students. Saeed is walking me through 245 Church Street, showing me the environments he encounters everyday as we discuss inclusivity. Tiptoeing past the offices of Engineering professors, down the hallway that made him “scared shitless” throughout undergrad, he’s telling me about what happened last Saturday and why it was inclusive. “‘Hey, Saeed! Whassup, whassup, whassup? And here’s a drink for you!’ and I’m like, ‘Sorry boys, I’m not drinking tonight.’” We turn the corner to a slender concrete hallway, edging our way out of the atrium and into the relative quiet of linoleum tile flooring and locked wooden doors. Saeed lowers his voice, continuing, “He goes, ‘Why? Why not?’ ‘Man, I’m fasting’ cause the month of Ramadan, you know.” A 25-year-old MA student in aerospace engineering, Saeed identifies as Canadian and has lived most of his life in Thorncliffe Park with his parents. Although his father emigrated from Pakistan in 2001, Saeed and his mother weren’t able to join him until 2005, when Saeed was eleven. Saeed describes Thorncliffe Park as a place that reminds his parents of home – a place they feel comfortable. With a nearby mosque and recognizable foods in local restaurants and grocers, it wasn’t until Saeed left the neighbourhood to attend Ryerson that he encountered what he describes as overwhelming difference: I think that’s where things changed. As soon as I graduated from high school and transitioned into university, my first class was a class of 670 students – it was a chemistry class. I was this one small fish in a 670-fish pond, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Who am I going to be friends with?’ You know, ‘Who am I going to talk to?’ Within this context, Saeed became immersed in a kind of cultural diversity he had never experienced before. The scale of these encounters made him feel invisible – and it took moments where he was able to stand out as himself, to be seen as an individual, for him to feel a sense of inclusivity. These moments are the outcome of cumulative interactions, like the mo­ ment when an unwanted beer becomes capable of transforming into a conversation about the meaning of Ramadan. For Saeed, this is a moment

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where he gets to stand out as himself – to break the confines of unspoken stereotypes by articulating his own nuanced relationship to his faith – but facilitating these moments requires certain conditions: “It’s almost like a tap – when do you turn the water on and when do you turn it off? Right? And to be able to know that you have to know how many people are surrounding the tap.” For Saeed the number of people around him affects what he discloses and how, indicating there is a numerical limit beyond which it becomes difficult for him to “be himself” within a group con­ versation. This limit indicates a line between enough and too much, a po­ tential quantity capable of shifting the relationship between observation, identification, and his sense of inclusivity. While this limit became apparent with Saeed, I chose to pursue it further with other students. A sense of scale “How many is too many?” I’m talking with Mariana, who identifies as a Venezuelan woman. She explains that although she was born in Venezuela, she spent three years living in the Middle East with her family before moving to Toronto to attend Ryerson. In two months, she graduates with a BA in Creative Industries. “More than four.” We’re discussing what makes a group unapproachable – when an en­ counter begins to feel oppressive or uncomfortable – looking for perceptual boundaries that shift an experience from inclusive to exclusive. For Mariana, a group feels inclusive as long as she knows at least one person and the total number is less than five. This is an important theme among Ryerson students: individuals generally feel comfortable joining three to five people – as long as they know at least one. This line between comfort and discomfort indicates two important elements of inclusivity: scale and re­ cognition – the ratio of known to unknown others and the upper limit. These characteristics represent a significant departure from the ways in which inclusivity is perceived by members of the design team at Henning Larsen. A sense of equality “At first I was just like, ‘Well, I don’t see that as an architectural problem, because, I mean, I don’t discriminate between sexes,’ so I would imagine that the women and men are equal in the same space.” The air is dense, hot, sweating against my skin. You can push it with your hand, its presence emerging through the absence of ventilation, the accumulation of tem­ perature and carbon dioxide weighing us down together. “But I can see it from a science point of view, that if it’s becoming too gender specific, or male-dominant, then it’s a good thing to tackle – but if it’s because women don’t code, or find physics, or whatever, exciting – I don’t know if it’s the architecture, but I’d like to find out.”

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For David, the lead design architect and partner in charge on the Innovation in Science Building, inclusivity is an inherent spatial quality. Working with several other prominent Danish architecture firms before coming to Henning Larsen more than ten years ago, David has been one of the partners spearheading the company’s push into North America. From David’s perspective, gendered positions exist equally in spatial environments unless the space is modified specifically to privilege one group over another. This emerges as an important theme among the design team at Henning Larsen: space, as a medium, is inherently democratic, inherently inclusive – space exists for everyone equally. What is placed in and around space can modify these qualities, but without the intentional installation of difference, the space is inclusive. Perched on opposite sides of a circular table, David says: “You can tie that back into inclusivity and making things safe and open and transparent – and back to the idea of synergy. You know, the idea that it only really gets exciting – I mean when you’re studying – it only really gets exciting when you stumble upon the unforeseen.” Here, a certain position begins to take shape. If space is approached from the perspective that it exists for everyone equally, then by installing open­ ness, transparency, and largeness – by reducing the walls and doors that would appear to subdivide a design into opaque, incomprehensible terri­ tories – an architect can allow a space to retain its inclusive character. This simultaneously promotes spatial interconnectivity in a design – producing what David calls ‘synergetic space’ – and intensifies opportunities for un­ anticipated interactions, an experiential element David perceives as essen­ tial for a good student life. A sense of control For the students I spoke with at Ryerson, an experience emerges as inclusive when an individual is recognized as themself and a perceived difference can be transformed into a shared understanding. Kayla, who identifies as a 29-year-old Canadian woman with Anishinaabe heritage and an auditory processing disorder, explains: “When I think about inclusivity, I think about the thing I had to work through.” For Kayla, a graduate of the fashion program at Ryerson, inclusivity appeared through an encounter with her professor during year two, when she began struggling intensely with post-traumatic stress, social anxiety, and depression. Kayla explains: We were in class at the time and she said, “Why don’t you take this time to go to the clinic” – because we have a Ryerson clinic – “and see if you can talk to someone about getting counselling here, or, you know, get connected with that? You’ve already dedicated this time to being in class, so this isn’t taking any other time out that you weren’t already expecting,” like, “Why don’t you go now?” Which I thought was a fantastic gesture.

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In order to facilitate this gesture Kayla needed to scale down her environ­ ment, to step away from her classmates without drawing unwanted atten­ tion. Encountering her professor in a controllable, modular workspace made it possible for her to shift positions easily, allowing her to expose a difference without fear of judgment from an unknown audience – and transform it into a shared understanding of her personal condition. For Kayla, the space became inclusive because she could install enough privacy to disclose sensitive information without creating a sense of stigma among her peers; if her classmates were not present or the space was being used for something else, then the experience would not have stood out to her as inclusive. Understanding how these factors influence one another when Kayla tries to use the space is an important part of understanding how inclusivity can emerge in classrooms on campus. For the students at Ryerson University, a space becomes inclusive when you can sense that your needs are being considered: the space somehow reflects your identity back at you, allowing you to claim a place within it. This can be done by facilitating recognition – being able to stand out as yourself in specific moments and specific ways – but, as the following ex­ ample illustrates, this can also be accomplished at Ryerson by labelling the built environment. A sense of recognition The text is bold, white, loud, carving out space against the blue background of the sign: “This is a women’s washroom. Everyone who identifies as a woman, and/or trans [asterisk] person may use this space. At Ryerson we respect everyone’s right to choose the washroom appropriate for them.” In small dark letters, huddled together in the thick white border at the bottom of the sign, the asterisk unfolds a set of labels, identifiers, potential containers of personhood: “In this case trans refers to people who identify as trans­ gender, transsexual, two-spirit, non-binary, genderqueer, and/or gender di­ verse.” Adjacent to this textual territory, in the lower left corner of the sign, is Ryerson University’s official logo, emblazoned in blue, white, and yellow. It’s Friday morning and I’ve managed to recover from my initial mistake with the focus group eighty-two minutes earlier. This is where I first meet Mariana, who explains that her experience with inclusivity at Ryerson has been radically different from her experience with inclusivity in other places: Here in Canada it’s huge, like, I think it’s really big for them, for, like, Canadians as a society, and that’s great. I think that Canadians are way more advanced in that sense compared to, like, Americans, or compared to Europeans. Moments earlier, Lakeisha, Yahvi, and Mariana – the three participants who all identify as women – spontaneously recited, in almost perfect unison, the

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text from the new washroom signs. Their shared description showed a kind of hyper-awareness, indicating some students know the tiny text in the corner of the sign word-for-word and it affects their everyday perception of in­ clusivity. Like, I tried to explain that to my parents and that’s like, ‘What?’ Like, for them it’s not common, like – of course in the Middle East you’re not going to see any of that – and I think it’s something that is kind of like – like, for us, I think we’re used to it and you go to a space and you, like, yeah, you are – if you identify as a woman, then there’s no problem that you use the women’s bathroom. There is a consensus in the focus group that extends thematically throughout the Ryerson community, cascading through interviews, ob­ servations, go-alongs, and documents: the washroom sign, as a physical object, is the primary example of creating inclusive space on campus. It’s ability to make the space claimable – to communicate the recognition of individual difference, even in the absence of others – allows people who feel their identities are contested or challenged by larger cultural narratives to place themselves within the community: to feel recognized and welcomed. The consistent use of the sign as the good example also indicates another important theme: at Ryerson, space needs to be claimed – it does not just exist for everyone equally. From this perspective, inclusivity must be in­ stalled in space. A sense of anonymity “A guy dressed as a woman in a men’s room? I wouldn’t care whatsoever. Or a woman being a man in the same space – I couldn’t care less. But I would certainly not like them to have to see signs on the wall.” Nikolaj adjusts a pair of black frame glasses and takes a sip of water. As senior project manager for the Innovation in Science Building, Nikolaj adminis­ trates the design process and oversees the communication and alignment of the project with the client. “These labels that say, ‘This is a toilet for men and transgendered persons’ – that makes Europeans vomit, basically, be­ cause that’s – I mean – putting up signs is simply not the way to deal with it.” For Nikolaj and the other members of the design team, the washroom sign is an architectural paradox. Among the team, the sign is not perceived as inclusive, but as exclusive – a perception diametrically opposed to the context in which it is invoked by the client. If you approach space as in­ herently inclusive, then labelling the environment becomes a way of redu­ cing inclusivity by drawing attention to difference. For Nikolaj, the sign is perceived as a way of separating individuals from the community – a way of telling people that without this sign, you do not belong.

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Transforming patterns of perception into architectural design drivers If I begin to unpack how these perceptions of inclusivity gear into each other (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, p. lxxxiv), two distinct positions take shape: team members at Henning Larsen appear to aim at inclusivity from a position where space exists for everyone, while the people I spoke with at Ryerson University appear to aim at inclusivity from a position where space must be claimed. Each position has important implications for the per­ ception of inclusivity as a phenomenon and for architectural design. As I will demonstrate below, the position from which a person approaches the phenomenon affects the ways in which it appears: a process that can lead to different perceptions of the same space. If inclusivity is approached from the position that space exists for ev­ eryone, then the phenomenon tends to be perceived through large, open environments where no one draws attention to individual differences – and the space is already “mine” before “I” enter. Designing the Innovation in Science Building to be perceived as inclusive from this perspective requires folding these perceptual criteria into an evaluative rubric that can be used to assess various design choices as the team selects different architectural elements. However, if inclusivity is approached from the position that space must be claimed, then the phenomenon tends to emerge in smaller, inter­ active environments where individuals can stand out and be recognized – and the space must reflect “my” identity and needs in order to be claimed. In order to operationalize these criteria, they also need to be folded into some kind of evaluative rubric – but here a challenge emerges: a singular architectural design cannot appear inclusive from both perspectives. Each of these positions can, however, be connected in a way that allows them to inform one another. By drawing each position into relationship along an axis, the perception of inclusivity can be re-conceptualized as a kind of scale. At one end of the scale space exists for everyone: from this position inclusivity is perceived primarily through larger, more open en­ vironments that produce a sense of anonymity. At the other end of the scale space must be claimed: from this position inclusivity emerges primarily through smaller, more interactive environments that produce a sense of recognition (Figure 12.1). Diagramming positions and spatial characteristics along an axis makes it possible for an individual or group to locate the relative differences between their own perception of inclusivity and the ways in which it emerges for others. In this sense, scaling inclusivity becomes a method for identifying experiential differences and converting those differences into architectural design parameters. Creating this scale requires a specific analytical shift: phenomenological perceptions of inclusivity have to be transformed into abstract concepts that can be taken up and used as evaluative criteria. This process allows the design team to conceptualize their own position as one of

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Figure 12.1 Scaling inclusivity. Illustration: Drew Nathan Thilmany.

many positions, effectively formulating a new position from which other positions can be identified and analysed in relation to one another. While individual perceptions are never located at one extreme or the other, the experience of inclusivity as a phenomenon can be clustered into relative positions along the scale. In this sense, the team members at Henning Larsen tend to perceive inclusivity from perspectives that are closer to the position that space exists, while the students I spoke with at Ryerson tend to perceive inclusivity from perspectives that are closer to the position that space must be claimed. As an architectural tool, scaling the analysis makes it possible for the design team to fold the built environment into configurations designed to facilitate a sense of inclusivity among the students at Ryerson University: a social phenomenon perceived through different registers, by different bodies, in a different place.

The shaping of social concepts In summary, this chapter provides an ethnographic map to guide future inquiries into the spatial and social characteristics of concepts that drive the architectural design process. This approach can be applied to create an interdisciplinary process that brings anthropology and architecture together throughout the de­ sign phases of a building proposal. Rather than being a methodology for identifying a singular set of best practices in architectural design, it is a way of unpacking the elements that shape the experience of a phenomenon in relation to the built environment – for specific bodies, at specific times, in specific ways. As an approach, questioning the shape of social concepts can be outlined in six steps: 1 2

Identify the design problem and the phenomenon in question. Work with the designers to understand how they perceive the phenomenon.

204 3 4 5

6

Thilmany Work with potential occupants to understand how they perceive the phenomenon. Identify patterns of perception, focusing specifically on how perceptions overlap or differ among and between groups. Diagram key perceptual differences into an evaluative tool that can be used with the designers to make informed choices about how the intended phenomenon will translate into occupants’ experience of the built environment. Communicate how the tool was created using ethnographic material, creating a narrative that allows the designers to understand how using the tool will help facilitate the intended occupant experience.

Within Henning Larsen Architects, I have applied this approach to study the emergence of disordered space and the shape of knowledge sharing in addition to examining the shape of inclusivity. This process allows us to generate anthropologically-informed design parameters and create tools we use to evaluate architectural choices regarding materiality, scale, acoustics, wayfinding, capacity, furniture, and building program. In my experience, the creation of design tools is an extremely important part of this process. When anthropology is presented to architects, the discussion among architects afterwards often involves comments like, “but those are just words.” Transforming anthropological findings with dia­ grams and schematics that allow architects to think through the concepts is what makes it possible for my work to enter the design process. Creating these design tools is inherently collaborative, because anthropologists and architects have to work together as a team to find forms and approaches that allow knowledge to move between them. At Henning Larsen Architects this project became a thirty-slide pre­ sentation that I use to facilitate discussions around inclusivity, design, and cultural translation. During the programming phase of the project, these discussions led us to resize the proposed atrium spaces in the Innovation in Science Building from large, open areas organized to produce a sense of anonymity to smaller partitioned environments designed to facilitate a sense of recognition. We were able to do this by manipulating the square meters of each space, the material selection, and the arrangement of one space in relation to another within the building envelope. Does inclusivity have a shape? Within the context of this project, the shape of inclusivity depends on your perception of space: the position from which you approach the phenomenon. As this chapter illustrates, locating differences in the perception of a phenomenon can be very useful in ar­ chitectural design. However, it is important to note that the findings pre­ sented in this chapter are specific to these people and this place. Questioning the shape of social concepts aims at spatial experience from the perspective that every phenomenon is perceived by an individual body in individual ways. Investigating how a phenomenon is perceived allows

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Figure 12.2 Ryerson University’s proposed “Innovation in Science Building”. Illustration: Henning Larsen Architects (2018, p. 43).

themes that are relevant to design to emerge, but applying these themes to an unrelated design would undermine the premise that each architectural endeavour requires specific research and collaboration around the design of a specific place.

Notes 1 Funding for this research was provided by Innovation Fund Denmark and Realdania. 2 All interlocutors have been anonymized within the text except for Louis Becker, whose position in the firm is public. 3 Louis Becker, Partner, Executive Manager, and Design Principal in charge of North American Development. 4 For literature that approaches inclusivity as a psychological, cultural, archi­ tectural, or organizational concept, see Có rdoba (2007), Ferdman (2014), Lees (2008), Pless and Maak (2004), Price (2017), and Roberson (2006).

References Córdoba, J.-R. (2007). Developing Inclusion and Critical Reflection in Information Systems Planning. Organization, 14(6), 909–927. Ferdman, B. M. (2014). The Practice of Inclusion in Diverse Organizations. In Ferdman, B. M., & Deane, B. R. (eds), Diversity at Work: The Practice of Inclusion. (pp. 3–54), John Wiley & Sons. Henning Larsen Architects. (2018). [Entrance to Ryerson University’s proposed Innovation in Science Building] [Architectural Render] in Henning Larsen

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Architects, Concept Design Report: Ryerson University, 202 Jarvis St. Development (p. 43). Henning Larsen Architects. Lees, L. (2008). Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance? Urban Studies, 45(12), 2449–2470. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2014). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. Pless, N. M. & Maak, T. (2004.) Building an Inclusive Diversity Culture: Principles, Processes and Practice. Journal of Business Ethics, 54(2), 129–147. Price, M. (2017). Un/shared Space: The Dilemma of Inclusive Architecture. In Boys, J. (ed.), Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (pp. 155–172). Taylor and Francis. Roberson, Q. M. (2006). Disentangling the Meanings of Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations. Group & Organization Management, 31(2), 212–236.

13 Rendering atmosphere Exploring the creative glue in an urban design studio Anette Stenslund and Mikkel Bille

Comment rounds FW: Re: PlaceAnonymous

From: Matthew Sent: July 3 2019 10:56 To: Evelyn [email protected] Cc: Stenslund Topic: Re: PlaceAnonymous | 3D model + Render | Handover Hi Evelyn, Please find attached few updated previews. Concerning the aerial view. This one is a bit tricky. We started with a dusk view which now progressively switch to a sunset view with your last comments. This can be a problem when at the end everything is lighten: inside and outside. It usually leads to quite “dull” or “flat” result. That’s why we did two tests here. One is a real dusk when light can only be artificial. It’s the better solution to emphasize the inner light coming from the building. The other one is a sunset. The last sun rays hit the ground and cast long shadows. That’s the best we can do in order to keep the building lighten from inside. Earlier than that will become day view. And the building glazing will have to be darker than the façade. I hope it makes sense. Please let us know which one we should go with. (In our opinion the sunset one is nicer). Thanks. Kind regards, Matthew

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The email extract from the commentary rounds between Danish architects, urban designers and an Australian rendering company marks a central point in the making of renderings for a new cultural hub in Copenhagen. After receiving the email from Matthew (the external rendering specialist), the lead architect, Evelyn, from SLA (an urban design studio in Copenhagen) turns to her colleagues and collaborators:

Sent: July 3 2019 11:08 To: Lucy , Pete , George Cc: Stenslund Topic: FW: Re: PlaceAnonymous | 3D model + Render | Handover Hi all, Please find update on VIEW B. I expect other views ticking in tomorrow morning. @Lucy Please see Matthew’s comments regarding the birdeye view. We seem to want a bit too many things with the image, which results in a flat image regarding the light. Feel free to give me a call when you’ve taken a look at it. Please submit your comments on the images in InDesign before noon. /Evelyn

Comments from Lucy and other collaborators are then sent via WeTransfer, where it is noted that, “View B is good, but we agree with you that there should be a different light. The picture here looks like morning light. It should be afternoon so there is light on the casting hangar.” Based on this input from Lucy, Evelyn returns to Matthew with her recognition of selecting the bird-eye View_B_Sunset due to the improved lighting conditions. With this peek into the exchanges of creative ideas in the process of producing renderings, this chapter explores the socio-cultural dynamics in urban design that unfold between architects, designers and graphic artists. The example above illustrates how questions are continuously raised about what and how components should be present in the renderings “to depict and present specific embodied regimes and affective sensory experiences to appeal to clients and consumers” (Degen, Melhuish & Rose, 2017, p. 7). Renderings are productions aimed to pitch a masterplan to an external audience in the early stages of a design process, and throughout the con­ struction process and by submission of tender, they serve as presentation tools (Melhuish, Degen & Rose, 2016, p. 228). But as renderings aim to

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Figure 13.1 View_B in preparation. Illustration: Doug & Wolf, SLA and Arcgency.

appeal affectively, the question arises: What role does atmospheres play in the creative process of rendering prospective urban spaces? It has been argued that computer-generated images (CGIs), of which renderings are but one kind, evoke urban atmosphere (Melhuish et al., 2016; Degen et al., 2017). Attending to the way CGIs circulate as key “interfaces” (Rose, Degen & Melhuish, 2014) in global, transnational networks of people and places, Melhuish et al. (2016) investigate how they serve as “vital platforms for communication and negotiation among pro­ ducers and audiences” about cultural heritage and distinct urban identities hereby paving the way to a new, digitally-enabled re-negotiated and post­ colonial urban design aesthetic. Along the same lines Degen et al. (2017) explore the aesthetic power relations that underpin CGIs as cultural pro­ ducts, which in their study implies a premise of Western sensibility, even in their attempts to be culturally specific. While in line with these views that rest on perspectives from an Actor Network approach (e.g. Yaneva, 2009; Rose et al., 2014; Melhuish et al., 2016; Degen et al., 2017), the analysis here is guided by a phenomenological understanding of atmosphere as felt and sensed and the token of how the human state of being resonates with the surroundings (Böhme, 1993, p. 114). Following Gernot Böhme’s (2017) emphasis on atmospheric archi­ tecture, we challenge the visual representation of architecture in favour of its felt and sensed property as atmosphere. Our focus on atmosphere in rendering processes enables a perspective that, following Ingold, locates

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Figure 13.2 View_B in preparation. Illustration: Doug & Wolf, SLA and Arcgency.

the creative process of making atmosphere through rendering practices not in the mind of makers but in the common engagement with materials and participating collaborators (Ingold, 2013, p. 22). We show how atmo­ sphere is not only the effect of renderings on an audience, as Degen et al. (2017) have shown, but acts as the kit that ties the whole rendering practice together. Decisions on proper ambient lighting in renderings, as illustrated above, are of course not only a matter of taste or arbitrary opinions about what might flatten or lodge an appeal of a rendering. The tangled affair of power and profit is not to be excluded from aesthetic rendering. For instance, in the rendering of View_B a minor battle was played out between on the one hand the team of architects, who designed the building complex (the casting hangar), and who would have it illuminated from the inside (best at late afternoon or evening). On the other hand, the multifarious group of urban designers who were responsible for the design of the outdoor area (the building’s surrounding environment) who would like to have their con­ tribution to be visible as well – preferable have it appear in daylight rather than left in darkness. This conflict of interest between contributing colla­ borators tips into the theoretical discussion of building architect’s decon­ textualization of urban design (Grubbauer, 2014), and it opens a door for studies of potential alliances between architects, designers and financiers (Dovey, 2010; Røe, 2015). Yet, rather than a prevailing sociological approach to classifying features of disctinction, we pursue the process of rendering as a way of engaging

Rendering atmosphere 211 emotionally in architectural creation. Atmospheres are transformative by nature – they mark and penetrate all who take part in the making of ren­ derings including those who seek to learn about it, right from the colla­ borating architects and designers to the anthropological fieldworkers. This ability forces us to flag the need to move beyond clearly distinguished disciplines of ‘architecture’ and ‘anthropology’ and to look at theory and practice as ‘interwoven’ in Ingold’s sense of the term (Ingold, 2013). Just like architectural ideas are not adequately understood to achieve their form by the molding of a material supply (Ingold, 2013, p. 20), architectural practices, likewise, does not serve the anthropological study as an empirical supply to be molded by predefined social theory. This is the motivation for our enquiry on atmosphere in rendering. The questioning of atmosphere and aesthetics in design still receives less attention than more salient sub­ jects of social power and distinction, but as we show the atmosphere is an important and often underrated co-player in processes of developing urban design, here illustrated by how aesthetics of lighting are guiding the ren­ dering of atmosphere. The analysis enables us to suggest how architectural anthropology can profit from taking a stern view on atmosphere as both that which is designed, and as an analytical lens. Urban designers do not merely create atmosphere through the application of personal taste or in­ tellectual justified values but are enrolled in the atmosphere that grows from the rendering practice itself. We are here not so interested in the specificities of the redevelopment project as such nor the companies and persons involved in the renderings. Yet we are aware that it is nearly impossible to describe and show photo­ graphs while offering the needed credits without the specific case and it’s collaborating parties becoming identifiable to some degree. We therefore credit collaborators but keep non-anonymous information to a minuímum. Data was generated during Stenslund’s nine consecutive months of field­ work in SLA – a renowned urban design studio with departments in Denmark and Norway.1 During the fieldwork Stenslund participated as observer in internal and external meetings, interviewed employees in the studio and during walk-alongs asking for their re-enactments. At the start of each design project the studio would usually seek to identifiy the at­ mosphere of the given site under redevelopement. Quite formally they ar­ ticulated the atmosphere as ‘the felt’ (det mærkbare) which would then need to be complemented by ‘the measurable’ (det målbare) of a place, such as scale or utility function. Lighting plays a crucial role for the atmospheric effect of a rendering and the social rules of the participants in the design process. This takes us on a journey from how the perspective and focus in the rendering is negotiated through lighting, to the cultural appeal of light. Yet, before turning to the empirical examples of rendering a prospective site, we need to address the very nature of renderings and their atmospheric properties.

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What is (a) rendering? According to Cambridge Dictionary (2020), a rendering (also: rendition), can for instance be a performance in the sense of “the way that something is performed, written, drawn, etc.”. Correspondingly it means “a translation of […] [a] piece of writing into a different language or a different style” and additionally it de­ notes “a work of art or performance that represents something”. Renderings thus have a double nature as both objects (noun) but also denotes performances “to render” worth exploring ‘anthropographically’. ‘Anthropography’ in op­ position to ‘ethnography’ is a term coined by Ingold (2013, p. 129) in order to describe a fieldworker’s sense for transformation processes (contained in the verb to ‘render’) instead of ‘pure’ descriptive observation. In architecture, renderings (noun) are detailed visualizations of design solutions for prospect projects, and colloquial language during fieldwork in the studio, suggests that renderings are often simply called ‘visualizations’: “I don’t say rendering”, an architects corrected and carried on, “Of course you can say rendering, but rendering is just a reminiscent term from V-ray – a Rhino plug-in [for a visualization program] – and thus rendering is just a way to talk about something, when it has received an extra treatment.” Hence, when we asked about rendering, many, like this particular architect, would understand rendering as a visualization, which is mirrored in some of the quotes that we include underway. Yet, throughout our conversations with the designers and architects it also becomes clear, that ‘rendering’ appears both as a noun and verb signifying a process when something is done – or given an extra treatment, as noted. Moreover, for an outsider, ‘visualizations’ can mean almost any kind of image creating. We use the notion of rendering then, as an analytical one to address how a rendering (noun) must be atmospheric in itself in order to convince an audience about how also a redevelopment project renders (verb) urban atmosphere – and the atmospheric rendering (noun) envelopes the collaborating designers just as much as it is targeted to envelope the adressees. The renderings (noun) serve a communicative role throughout the entire design process, but first of all they are created to win project contracts. They are produced in the initial phase of the design process to convince the client that the absolute best project proposal is revealed in and by the rendering. Renderings thus need to be “thoroughly well worked out images that tell the client that this is how [a project] will look like, and [the rendering] must look like reality” another informant said, confirming that the room for translation is narrow and not the perceivers’ obligation. While reflecting reality as well as possible, a rendering also keeps the dialogue about a project’s specific solution on grounds of principle as to avoid breeding too many specific expectations at an early stage, such as geometry, proportions or choice of materials. This balancing act between providing realistic impressions of a not yet realized project is upheld by the focus on the atmospheric effect of the rendering. Renderings must seem realistic, architects would tell us, but not in a factual sense in the scale of 1:1.

Rendering atmosphere 213 In the studio, good renderings rather would translate the design vision into an image in a credible way allowing clients, developers and user groups to feel and recall the overall atmosphere that a project seeks to create. In other words, the rendering designers must make outsiders envision the vision. This is where architectural rendering practice and anthropology share common grounds, in that it is not about an objective state of the world but an emic, even phe­ nomenological, lifeworld notion about what it feels like to emplace oneself in a particular place in the city communicated via the rendering. One architect’s comments on a specific rendering are telling for this, when he states: The things that are green here are also green in reality – but this [issue about colouring] is really up to the individual aesthetics of a company. In principle, you could also make the illustration pink – pink tree trunks and so. It can work just as fine and is not really an issue – it has more to do with personal style and taste. As the introductory example also illustrates, renderings are atmospheric because they act as atmospheric expressions rather than being factual as such. This means that what matters is how their felt presence take effect or reveal themselves at an experiential level rather than how they look ob­ jectively. Gernot Böhme (2001, p. 57) points out the difference between factual fact and actual fact; Realität and Wirklichkeit in German. For in­ stance, it may be that factually a room is a certain size, but actually it may feel much smaller or bigger than it really is by measure. Likewise, in fact there may be certain colours on the rendering but they may be perceived differently due to their ‘effect’, and this actual fact is what we call the atmospheric quality. So, whether the tree trunks are in fact brown, pink or purple is truly a ‘real matter of fact’, but still it is inferior to their atmospheric quality of the rendering, which is a question about their phenomenal appearance to the addressee. A transformation in the architecture businesses from mainly providing functional solutions to becoming more experience-oriented (Klingman, 2007) chimes with this approach. In the studio it was not uncommon to come across phone calls with customers broadly paraphrased like: Yes, we understand that you would like this building removed, that building restored, parking space suited for x numbers of cars and also you ask for a solution to the noise nuisance over here. We can easily find a solution to all of it, but can we please ask: how should it be for people to stay there? How should the area be experienced? This felt and lived quality of a place is explicitly cherished by the studio with distinction between felt and measurable. The studio would set off with an idea about how a place should feel in terms of its vibe, and this nittygritty heart of the matter would then be settled as the ‘concept’ or principal

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idea of a design solution. This is reminiscent of Adolf Loos’s call for the architect to first “identify a feeling for the effects he wants to create” (Pérez-Gómez, 2016, p. 20). ‘The felt’ is what the studio at times refers to as ‘the atmospheric’, and renderings are about ‘grasping’ and ‘capturing’ this atmospheric touch to pass it on to a larger audience. Renderings are therefore used as a way to communicate visually a project’s ‘feel’ – its at­ mosphere. To illustrate we now turn to a case of redevelopment of an area within Copenhagen City.

Rendering urban renewal The studio takes part in the transformation of an industrial district into a new, innovative and sustainable hub, where creativity, inclusive communities and lifestyle urbanism are at the forefront. The developers’ vision is to transform the existing industrial building and surrounding outdoor areas into a melting pot of arts and culture scenes, workplaces, places to eat, studios, workshops, sports facilities, play, entertainment, nature experiences, and much more. In order to bring these visions to life, renderings are needed, and the studio takes the lead of this task by hiring an external company specialized in rendering. This choice of collaborator, based in Australia, is due to the studio’s im­ pression of the delicate sense that this company has so far shown: “when our designers ask for ‘wild nature’, [this Australian company] doesn’t suddenly plant placenta flowers in the renderings” indicating that this aesthetic slip was made by others less successful collaborators. Aesthetics here enables us to approach the strong economic agenda that influences the process of urban design like any aspect of our environment (Friberg, 2019). It is important for the real estate provider to attract the creative class (Florida, 2005) in order to have them take lodgings that in the long run can reduce construction costs while simultaneously contributing to the livability of the area. Hence, it is the job of the studio together with its collaborators to have the renderings address the exact values and ‘good taste’ of the target group. Rendering, thus, is clearly about making an area appeal and make it object of social distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). For instance, at meetings in the studio we would witness discussions on how to create an image of this hub that in reality was available to everyone, but people would still feel among the few who knew. The image of a secret spot would be upheld not only through the rendering, but also through the choice of (no) advertisements, the sale of natural (unadulterated) wines, and by the arrangement of ‘public’ readings of literature – activities and programs appealing to the social group that would generate money and innovation as commodity (Røe, 2015). The location of the external collaborating rendering company in Australia was a timely advantage to the studio in Denmark who could exploit from the working hour time difference. Also, it is of advantage to the production of atmospheric renderings to choose a partner, who is miles away from the social struggles that may take place between companies and financials within the

Rendering atmosphere 215 Copenhagen area. Detached from local conflicts of interest, the external ren­ dering company is hired, partly to take note of interests explicitly formulated in the email thread above, but partly also in order to specialize in ‘good’, appealing and credible, rendering techniques with aesthetics at the forefront. It comes as no surprise that companies will have an interest in promoting the awareness of own enterprise (in casu: to have the construction work or the surrounding landscape stand forth in light), yet it is remarkable how the two Danish companies in this case consent with no reluctance to the external ad­ vice that deals with the atmosphere of the rendering and that mainly addresses its aesthetic appeal and not the self-interests of the companies.

Rendering atmosphere through luminosity Atmospheric renderings are composed to appear simple. Good renderings, Evelyn tells us, usually display just one situation and refrain from asking the recipient to relate to several things at once. It sounds straightforward when the architect tells us this, but when following the process, it seems to be less easy, especially in cooperative situations. Rebecca, an architect in the studio notes that: sometimes [we] have to be better at showing the simple picture. We often want to show everything at once; space for children, the elderly, bicycle parking, etc. But all of a sudden, the atmosphere becomes difficult to see, even if there is a beautiful light, because [the recipient has] to take a stand on way too many things. […] It’s something we’re quite aware of that we need to improve. We don’t have to show everything, but this is nevertheless what we sometimes feel an urge to do, since of course you want to make sure that everyone in the judging committee or whoever receives it can see themselves [reflected] in the project, rather than solely being seduced by a mood. Rebecca exemplifies the key issue discussed in the commentary rounds: How to create an atmospheric impression that is simple enough to seize the viewer? For example, rendering comments shows how lighting plays a crucial role for how simple the rendering appears, and thus how narrow or broad the focus should be for the person who encounters the rendering. At meetings with developers, it was also discussed what time of day would best represent the site. Since the bird-eye View_B (Figures 13.1 and 13.2) was the intended ‘money shot’ to hit the headlines with the overall project proposal, much was at stake in the rendering process of this view. Evelyn tells us how prior to placing the order by the Australian company, she did some 3D-testing of how the site would make its best appearance according to the choice of time of the day – that is to say; the lighting conditions: I made one for 10 a.m. and one for 12 a.m. and I’ve tested it in the bird eye view. We had fancied the idea of a full-summer-day-it’s-good-craic-

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Based on what and how much the addressee should be able to see, the studio decides to order a picture at dusk, for there to be just enough light both inside and outside the building. However, as the e-mail correspondence also reveals, the final rendering ends up being neither at dawn nor dusk. It ends up as a sunset image (Figure 13.3). This is due to the disclaimer of the Australian rendering company who flags their reluctance in meeting everyone’s wishes. Instead of spelling this out, they tie in with the lighting issue: The time of the day rendered in the image, they remind the employees in the studio, helps

Figure 13.3 Final View_B. Illustration: Doug & Wolf, SLA and Arcgency.

Rendering atmosphere 217 determine how many stories (or agendas) the rendering can contain. At the same time, Matthew points out to the Danish designers that a sunset picture will appear warmer (in reddish tone) and with longer shadows cast. “So, in the end we chose to go with his suggestion”, Evelyn explains, “because ob­ viously the shadows add a greater play of light and makes the image appear more interesting than the view at dawn”. The light creates focus that ensures the atmospheric effect of the rendering. Rendering atmosphere thus involves a designer’s careful attendance to what light may tell the viewer: “A rendering should be read in a split second”, an architect tells us. Accordingly, the light ensures that the eye instantly finds a place to rest, the same architect explains. Rendering atmosphere hence allows for a perceptual hierarchy with a clear centre of attention and a less important periphery, which in this case prevents dullness and ‘flatness’ in experience, keeping a focus and ensuring a simplicity by appearance. The point is then that the rendering acts through the atmospheric impression, and this im­ pression is framed through the interplay between light and storyline (what to see and not to see). This raises the question of how cultural aesthetics and skills of communication partakes in the design process.

Cultural aesthetics of light, subtlety and cheesiness For View_A (Figure 13.4), one of the other six professional renderings for the redevelopment project, Evelyn and her team ask for some of the light

Figure 13.4 View_A with rendering comments seeking to ‘ease the read’ of the image through lighting adjustments. Illustration: Doug & Wolf, SLA and Arcgency.

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rays to be removed. “It’s getting too cheesy”, Evelyn explains, “It’s almost a divine light. It’s like ‘too much’. It has to be more subtle. Something that doesn’t steal all the attention and still works well.” When we ask what it is that works well, one of Evelyn’s colleagues elaborates with reference to a rendering from another project: The light is like a goddess coming down. It’s like come on! Silly! Now Jesus himself is coming down from heaven! The person who fancied the visualization wanted so much godliness that it looked like Jehovah was coming down, and we [at the studio] were just like ‘chillax’. We prefer it to be a little more subtle. […] Interviewer: What is subtlety doing? It offers rest. After all, it’s difficult to focus on what you’ve done – that is, what you’ve actually drawn – if all is covered in fat sun rays. In the mentioned situation, it was a customer from England who fancied the ‘cheesy’ sun rays, we were told, and from the viewpoint of Evelyn’s team it is a matter of taste, which was exactly why the process of rendering could sometimes turn into a challenging task of manoeuvring among style, taste and preference of different cultures. This issue about the aesthetics of rendering becoming a cultural matter of taste is a general point that applies to most renderings. Although the studio does not conduct systematic segment analyses, it turns out that rendering (verb) employees draw on an intuitive flair executed to ensure the atmo­ spheric appeal of the renderings. For instance, Wei, a Chinese employee in the Copenhagen-based studio, qualifies this matter of taste by pointing to lighting adjustments in renderings. He distinguishes renderings for Scandinavian recipients from renderings made for South-European or Asian costumers: I feel like in the Scandinavian countries, the weather is a key issue, because the sky is always kind of cloudy and grey. It’s very rare to have like a sunny bright blue. […] Actually, everything is kind of desaturated in the renderings for Scandinavia. I don’t know why. It’s just the kind of feeling you get when you walk on the street in Copenhagen. You feel like… it’s not like the colourful Spain […] where there are really bright red and yellow colours. In the Scandinavian countries you don’t use colour a lot […]. It also goes with the personality of Scandinavian people. Everybody is shy, not very outgoing. People […] don’t have much expression on their faces […]. Maybe this is why desaturated colours go with this kind of environment. Wei is a good example of how architects and designers intuitively work with the impression that, for instance, choice of colour implies. Wei thinks

Rendering atmosphere 219 of geographical regions in terms of colours loaded with sentiments that match identities of places. Scandinavian people’s sentiments captured in a desaturated colour-spectrum confirms his aesthetic work with atmosphere producing renderings able to impinge on addressees with felt sensations of Scandinavia. By ‘turning down’ the colours, the designers would ‘turn up’ the atmosphere that they perceive exists in and around Scandinavia. In order to render atmosphere, one would need to have a sense of both the place under redevelopment and the type of person to which the ren­ dering should appeal. From the architects and urban designers, we hear of episodes where external rendering companies inserted improper elements into the images like a red bull, a severely obese person or a sinewy guy with tattoos. “Such kind of gimmickry just doesn’t work,” says Evelyn. “It’s not that we don’t want to be diverse and inclusive, but the stand-in people that we use have to look like our target audience and they cannot run away with the attention by breaking the norm”. As with the careful selection of suited people for the renderings, the same careful selection is done regarding the activities that ‘suited’ people are engaged in, suited vegetation and choice of furniture, facades and coating. The cultural aesthetics of all of these men­ tioned features constitute together the overall ‘material narrative’ of a rendering (noun).

The social mechanisms of rendering In a comment round for View_E (Figure 13.5), Evelyn asks the Australians to “delete the flower stand” – “It looks like a square from Albertslund Centeret [a suburban shopping area]. No offence, this is where I come from myself, but you know, this isn’t where we’re heading with this”. “So, where’re we heading?” Stenslund (first author) asks. “In my opinion, this is going to be a polished hipster-centre,” says Evelyn, implying a particular lifestyle urbanism that their design choices need to support. So out goes the petty-bourgeois flowerstand and in comes long grasses – the ultimate hipster vegetation nowadays. For this project, the architects and urban designers collaborated with a so called ‘cultural design studio’ – a community of unspecified profes­ sional background who were not familiar with making renderings. The community was expected to join the commentary round circling between designers in the North and rendering-specialists in Australia. Yet, Evelyn says, since they are untrained in the rendering communication working with them is a challenge. That is why Evelyn had to ‘translate’ what this community meant with their forwarded reference-images with which they tended to argue only. Pointing towards View_E, she says: “Well, I un­ derstand what they mean here [with recycled containers instead of a posh looking bar], but if others should be able to understand, we still need to spell it out, literally speaking. We just can’t assume that the Australians went to Reffen [a hip part of Copenhagen with faded shipyard grandeur]

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Figure 13.5 View_E rendering vegetation. Illustration: Doug & Wolf, SLA and Arcgency.

last Saturday”. This challenge of engaging in a cross-cultural commu­ nicative action shows that in order to render, one would not only need to know about cultural norms, values and ‘good taste’. One also needs to master communicative skills to formulate one’s intuitive flair about cul­ ture in written text. When Evelyn in each comment round thus formulates a collective response dispatched from all her collaborators in Copenhagen to the Australian company, she would literally translate images sent from the community of ‘cultural designers’ into text. For example, she would spell out that “the food stalls should not be made by concrete. We prefer remodelled shipping containers instead”, and elsewhere she would write, that they desired “Berlin type of furniture, table + bench” instead of Hay design and Acapulco chairs. So when urban designers based in Denmark in their commentary rounds for the rendering process ask for ‘weathered’, ‘rubbed’, ‘used’, ‘reused’, ‘less polished’ and ‘less neat’ materials then it is not because they desire some rubbish bits and pieces, but because this choice of materials adds to the intended atmosphere. Their choice of materials for the renderings are thus based on material’s atmospheric qualities which are in need of crosscultural translation. This happens not necessarily across nationalities, since the Australians were better at ‘breaking the code’ than other rendering companies located closer geographically. The matter of atmospheric ren­ dering is therefore less about cross-national communication than about

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Figure 13.6 View_E rendering materials. Illustration: Doug & Wolf, SLA and Arcgency.

communication and translation of aesthetic preference and taste of diverse target groups within a given culture.

Conclusion A main issue in architectural anthropology has been to discuss the ways in which architecture and anthropology as disciplines can be understood as sources of mutual inspiration and in the end also be combined (Lucas, 2020; Stender, 2017; Ingold, 2013). This article has argued that rendering atmo­ sphere involves a creative process of correspondence between light, materi­ alities, architects and designers that frames what the viewer must be able to perceive and thus feel in the immediate encounter with the rendering. As an image-making process, renderings involve an atmospheric competence of curating aesthetics that rests on intuitive flair and skills of communication. Rendering as noun and verb is entangled in selling dreams for the future that are credible and not too un-realistic by turning the question from what you see to how you feel about prospect urban spaces. We have shown how the rendering process is not only entangled in cross-cultural negotiations where atmospheres are attributed to the rendering in favour of clients’ visions for future cityscapes. It is also about how atmospheric sensory appearances marks the very materialization process of the renderings as well as the communication between participating collaborators. The atmosphere is, so to speak, the “glue” that ties the creative process together. Beyond simply a

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noun, rendering is a verb where atmospheric competences are negotiated and moulded in a process that in particular entails choosing the light that makes future places not just look, but also feel in particular ways.

Note 1 The research was funded by the Velux Foundation as part of the project Living with Nordic Lighting (no. 16998).

References Böhme, G. (1993). Atmosphere as the fundamental concept of a new aesthetics. Thesis Eleven, 36, 113–126. Böhme, G. (1995). Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik. Suhrkamp Verlag. Böhme, G. (2017). Atmospheric Architectures. The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces. Bloomsbury. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press. Cambridge Dictionary (2020). Rendering. Retrieved on 16 January 2020 from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rendering Degen, M., Melhuish, C., & Rose, G. (2017). Producing place atmospheres digi­ tally: Architecture, digital visualisation practices and the experience economy. Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(1), 3–24. Dovey, K. (2010). Becoming Places: Urbanism, Architecture, Identity, Power. Routledge. Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. Routledge. Friberg, C. (2019). To answer a demand: aesthetics in economy. Studi di estetica, (15). Grubbauer, M. (2014). Architecture, economic imaginaries and urban politics: The office tower as socially classifying device. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(1), 336–359. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge. Klingman, A. (2007). Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy. The MIT Press. Lucas, R. (2020). Anthropology for Architects: Social Relations and the Built Environment. Bloomsbury. Melhuish, C., Degen, M., & Rose, G. (2016). “The real modernity that is here”: Understanding the role of digital visualisations in the production of a new urban imaginary at Msheireb Downtown, Doha. City & Society, 28(2), 222–245. Pérez-Gómez, A. (2016). Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. MIT Press. Rose, G., Degen, M., & Melhuish, C. (2014). Networks, interfaces and computergenerated images: Learning from digital visualisations of urban redevelopment projects. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 32(3), 386–403. Røe, P. G. (2015). Iscenesettelser av den kompakte byen – som visuell representasjon, arkitektur og salgsobjekt. In: Hanssen, G. S., Hofstad, H. & Saglie, I.-L. (eds), Kompakt byutvikling. Muligheter og utfordringer (pp. 48–57). Universitetsforlaget.

Rendering atmosphere 223 Stender, M. (2017). Towards an architectural anthropology – What architects can learn from anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1), 27–43. Yaneva, A. (2009). The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. Peter Lang.

14 Constructing community? A collaborative housing development process meeting credit and concrete Silje Erøy Sollien and Søren Nielsen It felt like we were caught in a net … It has been a process which has gone from us being very deeply involved to not being able to decide anything at all. This shouldn’t be a normal forward purchase development! (Anders, member of building cooperative) And look – the project with that façade will end up looking just like the ‘Pippi Longstocking sketch’ from the first workshop. (Line, non-profit developer)

An architectural anthropology of modern housing development processes quickly runs into the methodological and theoretical problem of how to reconcile production in the capitalist world with an inclusive and partici­ patory creative process and construction as an architectural craft. The way materiality is articulated in the construction process is to a large extent distanced from the hands of the architect, the client group and the people sitting at design management meetings after the architecture project has entered the technical design and construction phases. What meets the cli­ ents, architects and the team of consultants, is a design and production process locked in industry standards for managing risk and a large number of suppliers and subcontractors, organized in infrastructures of legal ar­ rangements, logistics and project management, all favouring certain stan­ dard solutions. Bank finance and investors relations are among these arrangements. Urban housing might in some contexts be seen more as real estate and financial instruments for savings and investments than archi­ tecture for living one’s daily lives (e.g. Sassen, 2012; Ryan-Collins, Lloyd, Macfarlane, & Muellbauer, 2017). How does architectural research ac­ count for this? The creative process or the ecology of making, needs to take into account a large number of physical and intellectual frameworks, of which it is very difficult to get a complete picture, in order to address these complex pro­ cesses. Building construction in the city may be best understood as a form of urbanism, with its focus on infrastructures, (e.g. Amin & Thrift, 2016; Simone, 2004). The multi-sitedness of the processes means there may be

Constructing community? 225 elements produced in factories in diverse geographical locations, regulatory approvals taking place, client groups debating changes to the building program and a concrete foundation being poured on the building site all at the same time. An architectural image in the form of a visualization is communicated in the media, where the innovative housing project is being praised with accolades of big expectations. Sales materials to attract the final inhabitants exist in various geographical and virtual locations invol­ ving different organizations and materialities. The architectural design process at this point may be expressed in spreadsheets and words as much as in drawing. This chapter sets out to analyse the changing role of the architectural design in relation to the other actors in a specific building project, the private building cooperative Fællesbyg Køge Kyst in Denmark, as it moves closer to the construction site. In order to grasp the complex organization of developing the housing project, a pragmatist view and methods inspired by Albena Yaneva, who has analysed the way particular architectural offices work, have been adopted (Yaneva, 2009, 2012). This means charting the different actors’ positions and influence on tricky problems arising during the development process, in order to question agency and how creativity is expressed and by whom, in solving different challenges arising. These methods have been developed specifically to deal with complex socio-technological networks like industrial production processes and what sustains them (Latour, 1993). This chapter highlights how architectural research can use the pragmatist approach from an anthropological background to help unfold a wider web of factors affecting architectural design. Thus, we can create a wider un­ derstanding of the many actors and infrastructures at work in the colla­ borative processes of designing and developing an urban housing project. The aim is to start unpacking some of the many ‘black boxes’ or ‘dark matter’ in a design process, which are the results of standard organizational systems (Latour, 2005; Hill, 2012). Latour describes ‘black boxing’ as the oversimplification taking place when focus is on input-output in a machine/ program/ device, rather than the complexity of the process itself, whether this regards interpretation of a law, the application of a computer program or the design of a contract in a building process. Hill describes the ‘dark matter’ in relation to a design product/ service/ artifact as the complex organizational context that produced it. These processes are seldom in­ vestigated in detail in architectural and design research and can benefit greatly from what Anna Tsing calls the anthropological ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015). The stability of these systems, collectives and constellations of actors, are by their nature challenged by attempts to introduce new types of processes and unknown actors like the building cooperative presented in this chapter. This new actor opens up particular windows for questioning the organiza­ tional and legal-financial frameworks for alternative creative and participa­ tory building processes today, and for breaking up disciplinary boundaries

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and extending the concept of the creative process to everyone actually in­ volved in legislating, calculating, fabricating, creating and making a building. The research presented here is based on a post doc industrial research project about alternative housing strategies.1 The authors are post doc researcher (first author) based at Vandkunsten Architects and partner at the office (second author) responsible for the research project but not for the housing project discussed. The post doc researcher is an architect with a social science background and familiar with ethnographic method and anthropological analyses. In order to write this chapter, particular focus has been put on the ethnographic aspect of paying attention and observing, as well as the theoretical frameworks these are connected to. We have been mapping actors and timelines in order to keep track of the changes in the architecture and project organization over time, based on scrutiny of documents and drawings available to the ar­ chitects and client groups, and on repeated series of retrospective interviews of key actors. The post doc researcher has taken part in a number of meetings in the project group, visited the building site and attended public events and de­ bates with members of the client group. Particular socio-technical infrastructures appearing as matters of concern to the project architects at Vandkunsten has been given extra attention in the way the project has been deployed for analysis.

Actors and events Fællesbyg The housing project ‘Fællesbyg Køge Kyst’ challenges the structures of urban building construction by letting a group of future residents act as a nonprofessional client for a multistory housing project. This is very unusual in Denmark but widespread in parts of Germany (Kuhn, Harlander, & Stiftung Bauen und Wohnen, 2010; Ring, 2013). The project has the idealistic aim of bypassing professional developers, in order to make sure the apartments are tailor-made for dwelling and to save the developer fee and thus contribute to solving the crisis of affordable housing today. The project was initiated as a partnership between the public private development company Køge Kyst, to­ gether with Vandkunsten Architects and Selskabet for Billige Boliger – SfBB (‘Foundation for Affordable Housing’) after visiting the city of Tübingen in Germany and seeing the added value this type of democratic housing development model brings to the urban neighbourhoods. Vandkunsten and SfBB would assist the building cooperative in the initial stages for free, with architectural development and organizational issues. Køge Kyst provided an attractive building site with particularly long purchase option. The key crisis moment in the development process has been securing bank financing. For a period of several months after the initial design proposal phase, there was insecurity as to whether the project was going to be realized at all, as the banks posed very difficult demands for equity, collateral and risk reduction. In order for the project to go ahead, a different client organization was needed,

Constructing community? 227 to access the necessary equity for the bank loan and for making the project buildable. The decision-making process changed drastically for everyone in­ volved at this point, and the general complexity of urban building production was made very explicit by the fact that a group of non-professionals were on the centre-stage of the project management. The time spent trying to solve the fi­ nancial deadlock resulted in a number of delays to the standard technical design process, and there were big changes to the architecture outside the original client group’s influence. The project was launched with a public meeting in the southern harbour in Køge in March 2017, inviting people to take part in a building project where they themselves would be the client and thus have a large influence on the design of their future apartment (see Figure 14.1 for timeline).

Figure 14.1 Simplified timeline Fællesbyg. Illustration: Silje Erøy Sollien.

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Figure 14.2 The Pippi Longstocking sketch. Illustration: Vandkunsten Architects.

Vandkunsten produced a “Pippi Longstocking drawing” referring to the colorful Swedish children’s book figure, as a partly hand drawn inspira­ tional sketch for the project. The ‘storytelling’ of Fællesbyg was rooted in this image (Figure 14.2). A handful of households formed the ‘Fællesbyg (meaning “common building”) Køge Kyst’ association in August, and the building cooperative was born. The project would contain 40–50 apart­ ments, conforming to the local plan for the site, and finding more members was a main focus for the group. The group quickly grew, consisting mainly of people close to or already in retirement. Fællesbyg put up a camper trailer on the plot they had reserved, inviting interested people to come and talk about the project every Sunday. By august 2018, the architectural storytelling had been developed into a design proposal handed in to Køge Kyst for their approval, in Fællesbyg’s meeting minutes described as a “fully finished architectural design proposal”. A new visualization was developed for publicity, re­ flecting a varied volume with different façade cladding and a constructive system of wood, making it Denmark’s tallest wooden building. However, in order to make it Denmark’s tallest wooden building, someone would need to build it, and dialogue with a sales representative from a con­ tractor had been initiated and a target price agreed upon.

Constructing community? 229 Financial requirements – the long, drawn-out event In Denmark it has been common to have almost full bank financing when buying or building a home. It was expected that construction loans for the cooperative project of roughly 150 million Danish kroner, out of which 84.5 million would go to the construction enterprise, would require most of the apartments reserved, the building plot offered as collateral and a solid project organization. What was not expected, was the demand for 20–30% equity from the cooperative. One of the external consultants in the early phases had worked on a co-housing project ten years earlier, where the contractor had assumed the building risk during the construction phase. This was not possible in today’s market. Also, the banks do not “give away money like in the happy noughties anymore”, as a bank manager de­ scribed it. The negotiations with the banks were initiated in May 2018 by the chairman of the Fællesbyg board and a board member who had long experience as a chartered accountant with his own firm. Five banks were contacted, out of which only one was willing to meet with Fællesbyg. “Come back when you have 20–30% equity”, was the general message. Arbejdernes Landsbank (AL) initiated a dialogue, however. The building cooperative was well organized, the building site was attractive, and AL had recent experience from a highly complex co-housing project, which had been successfully realized in a much less attractive area. Meetings were held with the head of new business, and Fællesbyg got the impression that the bank was interested in having them as clients. 36 of the 42 apartments were at this point reserved after intense sales activities. The bank scrutinized the Fællesbyg documents and quickly told them to remove the profit-sharing clause in the articles of association, meant to hinder speculation in the attractive flats. The normal bank requirements were examined. There was not yet a formal registration of the plot, due to the stage-by-stage development process adopted by Køge Kyst. The gov­ ernment body responsible for the land registry, was in a process of physi­ cally moving, which meant there was a processing delay of nine months. For the bank this was unusual and is what the bank manager remembers as a main problem a year later. Building permit and a fixed price construction contract were also not ready, as the cooperative needed loan money to be able to pay for the needed consultancy work to reach building permit ap­ plication and for the contractor to calculate a fixed price. There was a bit of a chicken and egg issue: How to pay for the consultancy work needed in order to get to the stage of securing the loan? Until the loan was secured, the project could still collapse and there was a risk putting more consultancy hours into it. The AL bank manager collected the documents and passed them on to the credit department. The news came back early November: “We will give

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you the loan if you provide 20% equity”, just like the others. What had gone wrong? “You never get to talk to the credit department”, states HansJørn from the Fællesbyg board, when recounting the negotiation process. There is a culture that “it is more important to put a cross in Box A36 than asking why Box A36 is there in the first place”, he says. There is no box to tick for building cooperatives. More banks were contacted through the local bank managers who wanted to land the big local innovation project with prominent actors and media attention, but they were rejected by the credit departments.2 In the meantime, the backers of the project had started mobilizing to find alternative financing solutions and strategic alliances. People in SfBB after a while started talking about money, which would be freed up at some point in spring. CEO Line Røtting Dornan convinced her staff and board of governors that SfBB could provide the equity needed against assuming the role of non-profit professional client in the construction phase. Fællesbyg now had a choice between giving up the owner and client responsibility with a lot of the risk involved during the construction phase, against a fee of 8.4% to cover SfBBs running expenses and a sales risk, or basically giving up the project. CEO Line Røtting Dornan saved the project. But a lot of time had been lost. The architects had stopped drawing, worried too many work hours may be lost if the project collapsed. It was now high time to make the visionary project buildable. Contract and concrete In February 2019 an attempt from the contractor at calculating a price as near as possible to the target price from June 2018, came back much too high and unacceptable to the cooperative. There had been put a high-risk premium on the wooden construction system, making it more expensive than the actual construction costs. The building must be a concrete con­ struction as usual, as building industry and regulatory frameworks in Denmark since late 1940s are geared towards prefabricated concrete con­ struction (Kauschen, 2015, pp. 72–73). The wooden vision was given up in one member meeting. Vandkunsten assigned Gesine Kauschen, a highly experienced architect, to redraw Fællesbyg as a concrete structure with wooden sandwich elements. The cooperative was worried too many people would withdraw if big delays occurred, so it was decided as crucial to start building by 1 September. There were a couple of months to develop the project to the level needed for planning and building permission – which was in the hands of the contractor a couple of days before breaking ground on site. Fællesbyg agreed to pay engineer and architect to reach building permit application standard and then SfBB would take over as client in the next stage when the loan would be realized and reimburse the cooperative for the roughly 2.5 million Danish kroner.

Constructing community? 231 After the necessary constructive changes to the structure and more precise drawings, there was a need to change the apartment plans developed for ‘the wooden building’, as the whole modular make-up of the building changed – while the m2 already reserved and bought a bank guarantee for ideally should not be changed. All members of Fællesbyg were then invited to go through the apartment designs together with the architect. The households were grouped according to how the apartments stack on top of each other. Gesine drew live on a big screen in a Vandkunsten meeting room, moving elements around as people would speak, making sure people got to lead the design as much as they could themselves. After this exercise most elements of the building would be ‘locked’ for the contractor to be able to finalize the enterprise. However, exactly what had been fixed was not so clear to many of the participants. At the time of most recent inter­ views there was a lot of frustration among members of the cooperative about why things not yet defined in the building program, could not be discussed with the contractor. Things which had originally been described as ‘options’ in the design now came as ‘extras’ or were not possible at all. When contracting takes place in a fixed price construction contract, the contractor is responsible for the whole building project, and the architect becomes a subcontractor, in reality handing over the drawings made for the contractor to fill in the blanks. What is not yet in the building program or other contract-binding documents, is in practice out of the hands of ev­ eryone except the contractor. For the individual Fællesbyg members this means they have gone from being part of a client cooperative discussing everything about the design at member meetings, to hardly getting to know what is being decided about the building as construction is to start on site. “But why can’t there be a dialogue?” says Jan, one of the founding mem­ bers, “We are not professionals. How can we know everything in ad­ vance?” referring to the realization that they would have had to make every important decision before the project was handed over to the contractor, in order to have it under their control. SfBB has made a particular ‘client organization’ where the client re­ presentative, SfBB and two members of the Fællesbyg board meet regularly. The Fællesbyg representatives have the challenge of communicating to the rest of the members what changes and decisions are taking place, but now things are moving fast and there is not much room for discussion. The cooperative has in no time gone from being at the centre of decision making to not being able to decide “anything at all”, as described by cooperative member Anders: It felt like we were caught in a net. There were a lot of discussions we hadn’t taken yet. But we had to pay for the plot now! … This shouldn’t be a normal forward purchase (‘projektkøb’) development [where the developer makes all the decisions without dialogue].

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Ideally when signing the kind of contract between the contractor and SfBB, the project documents with the work instructions should all be ready, so that the whole future building is known, and calculations can be made as precisely as possible before construction starts. In reality the contract form allows for a process where the foundation is poured before the roof con­ struction is fully known. Thus, the physical building starts growing and becomes a pretty static central agent in the design process before many design details are cleared. In this specific case, the engineers were for ex­ ample taken by surprise by the consequences of very strict noise regulation in the area next to a still partly existing harbour, when they finally carried out the precise noise calculations for the windows. This is of course the type of information which should have been available before the windows are designed, not after the concrete elements have been produced. “Ideally we should have pressed ‘stop’ and given the project one more year of detail design making sure everything was in place before starting on site”, says Louise, project manager for the contractor. Some calculations seem to consistently come too late and cause expensive changes to the al­ ready standing building. “Next time we will do things the correct way”, says Gesine. Doing things according to the book in this case means ac­ cording to the industry standards “Ydelselsbeskrivelsen” for how a con­ struction design process should be divided up and which service should be delivered to whom and when, and the whole time guiding the nonprofessional client in this process. For Fællesbyg a normal construction phase, where many elements of the building are clarified by the engineers before regulatory approval, was skipped in order to save time and get the project ready to start building as soon as possible. Building and façade The foundation for the building was poured in December 2019. Fællesbyg members gathered to view the event and have been coming to the site regularly since. The sales camper has been removed after SfBB placed a prefab pavilion like all the other developers. Next to the sales pavilion, however, stands a colourful façade mock-up which still signals something is different. In June 2019, three days after submitting the building permit application, a presentation of the proposed façade design was made to the Fællesbyg cooperative: Everyone was there. The architects showed the drawing from the design proposal and built the presentation up with different variations – ‘We could have done like this or like this’ and as they have done in other places – the brick façade was too expensive, and so on. In the end the façade proposal chosen by the architects was revealed and everyone was cheering and clapping. (Karen, building cooperative member)

Constructing community? 233 The façade for the final design consists of a collage of cladding materials chosen from Vandkunsten’s back catalogue, including sky blue, gold, red, light green and dark anthracite. It is Line from SfBB who points out how much the building in the end actually looks very much like the initial Pippi Longstocking drawing rather than the Denmark’s tallest wooden building visualization. The initial storytelling device and hand drawn sketch clearly not signalling a finished project, in the end has had a lot of staying power.

Conclusion and perspectives The few examples of architectural anthropology based on thorough eth­ nography of architects’ offices, necessarily to some extent deals with the challenges to projects and the project teams reacting to changing market conditions and changing financial arrangements among the project partners (Hagen, 2014; Yaneva, 2009, 2012). Marie Stender describes how the impact of the financial crisis in 2007 was “dealt with much like an outside uncontrollable power which bears a resemblance to the forces of nature” by architects and clients and relates this to a concept of ‘unintentional design’ (Stender, 2018, p. 10). There has recently been increasing interest in looking more deeply into these forces in relation to housing and how their markets are created, as mentioned in the introduction. The focus is on the fact that markets are created and that we can influence how this is done and as architects and urbanists engage in the discussion of how to create better markets and thus better cities. An interesting attempt to really enter into the black boxes of the internal machinery of how banks produce mortgages and other forms of creating

Figure 14.3 Latest building visualization, summer 2020. Illustration: Vandkunsten Architects.

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money, is presented in Carmen Losmann’s documentary film Oekonomia (2020). She illustrates which keyboard buttons are pressed while asking unexpected conceptual questions to the directors in the European Central Bank and big asset management companies. This can be seen as an example of the “art of noticing” called for by Tsing (2015), even if Losmann is not an anthropologist. Architecture also pays a lot of attention to detail and cuts across scales, just that traditionally this has been more about con­ structive and material details. Architectural research is, however, not a static field with clear disciplinary boundaries, and in order to engage with the financial, legal, political and logistical infrastructures that are such an important part of producing urban architecture, we argue that these must be part of a transdisciplinary architectural analysis. The emerging field of architectural anthropology shows promising ways of approaching these processes in a systematic way and the detail needed to deploy aspects of complex networks and infrastructures for analysis, as illustrated in this chapter. By describing in minute detail what happens, based on all information available and charting the actors and events in time and space, we can see many of the changes taking place, and by asking additional questions, we understand how people and things have been affected by the events. The process described above shows how the building cooperative felt they were caught in a net of building industry structures where they had committed to a project that they suddenly did not have the expected influence over anymore. The decision to start building quickly in order to recuperate lost time waiting for finance, meant that some steps in the ‘correct’ design phases were skipped, adding to elements which were out of the hands of the cooperative to decide because the building was there already, before all design issues had been discussed. The initial professional backers of the project had the aim of changing the housing market, and the fact of working together with other just as moti­ vated and agile professionals, helped them together to show flexibility and creativity in moving the process forward within the structures described. This significant personal and organizational motivation, leading to stable alliances, is, however, rather captured in the research through personal interviews and engaging in this work together with the people in question, and only indirectly through the alliances and communication channels appearing in timelines, organizational mapping of actors and detailed de­ scriptions of specific events. In a discussion about different ways of working between architects and anthropologists, it has been said that the architect wants to change the world by adding to it, and the anthropologist traditionally by giving voice to social groups not normally listened to (Stender, 2017). Today this may to a large extent be about giving voice to a ‘more-than-human society’ and change our way of seeing our environmental relations in a deeper way. Tim Ingold uses a concept of ‘vitality’ in describing different ways of relating to

Constructing community? 235 materials and their agency, arguing that automated production renders processes less human and with less vitality (Ingold, 2010). This adds a normative element to the human and to the ‘more-than human’ experience, beyond socio-technical networks. Bringing these perspectives into the analysis of the credit departments would be the next stage in the project of unpacking black boxes in the service of developing more humane and thus more dynamic, vital housing models, where inhabitants, professionals and materials are co-creating better housing. The phenomenological experience of working with live, dynamic processes, requires reciprocal relations, not just spreadsheets that respond to questions with blinking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the screen after you fill in the blanks. In order to establish and cultivate these dynamic reciprocal relations, we need to continue opening black boxes in order to see the networks and infrastructures framing the production of architecture more clearly and challenge them.

Notes 1 The industrial post doc project is a collaboration between Vandkunsten Architects and BUILD, Aalborg University, part funded by Innovation Fund Denmark. 2 Considerable effort has later been put into investigating which laws, regulations and professional practice guidelines are responsible for this attitude by the banks, but there appears to be no formal reason (see Sollien, 2020).

References Amin, A. & Thrift, N. (2016). Seeing Like a City. John Wiley & Sons. Hagen, A. L. (2014). Fear and Magic in Architects’ Utopia: The Power of Creativity among the Snøhettas of Oslo and New York. PhD thesis, Faculty of Social Science, University of Oslo. Hill, D. (2012). Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary. Strelka. Ingold, T. (2010). Making: Archaeology, anthropology, art and architecture. Routledge. Kauschen, J. S. (2015). Bæredygtige systemleveranser ved renovering: Ressourcer. Økologi. Nødvendighed. PhD thesis, KADK. Kuhn, G., Harlander, T., & Stiftung Bauen und Wohnen (Eds). (2010). Baugemeinschaften im Südwesten Deutschlands. Dt. Sparkassenverl. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford University Press. Losman, C. (2020). Oekonomia, Petrolio Film. Ring, K. (Ed.). (2013). Selfmade City: Berlin: Stadtgestaltung und Wohnprojekte in Eigeninitiative. Jovis. Ryan-Collins, J., Lloyd, T., Macfarlane, L., & Muellbauer, J. (2017). Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing. Zed. Sassen, S. (2012). Expanding the Terrain for Global Capital: When Local Housing Becomes an Electronic Instrument. In M. B. Aalbers (ed.), Subprime Cities, pp. 74–96. John Wiley & Sons.

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Simone, A. (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture, 16(3), 407–429. Sollien, S. E. (2020). Byggefællesskaber: Grundlag for udvikling af en dansk model, Tegnestuen Vandkunsten. Stender, M. (2017). Towards an Architectural Anthropology: What Architects Can Learn from Anthropology and vice versa. Architectural Theory Review, 21(1), 27–43. Stender, M. (2018). Man-Made Mountains and Other Traces of a Fluctuating Market. An Anthropological View on Unintended Design. Ardeth, 2, 77. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press. Yaneva, A. (2009). The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. Peter Lang. Yaneva, A. (2012). Mapping Controversies in Architecture. Ashgate.

15 Norwegian pilots Navigating the technological logic of sustainable architecture Ruth Woods and Thomas Berker

Climate change and concern for the environment are high on international and national agendas. The existing building stock is responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions. National and interna­ tional directorates state that we need to renovate or build super-efficient buildings that use very little energy and include building materials that are locally produced with low CO2 emissions. Most articles that begin with stating these facts continue by proposing solutions. Here, we start with a doubt. Harvesting the ‘low hanging fruit’ of climate change mitigation by architecture is easier said than done. The construction industry; en­ trepreneurs, architects, small and large contractors, electricians, plumbers and carpenters are invested in less sustainable practices and will only be convinced of the feasibility of alternatives if they see well-functioning ex­ amples that deal with regional climate conditions, architectural styles and traditions. This is the main reason why pilot buildings are a popular tool to deal with these challenges. The logic of a ‘pilot’ is that it can ‘lead’ through the unchartered territory of energy efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions. A technological interpretation of pilot buildings sees them as a safe test bed, which can be used to develop and demonstrate future solutions. Once the pilot building is constructed and solutions are tested and shown to be feasible, the ex­ pectation is that all the others easily can follow its lead. The reality of pilot buildings is, however, always much messier. Mistakes made and dead ends encountered are hidden by the end results (Ingold, 2013, pp. 58, 59). Stories about pilot buildings that have failed are told less often, but the Norwegian context is scattered with pilots that did not achieve their ambitions and turn out to be regular buildings that prove the opposite: that change is difficult. There is no reason to believe that Norway is special in this respect. The chapter tells two stories about zero emission pilot buildings from central Norway.1 The first is about the transformation of the old offices of the Norwegian broadcasting company (NRK) into a zero-emission kinder­ garten, at Lø in Steinkjer. This kindergarten did not get built because of opposition from employees. The second story is about end-user evaluation of an electrochromatic sun shading system installed on the façade of

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Heimdal secondary school in Trondheim. A shading system that did not gain end-user approval. The intention of the chapter, however, is not to unmask false promises. It rather focuses on the consequences of specific ways in which pilots are performed within architectural and engineering practices, which we will call the technological pilot logic. Based on this we will propose an alternative, which we call architectural anthropological navigation. The chapter starts by describing different notions of what makes a building a pilot building, highlighting the difference between the techno­ logical interpretation of a pilot applied within architecture and engineering, and the local understandings associated with the places where pilots are located. The practice of navigation is proposed as a mediating theme, one that resonates with the anthropological method and offers an alternative to the technological approach to pilot buildings which we call architectural anthropological navigation. We then present the stories about pilot build­ ings and conclude the chapter with a suggestion about the role of archi­ tectural anthropology in pilot buildings.

What are pilot buildings? Pilot buildings are common within applied interdisciplinary research pro­ jects that aim for extremely energy efficient, environmentally friendly buildings, where architects and engineers collaborate with practitioners from the construction industry. In pilot buildings innovative technologies and solutions are tested and demonstrated during design and construction phases and in the completed buildings. Anthropologists have increasingly been given a role in the interdisciplinary teams. A dictionary representation of the verb ‘to pilot’ tells us that it is to “act as a guide to lead or conduct over a usually difficult course” (MerriamWebster, 2020). This definition is associated with a ship or harbour pilot, but it also tells us something about the expectations from the architects and engineers associated with pilot buildings: that a pilot will, based on a design or model, lead us where we want to or expect to go. An engineer who has worked with pilot buildings for at least five years told us “I have iron clad faith in the use of pilot buildings. It is a much better way to disseminate than through a report. It is so easy to communicate; you can see whether it works or not”. It is hard to disagree with her argument and with the use­ fulness of ‘real-life’ examples when communicating with the construction industry. Technical or architectural solutions, which promise a certain performance, can be doubted. But a realized, and at least seemingly wellfunctioning pilot building can be seen and touched. Empirical reality is a powerful way of dispersing doubt. In the engineer’s quote the possibility of failure – ‘whether it works or not’ – is an option. However, framed as a device that reduces doubt, pilot buildings are an arena in which a techno­ logical hypothesis is proven. In this version of pilot logic, failure of the

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hypothesis is only of relevance to the engineers and architects that have the means to produce better solutions based on what they have learned. A building that does not meet the performance aimed at during design and construction simply is not a pilot in this logic. We call this technological pilot logic. If we look closer at the activity of piloting in a broader sense, navigation and the skills needed to navigate emerge as central team. An understanding of navigation as both experience-based and as tech­ nical skill is an ongoing theme in anthropology. In the first line of Malinowski’s introduction to Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922/ 1984) he sets the scene by telling us “The coastal populations of the South Seas Islands, with very few exceptions, are, or were before their extinction, expert navigators and traders”. Malinowski goes on to explain that the method, participant observation and being in the field, are a means to na­ vigate everyday life with natives, to “traverse the distance” between the anthropologist’s western understandings and those of the native. Along the way he points out that this method, although different to that of the phy­ sicist or chemist, is just as rigorous. But he does not subscribe to the view that maps, plans and diagrams are necessary to navigation. Rather, he is critical to the previous tradition where anthropologists used these tools from a distance to analyse and express opinions about native behaviour and social organization. The anthropologist’s job is to disentangle cultural phenomena, the “imponderabilia of actual life” (Malinowski, 1922/1984, p. 18), by being there. Learning by experience and grasping the small and large details of everyday life enables anthropologists to understand the local point of view. Returning to how pilot buildings are performed, an understanding of the imponderabilia of everyday life is lacking from the technological logic which was described above. There, occupants are given the role of passive recipients who are testing and receiving information about buildings and technologies (Woods & Berker, 2020). The place as a location with a community and history is not included in the technical design and development phases of pilot buildings. If specific places and activities are mentioned, it is in terms of somewhere data about technical performance can be collected. We suggest that pilot buildings will have greater relevance if they are understood as places that are something more than where “performance data” can be extracted (Hodson & Marvin, 2007, p. 311), avoiding an assumption that residents will simply accept serving as passive test beds. Heiskanen, Jalas, Rinkinen, & Tainio (2015) have studied experimental formats applied in pilots and suggest that from the perspective of “nontechnologists”, local experiments may run into conflict when they meet the everyday concerns and responsibilities of the people living there (Heiskanen et al., 2015, p. 162). Another way of framing the alternative to the technological logic that we are developing here is to insist on a specific contradiction between pilot

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buildings as devices used to de-risk new approaches before being upscaled or shared with a wider market (Hughes, Yordi, & Besco, 2018, pp. 7,8), and ‘lived spaces’ that include local qualities of community, history, geo­ graphy and climate. Pilot buildings that follow the technological logic re­ present outsider understandings. An outsider views a place as a location or setting for concepts, whilst a local understanding of a place is socially constructed through everyday practices, representing “spatialised experi­ ence” (Rodman, 1992, p. 643). Rodman suggests that a more useful un­ derstanding of a place combines local and outsider understandings, establishing “lived space” (Rodman, 1992, p. 642). As alternative to the technological understanding of pilot buildings we propose to approach them as examples of ‘lived space’ and as an effective means to navigate the design and development phases and to learn in the process. One consequence of a move from technological logic to pilot buildings as ‘lived space’ is that stories become an important medium to think with. Within applied interdisciplinary research projects, pilot buildings are cur­ rently used to demonstrate future solutions, representing a kind of ‘everywhere-as-space’, or maps, a point of view from above (Ingold, 2011, p. 227). Maps are non-indexical representations of a place, that guide us but are not bound to one particular point of view (Gell, 1985; Ingold, 2011). According to Ingold (2011), when finding our way in everyday life we rarely venture into unchartered territory, which forces us to rely on maps. Instead, everyday life is characterized by repeated movements within structured patterns of space and time (Shove, 2012). Finding our way within and through these patterns is based on memory, resembling story­ telling rather than map-using. We do not have maps in our heads. Instead, we have stories that are bound to the place. Pilot buildings that do not aspire to develop a ‘lived space’ and instead one-sidedly emphasize ‘piloting’ in the sense of the creation of a universal map, lack the connection between ‘everywhere-as-space’ and experiencebased knowledge. Maps in their two dimensions hide historical change as well as the messiness of their creation. In a similar way, in completed buildings an aesthetic of newness masks the process and what was not in­ cluded (Gieryn, 2002, p. 62). In addition, the partners from the construc­ tion industry that have paid the added cost of testing new solutions have strong incentives to make sure that the investment is a success, hiding the messiness of political decision-making, the inclusions and exclusions, the failures and losses of the design and development phases. The idea that pilot buildings offer maps for behaviour, masks the refiguration of formal and material qualities by building users, and the significance of the unintended consequences of design decisions (Buchli, 2013, p. 99). Buildings are not simply somewhere people go to do things (Rodman, 1992, p. 640). Gieryn (2002) demonstrated in a study of the biotechnology building at Cornell University that the redevelopments and adaptation to needs, are social processes with political preconditions and consequences. Carsten and

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Hugh-Jones (1995) stress that in houses there is an interplay between permanence and impermanence that is about more than building main­ tenance. Changes often coincide with changes in the lives of inhabitants and are thought of in terms of them (Carsten & Hugh-Jones, 1995, pp. 37–39). Guestrooms turn into nurseries, storerooms into home-offices and back again. The renovations, extensions and make-overs are part of the inter­ pretative possibilities of buildings. Stories convey changes in time, and they reveal how things became what they are today. Pilot buildings as ‘lived space’ are about navigation through unknown lands, where maps are handy (or today, navigational software), but they are as much about the creation of these maps together with those who inhabit these spaces. Thus, there is a need for combining insider and outsider stories, enabling the establishment of pilot buildings as ‘lived space’ rather than as maps for future behaviour. We believe that archi­ tectural anthropological navigation is required.

Anthropological navigation Participating in applied interdisciplinary building research based on the principles outlined above, is challenging for anthropologists, because they are required to participate on both sides of the ‘lived-space’. As part of the research team they are engaged with a result orientated approach, where success is measured in terms of completed buildings and energy saved. At the same time, they are included in the project because they can enable greater interaction with building users. The combination can challenge their ability to support the inclusion of the building user. In addition, despite it being increasingly common to include anthropologists in this kind of pro­ ject, there is still an expectation among the design experts; architects and engineers, that the anthropologist’s role is post-processual (Henning, 2005), arriving when the building has become the universal map that seeks to replace the multiple stories of its creation. Instead of enabling the inclusion of building users in the design process, anthropologists are thus only able to report what happens when users are not included. Anthropologists entering the building after completion are expected to check if it is functioning according to design ambitions. Checking if ‘end-users’ present in the building have affected the realization of these ambitions. The term ‘end-user’ is telling in this context: they enter at the ‘end’ – and are expected to ‘use’ what is there. A ‘user evaluation’ is a common post-processual action, it is a response to the design process. It aims to avoid expensive failures, but as it takes place after completion (Vermeeren, Law, Roto, & Obrist, 2010) it is founded on a contradiction. Evaluation can have value, with implications for building management or use in other new buildings. As an ethnography for architects its findings are fed back into new design processes and plans for new buildings. It can, if the evaluation is negative, even lead to replacement of the evaluated

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system. More commonly, however, in the scenario often preferred by the evaluation’s sponsor, it can supply success stories (Janda & Topuzi, 2015), that encourage the use and marketing of a new technology. Seen from the vantage point of an architectural anthropology, the idea that the anthro­ pologist’s role is essentially to evaluate end-user behaviour inside completed buildings is based on a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is foun­ dational for a technological logic of pilot building. Logic which is rooted within the parts of applied building research where building users are un­ derstood as passive and lacking in knowledge and are expected to change their behaviour based on technology requirements (Ellsworth-Krebs & Hunter, 2015; Ryghaug, Skjølsvold, & Heidenreich, 2018).

The technological logic of a ZEB The stories about two zero emission buildings (ZEBs), Heimdal secondary school, and the Lø kindergarten, illustrate the perils of assuming that building-users and those studying them are non-essential during the design and construction of pilot buildings and only of interest when it is taken into use. A ZEB has low energy requirements and a net zero climate footprint and includes technologies for generation and storage of electricity and heat (Hestnes & Gustavsen, 2017). The definition of a ZEB is essentially tech­ nical, activities connected to sustainable lifestyles, such as recycling or food production are not included. The desire to reduce emissions has societal relevance and international agreements such as the Paris agreement and EU goals for zero emission society suggest its importance on a policy level, but engaging building users with the scenario has proved to be a challenge. In energy research, stories are predominantly used to describe technology development and they are part of why pilot buildings are useful as dis­ semination devices. Stories are not neutral in applied research projects. Success or ‘hero’ stories are the most popular because they are inspiring and positive, but in success stories there is often no correlation between what is predicted or proposed, and the results presented (Janda & Topuzi, 2015, p. 517). In what follows we use stories that include the messy practices or things that simply did not work. The end-user is not a generic entity in the stories about the pilot buildings in Heimdal and Lø, they provide the local insider understanding of a place that is socially constructed through ev­ eryday practices. The zero-emission technology and buildings are part of the stories told, as well as the outsider understandings of the place. But the stories show that the lived understanding of place, where both insider and outsider understandings are included and regarded as important to pilot building design and development, was not established.

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A zero-emission kindergarten In the autumn 2017, Steinkjer municipality in collaboration with the Research Centre for Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities (ZEN), began planning a zero emission neighbourhood in the suburban area of Lø. Plans included renovating the Norwegian broadcasting (NRK) offices from the 1980s to a zero-emission kindergarten. Two existing kindergartens in Lø were to be co-located and merged in the completed building. The Lø story presented here includes both the outsider and insider understandings of the plans for the kindergarten at Lø but is the story of a pilot building that was not realized. The outsiders included a team of ZEN researchers (two engineers, a geographer, an architect, and an anthropologist), who were supporting the design and development process led by Steinkjer mu­ nicipality, and representatives from the municipality’s planning and devel­ opment departments. The insiders represented the two kindergartens, employees and parents who were to be co-located in the planned zero emission kindergarten, two kindergarten managers and a representative from the municipality working specifically with kindergartens. An ethno­ graphic process that included participant observation and interviews was initiated to follow the planning and development process but ended up

Figure 15.1 The entrance to the old offices of the Norwegian broadcasting company (NRK) in Steinkjer where the zero emission kindergarten was to be located. Photo: Morten Stene.

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Figure 15.2 A rear view of the (NRK) building. Photo: Morten Stene.

being used to understand why different understandings of the needs of the building did not connect with each other. Representatives from the municipality’s planning and development de­ partments and ZEN researchers believed that the plans for renovating the NRK building at Lø was a “fantastic opportunity” (the anthropologist was no exception). They saw no contradiction between the pilot and the needs of the two kindergartens. What they did not see was that the kindergarten representatives had no desire to be the passive recipients of a renovated ZEB kindergarten. This was despite one of the kindergarten managers stating: “We have been in Søndre Egge (a kindergarten recently built by Steinkjer Municipality). I want one like that, a new kindergarten with a big outdoor space that goes all the way round the building.” A kindergarten in a renovated ZEB was not what they had asked for or had previously been promised. During a meeting in the town hall the municipal kindergarten supporter declared “If I could decide, I would pull the whole lot down.” According to the two kindergarten managers, employees and parents were not familiar with ZEN. “Nobody knew what ZEN was, but the group work (during two workshops with parents and employees) was about sustainable development. Nothing about merging the kindergartens.” A lack of famil­ iarity with ZEN’s zero emission scenario influenced interpretation of sus­ tainable solutions proposed during discussions.

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In a letter to the municipality’s executive committee asking for a new rather than rehabilitated kindergarten building, they stated that the sug­ gested solar panels, sharing the kindergarten premises with others and re­ ducing the number of parking spaces, would be expensive, require extra maintenance and affect the children’s privacy and safety. These factors would, they claimed, limit the building’s functionality, have a negative ef­ fect on the everyday lives of children, parents and employees, and increase the cost of building and managing the kindergarten. The two managers based their arguments on everyday experiences within existing buildings and visits to new kindergarten buildings within the municipality. In March 2018, the chairmanship of Steinkjer municipality took the decision, based on the letter from the two kindergarten managers, to de­ molish the NRK building and build a new kindergarten on the site. This was the end of plans for a pilot building in Lø. Demolition will make it expensive and difficult to achieve zero emissions because the CO2 emissions embodied by the new materials used in construction have to be accounted for. After the decision was made one of the kindergarten managers told me: I am very pleased with the decision to build a new kindergarten. I took an active role because I did not recognize us (the two kindergartens) in the proposal that was sent. It said that we were really positive towards the renovation of the NRK building. The Lø story starts early in pilot building development, but it shows that the design and development process did not take previous events and local knowledge strongly enough into account. A mismatch between insider and outsider concepts and knowledge was so intense that it stopped the devel­ opment of the pilot building.

Heimdal secondary school The new Heimdal secondary school, which opened in August 2018, is a ZEB, and one of the first to be completed in Norway. It is also one of the largest schools in Norway, with a gross area of 300,000 m2 and space for 1020 pupils. Internal and external sun shading contributes to a good indoor cli­ mate and helps to reduce a building’s energy requirements. Electrochromatic glass shading is installed in the school’s south facing façade. The system has no moveable parts and is integrated in the insulated glazing unit of a window. When functioning it provides shading automatically based on re­ gistered solar radiation through the glass into a room (Woods, Lolli, Thomsen, & Grynning, 2020). A user evaluation of electrochromatic sun shading that included observation and interviews, was requested by ZEN centre partners. Six building users from technical management, responsible for the everyday follow-up of the building, and teaching and administration staff were interviewed.

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Figure 15.3 Heimdal secondary school in Trondheim, the electrochromatic glass is included in the south facing façade. Photo: Spesiellise Foto & Design.

At Heimdal the electrochromatic glass often did not work, leaving south facing windows without any sun shading, compromising the indoor climate in a classrooms, offices and meeting rooms. The exchange of knowledge between the design team and building managers did not go smoothly and this had an impact on how the system was understood and the ability of the building users to take it into use. A member of the technical management team told us, It just flashes, I don’t know why. I don’t know enough about it. We don't really know how it should be run. A lot of people think rooms should be darker. No one has training and equipment. This is a pilot building, and the support is poor. The technical managers told us that the system is designed so that they are unable to deal with challenges themselves, “it could have been clearer in relation to what room it is in. What circuit. There is a drawing, but it is convenient to know which circuit.” The only expert was in another country. The lack of local knowledge was a challenge for staff working in rooms with the glass in the windows. A member of the teaching staff told us,

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The worst thing about it is it takes so long to get help. You lose faith. It is probably similar to the technology in car windows. They should already know how it works. If they are going to test it, there must be someone living nearby. It shouldn’t be necessary to fly an expert in from abroad. They should train someone in Trondheim. These problems led to new sun-shading systems being installed, external and internal, both of which will limit the view in and out of the building and which will threaten the delicate balance within the building’s carbon budget. The electrochromatic glass is increasingly being ignored. The interviewed users, whilst complaining about the sun shading and the challenges of being involved with pilot buildings, all at some point said more or less the same thing, that they really liked the building. A member of the teaching staff told us, We are proud of it (the school building), that we supply Huseby swimming pool (a neighbouring building) with heat. It is important at a time where there is focus on the environment. It lives up to our expectations and it’s mostly a great school. I am really proud to be part of Heimdal secondary school. A lot of people want to work here. The new building is disarming, and the challenges do not seem to detract from the overall pleasure in the finished result. The user evaluation tells the story about insider and outsider understandings, but the outsiders who made the decision to include the system are not present in the story. They are represented by the electrochromatic glass, which despite efforts to actively include it in the local use and understanding of the building, remains literally an outsider. Problems associated with circuit design and knowledge exchange are not insurmountable. If dealt with earlier, they could perhaps have been solved? A lived space that valued the knowledge and experience of the building users was not established during the design process. Evaluating the glass after installation seems too little too late. Electrochromatic glass has not been recommended for further use in schools (Woods et al., 2020).

Discussion: Maps of the future or lived space? Our stories demonstrate that within the technological logic, pilot buildings are intended to represent maps of future buildings for the construction industry, but the concepts and scenarios found in the ‘everywhere-asspaces’ that they represent often do not fit with everyday lives. This compromises the pilots’ ability to engage with the lives of the people working and living within them, and to establish new technology as relevant outside the research context. The technological logic dominating the design team produces an expectation that the most important results from

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pilot buildings is their relevance in the ‘everywhere-as-spaces’ found in a wider market, which justifies the disregard for local users and their stories. In Heimdal and Lø building users were not included when decisions were being made, the users’ knowledge about the place was not asked for and not enough time was spent on providing them with knowledge about solutions proposed. At Lø the knowledge gap shut down the pilot building and in the Heimdal school it prevented users from interacting meaningfully with the technology which was tested. In addition, the story about electrochromatic glass shows there is an interplay between expectations about permanence on the side of the building design team and a reality of impermanence due to building maintenance and the requirements of building users. It ex­ emplifies the never-ending work of interpreting and adapting the building by its users, which amounts to a continuation of the navigational efforts far into the pilot building’s life.

Conclusions: Anthropology applied The design and development of pilot buildings for the construction industry is a field of applied research and largely dominated by engineers and archi­ tects. Anthropology’s role in applied research remains peripheral to the process, often still taking the form of a user evaluation after a building’s completion. Here we have argued that this is rooted in a specific technolo­ gical logic of piloting, in which the desire to create a universal map super­ sedes the other side of ‘lived spaces’: local experience. Navigating between abstract universal concepts and everyday life resonates with the practice of anthropology but being able to do this requires an interdisciplinary reshuf­ fling. This reshuffling would demand establishing an understanding of the social and cultural place at the start of a project by including the building users with their knowledge and experience, and taking this knowledge as seriously as the potential associated with sustainable building solutions. The main task of architectural anthropology then becomes to secure and support the building user’s creative involvement during the design process. Rather than acting as an observer of behaviour or as an evaluator of users, the anthropologist becomes a knowledgeable guide through an alternative logic of piloting. One which approaches the pilot building as ‘lived space’, em­ phasizing that a pilot building is not only a space for technological learning but also a place for the interpretive possibilities of everyday lives.

Note 1 This research was funded by the FME Research Centre on Zero Emission Buildings in Smart Cities (FME ZEN) https://fmezen.no/

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References Buchli, V. (2013). An anthropology of architecture. Bloomsbury. Carsten, J., & Hugh-Jones, S. (1995). Introduction. In J. Carsten & S. Hugh-Jones (Eds), About the house. Cambridge University Press. Ellsworth-Krebs, K., Reid, L., & Hunter, C. (2015). Home-ing in on domestic en­ ergy research: “House”, “home”, and the importance of ontology. Energy Research & Social Science, 6, 100–108. Gell, A. (1985). How to read a map: Remarks on the practical logic of navigation. Man, new series, 20(2) (June), 271–286. Gieryn, T. F. (2002). What buildings do. Theory and Society, 31(1), 35–74. Heiskanen, E. Jalas, M., Rinkinen, J., & Tainio, P. (2015). The local community as a “low-carbon lab”: Promises and perils. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 14, 149–164. Henning, A. (2005). Climate change and energy use: the role of anthropological research. Anthropology Today, 21(3), 8–12. Hestnes, A. G., & Gustavsen, A. (2017). The ZEB definition of zero emission buildings. In A. G. Hestnes & N. L. Eik-Nes (Ed.), Zero emission buildings. Fagbokforlaget. Hodson, M., & Marvin, S. (2007). Understanding the role of the national exemplar in constructing ‘strategic glurbanization’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31(2), 303–325. Hughes, S., Yordi, S., & Besco, L. (2018). The role of pilot projects in urban climate change policy innovation. Policy Studies Journal, 48(2), 271–297. Ingold, T. (2011). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. Janda, K., & Topouzi, M. (2015). Telling tales: using stories to remake energy policy. Building Research and Information, 43(4), 516–533. Malinowski, B. (1922/1984). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Waveland Press. Merriam-Webster (2020). Pilot. Retrieved on 12 November 2020 from www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pilot Rodman, M. (1992). Empowering place: multilocality and multivocality. American Anthropologist, 94. Ryghaug, M., Skjølsvold, T. M., & Heidenreich, S. (2018). Creating energy citi­ zenship through material participation. Social Studies of Science, 48(2), 283–303. Shove, E. (2012). Habits and their creatures. In A. Warde & D. Southerton (eds), The habits of consumption, 12. COLLeGIUM: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Vermeeren, A. P. O. S., Law, L. E., Roto, V., & Obrist, M. (2010). User experience evaluation methods: Current state and development needs. Proceedings of NordiCHI 2010, 16–20 October. Woods, R., Lolli, N., Thomsen, J., & Grynning, S. (2020). Heimdal Secondary School: Electrochromic glass window system evaluation. Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) & SINTEF Community. Woods, R., & Berker, T. (2020). Citizen participation in Steinkjer: Stories about the “old NRK building at Lø”. Earth Environmental Science, 588, 032016.

Afterword Engaging architectural anthropology Sarah Pink

Architectural anthropology is a significant proposition. As I write, a global crisis in public health, climate change, economic instability and inequality and politics surges. Simultaneously emerging digital, automated, and connected technologies – often envisioned in dominant narratives as solutions to societal problems – are increasingly embedded in the environments, practices and experiences of life. A turn towards a more active and engaged anthropology is all the more necessary and urgent, and architectural anthropology has the potential to play a critical role in such a movement. The crises we are living, and the innovations in new automated technologies that are entering our lives are inseparable from the environments, circumstances and spatialities in which everyday life will continue to shift and change in following years. These (unfinished) crises have implications for the lives of humans and other species in homes, indoor and outdoor public spaces and for where and how we work, including the ways in which anthropologists and architects practice. Architectural anthropology has the potential both to offer new ways of knowing in and about these crises, how people live in and through them, and to intervene collaboratively in the processes through which new modes of making, being in and experiencing the materialities, atmospheres, and socialities of physical, sensory, technological, possible, and imagined space emerge. The case for architectural anthropology seems watertight, it has been established on the basis of firm theoretical and methodological foundations, as is confirmed by the contributions to this book by Tim Ingold and Albena Yaneva respectively, as well as the work of others such as Trevor Marchand (2009) or Victor Buchli (2013). Architectural Anthropology continues to take further steps out of the comfortable confines of its anthropology’s disciplinary conventions, to engage both critically, ethnographically and practically with the spatialities and temporalities of architecture. The prospect of architectural anthropology specifically offers an opportunity to consider how a theoretically, methodologically and practically interdisciplinary field might both play a role in academic research and discussion, and be engaged as an active element of public debate and practical intervention. I believe that such modes of bringing together interdisciplinary

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theoretical scholarship and applied practice should lie at the core of the future of anthropology as a discipline (Pink, Fors, & O’Dell, 2017) and that an anthropological focus on the relations of humans, other species, environment and emerging technologies should be fundamental to the ways futures are understood across design and planning focused disciplines including architecture. This book takes a crucial step in consolidating this field of interdisciplinary practice, both theoretically and methodologically – I first reflect on how this is achieved and its implications and then develop a discussion of how I believe this might best be taken forward towards an Architectural Futures Anthropology. One of the strengths of this book is that it advocates for architectural anthropology as a methodology. In particular there is a focus on interdisciplinary methodological innovations whereby anthropologists and architects work together to create shared practices and visions. For example, by through the investigation of public space with participants. Many of the contributions exemplify such work creating dialogues between anthropologists and architects (Harboe & Geirbo) for instance by bringing the perspectives of urban youth into such conversations (Hagen & Osuldsen), and engaging anthropological filmmaking as a method in urban planning and design (Berglund-Snodgrass & Högström). Two core uniting theoretical foci endure through my reading of Architectural Anthropology: space and futures. While of course these are not the only theories that are used across the chapters of this book, to my mind they encompass and overlap with most of the concepts that might be engaged to think with anthropology and architecture. Indeed, as noted below, the contributors to this volume offer us a wealth of concepts which have been generated through their collaborations, and which could be used in future work. They invite us to consider what is specific about the theoretical orientations that we might use to understand the temporalities and spatialities that architecture entails and implicates, and how these draw in and draw out attention to conceptual and empirical layers of investigation including of practical activity, sociality, materiality, atmosphere, affect, and ethics. The emphasis on architectural anthropology as concerned with the spatial is useful for distinguishing it from design anthropology, with which it has much in common. Spatiality is central to this book, its subtitle invites us to its exploration of lived space, through its definition yet openness in the form of its porosity (Lori) and blurred boundaries (Stender & Blomgren Jepsen), and the experience of living in buildings and homes (Øien & Rasmussen) alongside the experience of home outside these bounds for homeless people (Højring & Bech-Danielsen) and the walled nature of the island (Johannessen & Martin). This is a perfect starting point for considering the implications of the critical perspectives offered by the contributors to the book. Here the chapters of the book directly reveal how gender, disabilities, class, migrant, and other inequalities are implicated across

Afterword 253 diverse spatialities of homes, indoor and outdoor public and incarcerated sites. The contributors collectively call for, and start to demonstrate the need for a movement, an impulse and a mode of engagement through which anthropology might participate in the making of new, adjusted, or alternative spatialities. This would involve seeing architectural anthropology as an interdisciplinary field of scholarship and practice that intervenes critically and practically in the ways we conceptualize and create spatialities. Futures are also at the core of the work of this book, since like design anthropology, architectural anthropology is complicit in the processes through which futures are imagined and made. Some of the chapters in this book represent the potential of architectural anthropology as an applied process that is engaged with experimentation, prototyping and advising on how buildings come about. Unlike conventional anthropology architecture does not problematize or shy away from futures, but instead, as for design, much architectural practice inevitably seeks to intervene in the future. There are many approaches within architecture, including critical approaches to architectural scholarship and practice, whereby it is acknowledged that the architect cannot engineer societal or human behaviour change through spatial design (Pink, Burry, Akama, & Qiu, 2018). Therefore I do not want to apply a broad critical brush to the discipline or its practitioners, however there is very obviously an anthropological critique that can be applied to such ideas, and existing work has revealed how often architectural companies cannot but be complicit with a capitalist system of innovation, governance and planning (Abram, 2017) as they tender for projects. Contributors to this book show how such consequences have been mitigated, and evaded often in the Scandinavian context, there is much to learn from this. One of the advantages of architectural anthropology, is therefore its ability to critically engage with the spatial futures that are envisaged by planners, government, and industry, to bring to the fore the everyday questions that they raise, and the inequalities they should address. Anthropological ethnography can be mobilized to reveal and surface and to collaborate towards the imaginaries for other possible futures, where spatial formations are ongoingly and differently entangled with other elements of environments, human lives, hopes and desires and interspecies relations. The contributors to this book engage a series of concepts that enable them to think processually – for example the notion of rendering offers ways to consider atmospheric transformation (Bille & Stenslund), the concept of infrastructuring is engaged to understand processes of social, political and spatial change (Andersen, Dalseide & Fagerlid) and the concept of piloting which offers routes through which to encounter the possibility that emerges from engaging with a kind or prototype or test building (Woods & Berker). These concepts are important because they form the basis of a conceptual guide for architectural anthropology, which might be applied and advanced through future work.

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A futures anthropology approach (Pink & Salazar, 2017) offers a particular take on architectural anthropology, in that it complicates how futures have been conceptualized both in anthropology and architecture. Whereas anthropologists have long since been interested in futures, the main thrust of existing research has tended to be critical or documentary, in that it has mainly critiqued the ways futures are predicted and characterized in other disciplines, theorized how they are imagined, and documented how they are experienced through ethnographic studies. Instead a futures anthropology approach (Pink & Salazar, 2017), inspired by design anthropology (Smith & Otto, 2016) suggests that there is a further step. We have argued for attention to futures as contingent, ongoingly emergent, never knowable or reachable. I have also argued for a futures ethnography approach, which re-thinks the sites of our research as explorations of possibility, imaginaries and uncertainties. This approach engages anticipatory concepts, such as trust, anxiety, hope and desire (Pink, 2021a) through which to understand how these sites of what has not (yet and perhaps never will have) happened are experienced, sensed and spoken of through the present. In the case of architectural anthropology this involves asking how this approach can most effectively be located beyond the exploration of the spatialities of the present which immediately slips over into the past. Putting it another way, how can we surpass the study of processes and experiences as they happen? The chapters of this book demonstrate how architectural anthropology is a necessary movement, how it shows up the perspectives and practices of the stakeholders encountered at its sites of design, planning, making, monetizing and dwelling and reveals how they imply moves towards spatial futures that are more or less equitable, ethical and responsible. I believe this raises a key question regarding how architectural anthropology might contribute to debate and practice in the sites where architecture and the stakeholders whose agency influences it are active, as they become active? Putting this idea another way, how can architectural anthropology participate as architecture slips over into its futures, and how might it do so as an interventionist stance, which seeks to guide such processes. There are a number of ways in which this might come into practice, including through interactive and ongoing collaboration between architects and anthropologists as shown by several of the contributors to this volume. However, this is not simply a practical step and I would argue that to advance further we also need to interrogate the theoretical and methodological orientations of anthropology as a whole, to re-think how futures might become conceptualized and practiced through the discipline. Architectural anthropology provides an ideal conduit through which to experiment with such a move. I next explore this through a reflexive discussion of how the idea of architectural anthropology inspires me to think about and with my own practice as an interdisciplinary anthropologist.

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Architectural anthropology as futures anthropology My current work involves the development of a futures-focused anthropology, which intentionally transgresses the temporalities of traditional anthropology in its theory, subject matter and its methods (Pink & Salazar, 2017; Pink, Akama, & Ferguson 2017; Pink, 2021a). I argue that to be able to be engaged, and to work towards ethical, equitable and responsible futures anthropologists need to intervene in the sites that anthropology has conventionally problematized and avoided. These are sites where conversely those other disciplines and professions that seek to influence what happens next, practice in ways that they believe are unproblematic. This means that anthropologists need to extend the scope of the discipline to not only critique but to seek to intervene. Therefore architectural anthropologists would critique future visions that are framed by predictive narratives which seek to create finished artefacts. In place of such narratives they would call for greater acknowledgement of futures as contingent, open, uncertain and nurtured by human creativity and everyday innovation. Such an approach would maintain theoretical principles from anthropology that problematize the very idea that futures can be imagined as something ahead of us. But it would re-harness these principles and related critical perspectives in dialogue with ethnography to complicate the predictive modes of future-thinking that underpin the dominant narratives. In my view this means we need a new anthropology, which focuses on its interdisciplinary and interventional possibilities in ways that remain loyal to the critical impulse and considered perspectives that arise from anthropological theory and ethnographic practice. One of my interests in architecture is precisely its futures-focus, and its subsequent capacity to pair with anthropology in such an endeavour. There are many possible sites at which anthropological and architectural practice and theory might encounter each other. First we might consider how architectural design sometimes becomes complicit in agendas of governance, aimed to shape or change future societies, everyday lives or workplace practices, often with good intentions. This can be at odds with design anthropological work which reveals how people innovate to create the ways of being, sensing and feeling that are appropriate for them in relation to and often in spite of architectural design. A second touching point might be where anthropologists collaborate with architects to understand how people engage with and imagine their futures in and through architectural space. This means going beyond co-design methods and public consultations, and it is definitely not ethnography in the service of architectural design. Instead it involves engaging the analytical tools of design anthropology as a mode of architectural anthropology investigation to understand possible human futures. A third example might be to consider how and where architecture emerges as a playful and speculative field, which can focus on questions of possibility and is inhabited by critical architecture

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scholars whose work and ideas resonate with those of design anthropologists. Here the sites of architectural speculation and imagination might become shared sites for the unfolding of futures anthropologies and ethnographies of the possible or unknown. Anthropology, particularly in its ethnographic endeavour, is a reflexive discipline, requiring its practitioners to question, understand and reveal their positionality in processes of research, analysis and representation. Architectural anthropology needs a specific mode of reflexivity, as follows: it should engage reflexively with not only how anthropologists, architects, and projects that they share are situated in the present, or the biographies that define them, but it should also have a reflexive stance towards the anticipatory modes within which they work. To situate individuals and projects and the ways of knowing and sensing that pertain to them in relation to the imagined, the possible, the uncertain and the unknown.

Architectural anthropology in practice: a reflexive account This book brings together the work of a number of researchers, practitioners, and scholars who have engaged at the intersection of anthropology and architecture, and in doing so defines a field of practice. I originally trained as a social and visual anthropologist, which meant treading an interdisciplinary path, and indeed also making a commitment to a field of anthropology which at the time was often marginalized by mainstream anthropologists. If anything this increased my enthusiasm for the prospect of practising anthropology outside the constraints of the discipline itself. I was concerned both with interdisciplinary theory-building and with the practice of what I would now call interdisciplinary anthropology. The interesting thing about establishing a field of practice in academia, is that when doing so it is also usually possible to define the origins and emergence of this field and this can involve asking how it was in some ways already there – latent or lurking, waiting to be defined and for its community of practice to find each other. Architectural anthropology offers this prospect, since, as Tim Ingold notes it can be found in the history of the discipline, and I believe that with some self-interrogation many anthropologists might find unnamed elements of it within their work. Curious about how I might define myself as a sometimes practitioner of architectural anthropology, in the next subsections, I reflect on my own research to discuss how a futurefocused architectural anthropology might attend to different elements of the creativity involved in the circumstances in which architecture as a practice and a process is implicated.

The unbuilt When I first discovered the concept of the unbuilt I was fascinated by the idea that architects inhabited an otherwise invisible alterity, imperceptible

Afterword 257 to me until its existence was revealed through a show of plans, visualizations, and even awards or other merits conferred on buildings that did not and likely would never be built. It seemed to me an otherly world, sensorial and engaging despite its intangibility, something that was here but not here, alongside, bursting with potential, but not predictive or certain. While for architects the concept of the unbuilt might be experienced quite differently (which is something I have yet to find out), my interest in it relates to the question of futures in two ways: it suggests a route towards considering the question of what is built as being emergent from the circumstances that the world finds itself in; and its speculative mode creates a world of possibility, imaginary and what if, a kind of alterity to the embeddedness of the material monetized world in which buildings are constructed. Indeed a design anthropological notion of the unbuilt may be seen as living alongside the sets of imaginaries that inhabit architectural anthropology: the unbuilt that lives in the drawings and sensed spatialities of architectural designers; the everyday imaginaries of the unbuilt that emerge from our experiences of our immediate environments – for instance as I imagine or sense but do not verbalize what an extension to my home would feel like; future dominant visions of the impact of the built environment on society; and contesting visions, of the differently built. The unbuilt is a speculative mode, a ‘what if?’, which might be engaged to bring together the imaginaries of different stakeholders in uncertain futures. That is, it could be a meeting point where a futures-focused architectural anthropology is performed.

The construction site Nothing is ever ‘finished’, yet in some contexts things and processes are more obviously unfinished and in progress than others. Since around 2007 I have collaborated with experts in the construction industry in research focused mainly on construction worker health and safety. The construction industry is one of the most dangerous industries in the world to work in. Workers die from a range of accidents including falls from height, as well as suffering ill health from workplace injuries. Compared with the number of anthropologists interested in the more glamorous and publicly visible work of architects, the hidden, dangerous dusty and hard work of construction workers is little attended to. Nevertheless there is a thriving field of research in this area, and part of my work has involved bringing this together with insights from design anthropology (Pink, Tutt, Dainty & Gibb 2010; Pink, Tutt & Dainty 2013; Pink, Lingard & Harley 2016, 2017). The lack of attention to the construction industry in anthropology is surprising given its participation in, for instance the monetization of space and labour, the vulnerability of its workers. Construction is also about the making of architecture, it is where architectural anthropology might engage with the processual world in which architecture comes about, and with the

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biographies of buildings, not simply as inhabited by those who dwell in them as they are occupied, but by those whose labour and sometimes lives will forever reside in their structures. Construction process and construction work are future-focused modes of activity. They reveal a processual world in a rapid process of transformation, as different materials and teams of specialist workers participating in a fragmented labour market characterized by subcontracting, move in and out of a site, and on to other sites. The skilled labour, and ways of staying safe on a construction site that are practiced by workers involve modes of creativity and innovation that balance regulatory guidelines and frameworks, organizational pressures with realistic and often unspoken ways of knowing about how to work and keep safe. Here, what will happen next might be a matter of life and death or of completing a job and being paid before or after the weekend. Ethnographies of construction work are a thorough reminder of the processual nature of the worlds we live in, the changing environments in which we know and learn, the social inequalities that shape our economies and our health outcomes and life expectancies. A focus on the construction site reminds us to ask whose futures are implicated in the spatiality of architecture, beyond the public face of building, in architectural practices, planning, and the people who inhabit ‘finished’ projects.

The prototype In around 2014 I began to collaborate with a group of architects, led by Jane Burry, a Professor of Architecture, in a project focused on a prototype architecturally designed meeting space – the FabPod. Our work focused on the acoustics of the FabPod which had been inspired by Jane’s work on the Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona, and led to the creation of an acoustic design methodology which sought to refract sound through the use of hyperboloid shapes. The design process had been complex because there existed no software for the design of such acoustics, and our interdisciplinary research brought together the prototype FabPod, video ethnographic research and acoustic measurement techniques. Jane Burry, our colleagues and I report on this project elsewhere, and discuss its implications for how we might understand the architectural imagination (Pink, Burry, Akama, & Qiu, 2018). As I read a set of publications by Jane and her colleagues, seeking to understand their work I became both lost in and fascinated by the inspiration for their project, the complexities of their techniques and the processual and speculative nature of architectural design. This project alerted me to the ways in which the imagination serves as a future-focused technique or technology in architectural practice, and how it emerged in the everyday life experiences and in the speculative imaginings of participants in design ethnographic and creative practice research activities that my colleagues Yoko Akama, David Carlin, Annie Fergusson

Afterword 259 and I undertook with people who used the FabPod (e.g. Pink et al., 2017; Carlin et al., 2018). It subsequently led me to ask further, how might the imagination also be part of a futures anthropology approach which brings together anthropological, ethnographic and architectural imaginations into dialogue. Such dialogues would take place at sites that anthropologists do not usually inhabit, that is beyond the comfort of an anthropological practice that has tended to stay focused on ethically accounting for what has already happened. I return to ethics later.

The ongoingness of architecture From 2015 to 2018 I led a design anthropological project which investigated how hospital staff, patients and visitors experienced moving into and inhabiting a newly built architecturally designed hospital site in Bendigo, a regional centre in Victoria, Australia. The new hospital is a stunning, award winning, building. Amongst other significant features, its design enables the flow of light into its central atrium and the units inhabited by patients via large windows and internal courtyards. Our research showed how participants experienced the space and how they innovated to generate the feelings and practices that felt right for them. Our research covered questions, including how staff innovated spaces to take their breaks (Pink et al., 2020), how comforting practices were performed (Duque et al., 2020) and the generation of homeliness (ibid.). The question of how staff created a sense of homeliness in the new hospital space, discussed in an article led by Melisa Duque, demonstrates two key points, relevant here. First the question of homeliness had been identified as important to our participants during the first phase of our ethnography in the old hospital in the first phase of our ethnography, undertaken by Shanti Sumartojo. At the new site we were able to trace how this feeling of homeliness was constituted newly, for instance in part through familiar sensory encounters including taste. Second, the work demonstrates the unfinishedness of architectural space, as never complete and always reconstituted through both everyday and dramatic practices and activities of its inhabitants. The idea of everyday spaces as unfinished is well established (Pink, Akama, & Ferguson, 2017). The process of creating homeliness in a new space emphasizes this, and demonstrates the need for a processual theory of emergence to underpin the way anthropologists encounter architectural space.

Emerging technologies In all the fields discussed in this chapter, emerging technologies – with increasing degrees of automation, robotization and artificial intelligence – are at play. They are assuming specific roles within everyday spaces of many kinds. Simultaneously they are part of a connected world of big data, where there is a possibility (although not an eventuality) that further continuities will emerge between them.

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The architect Jane Burry, mentioned above, specializes in mathematical and computational architecture. One of the significant things I learnt through my collaboration with Jane and her team, now several years ago, concerned how the FabPod design involved working with algorithms which assisted but did not solve the question of how to design for particular acoustic effects, and also required the activation of the architectural imagination. Now, as AI seems set to play a greater role in architectural design, this raises questions about how and where automated and machine learning processes might best support the creativity of the architect, and where they meet with the architectural imagination. Construction work is set to become increasingly automated and robotized according to the future visions of technology designers and industry accounts. For instance drone technologies (Li & Liu, 2019) and robots (Liang, Kamat, & Menassa, 2020) might be used to perform certain tasks, and automated hazard detection might make construction sites safer (Fang et al., 2020). For the next five years my colleagues and I will be researching automation and robotization in construction work in Norway and Australia within a wider project about the automation of work. My hunch, based on my earlier ethnographic research and reading of recent academic and grey literature is that technological possibilities of future construction work could make the industry safer, but it is likely that they will still involve human knowing and intervention, in relation to machine learning and intelligence. This is also reflected in industry views of the future of construction, where for instance the consultancy McKinsey & Company suggests that ‘machines will take over individual activities within a role’ and ‘workers will need to learn to work side by side – or in a hybrid role – with machines’ (Chui & Mischke, 2019). Speaking anthropologically we should investigate how the sensory and unspoken ways of knowing that inform how construction work is performed will still be necessary to how buildings are made. While the creativity of the construction worker is much less frequently discussed, than the architectural imagination is, it is equally important to understand how worker creativity best combines with the possibilities of emerging intelligent technologies. Above I also highlighted how people inhabit and innovate in everyday spaces, through the case of the hospital and the home. The future of healthcare is one of the key areas that emerging technologies are associated with and there is growth in robotic, artificial intelligence and automated decision-making technologies in health care environments. This includes technological interventions in surgical procedures, patient records, and diagnostics and in the automated transport of materials and things (food, laundry) through spaces. Smart home technologies are also part of the everyday architectures in which some people live, as sensors involve technological ways of knowing about characteristics of space, including levels of light, temperature, and movement. Public spaces are moreover increasingly datafied, that is we live in spaces where invisible architectures of data,

Afterword 261 sensors and predictive analytics are equally part of our environments as are the materialities of buildings or public squares and plazas. The possibility of learning to live not only in material space, but with the often invisible elements of technological and datafied space is part of everyday futures. Ethnographies that seek to understand the spatiality of everyday life might usefully incorporate an anticipatory mode of investigating how, if and where people see their near and far future experiences of and activities as involving such technologies. My points in this section are all contingent in relation to inequalities of access and distribution of emerging technologies. Moreover as argued elsewhere, neither societies nor individual lives should be seen as the landing sites at which such technology simply impacts on the world or is appropriated by people as it is (Pink, 2021b). It is not only spatialities that are unfinished, but also the technologies which begin to share journeys forward into uncertain futures with people and the other things that constitute the circumstances of life. The study of and/or intervention in architecture in the making, architectural design and prototyping, or of life in architecturally designed spaces will necessarily be a situated socio technical architectural anthropology that acknowledges the ongoingness and contingent nature of the relations between different things, species and processes.

The futures of architectural anthropologies and anthropologists If much of the contemporary world is in crisis, then architecture cannot be seen as separate from this situation. What is built and not built is emblematic of what the circumstances of the world enable. This relates not only to what architects might design, but also to the spaces – homes, public spaces, and other sites – that are imagined by the people who wish to live their everyday lives in them or professionals who wish for new sites for particular groups of people. As the chapters of this book show, architectural anthropology can reveal experience, imagination, inequalities, and possible productive ways forward. I believe this signifies a dynamic sub discipline that has the potential to combine theoretical scholarship and applied practice in an exemplary way. From my perspective, the next step calls for a turn in temporality, towards an explicitly futures focused architectural anthropology; a preemptive mode of theoretical-ethnographic scholarship which does not stop at researching what has already happened or is happening in the moment, but seeks to investigate possible futures that are unknown and perhaps will never be known. Architectural anthropology enables such a task, in part because it brings together the ethnographic rigour and commitment of anthropology together with the future-orientation of architectural design and allows a meeting of imaginaries.

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This book, with its focus on futures, spatialities, and collaborative methodologies offers a strong starting point. It is rich with concepts which might be mobilized to take this field forward, with examples of interdisciplinary process and with empirical insights that demonstrate how and why bringing together these two disciplines into an Architectural Anthropology is an important move.

References Abram, S. (2017). Contemporary obsessions with time and the promise of the future, in J. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving and J. Sjoberg (Eds), Anthropologies and Futures (61–82). Oxford: Bloomsbury. Bucchli, V. (2013). An Anthropology of Architecture. London: Bloomsbury. Carlin, D., Y. Akama, S. Pink, & S. Sumartojo (2018). Uncertainty as Technology for Moving Beyond, in Uncertainty and Possibility. London: Bloomsbury. Chui, M. & J. Mischke (2019). The impact and opportunities of automation in construction. Retrieved from www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-andinfrastructure/our-insights/the-impact-and-opportunities-of-automation-inconstruction Duque, M., M. Annemans, S. Pink, & L. Spong (2020). Everyday comforting practices in psychiatric hospital environments: A design anthropology approach. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, online ahead of print. Fang, W., L. Ma, P. E. D. Love, H. Luo, L. Ding, & A. Zhou (2020). Knowledge graph for identifying hazards on construction sites: Integrating computer vision with ontology, Automation in Construction, 119(103310). Li, Y. & C. Liu (2019). Applications of multirotor drone technologies in construction management, International Journal of Construction Management, 19(5), 401–412. Liang, C.-J., V. R. Kamat & C. C. Menassa (2020). Teaching robots to perform quasi-repetitive construction tasks through human demonstration, Automation in Construction, 120(103370). Marchand, T. H. J. (2009). The Masons of Djenné. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pink, S, D. Tutt & A. Dainty (2013). Introducing ethnographic research in the construction industry, in Pink, S., A, Dainty, & D. Tutt (Eds), Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry. London: Taylor and Francis. Pink, S., (2021a) Digital futures anthropology, in H. Geismer & H. Knox (Eds), Digital Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury. Pink, S. (2021b) Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage. Pink, S., Y. Akama & A. Fergusson (2017). Researching future as an alterity of the present, in J. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving, & J. Sjoberg (Eds), Anthropologies and Futures. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Pink, S., J. Burry, Y. Akama, & X. Qiu (2018). Experience and imagination in transdisciplinary design: The FabPod, Architecture and Culture, 6(2), 307–328. Pink, S., M. Duque, S. Sumartojo, & L. Vaughan (2020). Designing for staff breaks, HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal, 13(2), 243–255. Pink, S., V. Fors, & T. O’Dell (Eds) (2017). Theoretical Scholarship and Applied Practice. Oxford: Berghahn.

Afterword 263 Pink, S., H. Lingard, & J. Harley (2016). Digital pedagogy for safety: The construction site as a collaborative learning environment, Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 1(1), 1–15. Pink, S., H. Lingard, & J. Harley (2017). Refiguring creativity in virtual work: The digital-material construction site, New Technology, Work and Employment, 32(1), 12–27. Pink, S. & J. F. Salazar (2017). Anthropologies and futures: Setting the agenda, in J. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving, & J. Sjoberg (Eds), Anthropologies and Futures. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Pink, S., D. Tutt, A. Dainty, & A. Gibb (2010). Ethnographic methodologies for construction research: Knowing, practice and interventions, Building Research and Information, 38(6), 647–659. Smith, R. C. & T. Otto (2016). Cultures of the future: Emergence and intervention in design anthropology, in R. C. Smith, K. T. Vangkilde, M. G. Kjærsgaard, T. Otto, J. Halse, & T. Binder (Eds), Design Anthropological Futures (19–36). London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Index

Aabø, S. 126, 130 Aat Vos 122–3, 125–6, 132 Abram, S. 253 acoustics 35, 41–2, 258, 260 actor network theory (ANT) 3, 65, 183, 184, 209 aesthetics 2, 48, 85, 87, 91, 113, 177, 183, 240; global 138–9; rendering atmosphere 207–23; UVAs 117, 119 affordance 77, 157 Ahmed, Sarah 41 Akama, Yoko 258–9 Akbari Chermahini, S. 185 Alstäde, Victoria 155–8 Andersen, Bengt 106, 122–34, 253 anonymity 201 Anstalten (Nuuk) correctional facility 90–7, 101 Anthropocene 1 anthropography 212 Appadurai, A. 171 applied anthropology 4 appreciative inquiry 138 Arbejdernes Landsbank (AL) 229–30 archiving 15–17, 19–28 Argonauts of the Western Pacific 239 art of noticing 225, 234 artificial intelligence 259–60 At your neighbour’s house 155–8 atherosclerosis 66 atmosphere, rendering 207–23 Attili, G. 149, 151, 152, 158 Audunson, R. 126, 130–1 Augé, M. 137 authorship 15, 16, 151–2 automation 259–60

Awan, N. 161 Bäcklund, Emma 158–60 Bagnoli, A. 79 balconies 32, 48–61 Ballantyne, A. 63 Barad, K. 6 Barth, Fredrik 7, 8, 9, 54 Barthes, R. 26 Basso, K. 144 Bastien, S. 183 Bateson, G. 185 Bauman, Z. 137, 172 Bech-Danielsen, Claus 1–12, 31–3, 76–89, 252 belonging 114, 135–8, 140–1, 146, 150; ‘After Belonging’ 164–76; temporal 136–7, 143 Bendigo hospital 259 Benta, M. 94 Berglund-Snodgrass, Lina 106–7, 149–63, 252 Berker, Thomas 178–9, 237–49, 253 Besco, L. 240 Bille, Mikkel 55, 178, 207–23, 253 black boxing 225, 235 Blanco, L. A. C. 166, 167–8 Bluyssen, P. 62 body language 53 body multiple 66 Böhme, Gernot 209, 213 Bondi, L. 155 bottom-up approaches 107, 150 boundaries 31–103; balconies 32, 48–61 Bourdieu, Pierre 1, 214

Index 265 Braathen, M. 174 Braidotti, R. 6 Brattbakk, I. 135 Brochmann, G. 174 Brown, Wendy 90, 101 Buchli, Victor 1, 240, 251 ‘building back better’ 5 Burns, C. J. 149 Burry, Jane 258, 260 Calvino, I. 26 Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) 15–16, 18, 22 Carlin, David 258–9 Carr, S. 144 Carrithers, M. 184 Carsten, J. 1, 240–1 Castells, M. 57 Chui, M. 260 Ciacci, L. 149 City Guide platform 168 Clapham, D. 2–3 climate 5, 240; footprint 242; indoor 32, 62–75, 245–6 climate change 237, 251 cognitive mapping 144 collaborative housing development 224–36 collage technique 76–89 collective emancipation 150 colonialism 3, 4, 92 community: collaborative housing development 224–36; homelessness 85 computer-generated images (CGIs) 209 construction sites 257–8, 260 constructive interference 98 Cooperrider, D. L. 138 cosiness 55, 57, 60 COVID-19 pandemic 5 creativity 177–249; entanglements 184–5; youth participation 181–93 Cresswell, T. 171 critical anthropology 13 Culhane, D. 184 cultural aesthetics 217–19 Dalseide, Astri Margareta 106, 122–34, 178, 181–93, 253 dark architecture 90 Davison, J. 94 decontextualization 210 Degen, M. 208–10

Deleuze, G. 19, 145 deportation centres, Lindholm Island 90–2, 97–101 description 26–8 design 4, 9, 15, 19–28, 177–249; internalization 36–7; social concepts 194–206 Després, C. 76, 77, 86 Devlin, K. 138 diversity 195, 197–8 dividuals 40 Dornan, Røtting 230 Dovey, K. 83, 85, 210 drone technologies 260 Duque, Melisa 259 dwelling/inhabiting 17–28, 69 Earon, O. 48 Easterling, K. 90, 92 Edvinsson, Daniela 152–4 Edwards, Betty 86 electrochromatic glass 237–8, 245–8 Ellebæk 97 emotions 254; film-making 150, 154–8, 160; imprints 135–48 empathy 158 Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM) 109, 111–12, 114–18 end-users 241–2, see also participation Engbo, H. J. 93 Enner Mark Prison 94 environment; see sustainable architecture equality: ‘opening up’ 171–2; youth participation 198–9, see also inequality equalizer effect 141 ethnographic turn 3 eutopias 142, 146 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 4 everyday life, homelessness 85 FabPod 258–60 Fællesbyg Køge Kyst 225–35 Færch, M. 97 Fagerlid, Cicilie 106, 122–34, 253 Fainstein, S. 136 Falleth, E. I. 181 Feld, S. 144 Fergusson, Annie 258–9 film-making, spatial difference 107, 149–63 Florida, R. 214

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Garvey, Pauline 52–4, 55, 60 Gaviria, Aníbal 112–13, 114 Geertz, C., 20, 28 Gehl, J. 48 Geirbo, Hanne Cecilie 105–6, 109–21, 252 gender, equality 198–9, 252 Geurts, K. L. 183 Gibson, James 77 Gieryn, T. F. 49, 240 Gifford, R. 138 Göbekli 94 Goffman, E. 95 Goldhagen, Sarah W. 36 Graham, S. 90, 112, 114, 171 Gram-Hansen, K. 86 Grant, J. 131–2 Groat, D. 7 Gromark, Sten 105–7 Grønseth, Anne Sigfrid 107, 164–76 Grubbauer, M. 210 Guattari, F. 145 Gullestad, Marianne 3, 37, 41, 130 Gunn, W. 4 Gustavsen, A. 242

Hellberg, Marcus 158–60 Henning, A. 241 Henning Larsen Architects 178, 194–205 Henriksen, Martin 97 Hermant, E. 22 Hernández, B. 166 Herschend, S. S. 97 Hestnes, A. G. 242 Hidalgo, C. M. 166 Hill, D. 225 Hill, J. 17 Hirsch, N. 92 Hjort, Sofia 155–8 Hodgkin, R. 181 Hodson, M. 239 Hoelscher, Kristian 111 Hoffmann, T. 95 Högström, Ebba 106–7, 149–63, 252 Højring, Laura Helene 32–3, 76–89, 252 Holbraad, Martin 36, 119 holism 3, 67, 70, 73, 79, 90, 140, 146 Holmarsdottir, H. B. 183 homelessness 32–3, 76–89 homeliness 32–3, 76–89, 259 homes 31–103; balconies 32, 48–61; collaborative development 224–36; indoor climate 32; intimacy 41–2; noise nuisance 32, 35–47 Hommel, B. 185 Hoppenbrouwer, E. 123, 128, 131 Horváth, A. 94 Hugh-Jones, S. 1, 241 Hughes, S. 240 Hunt, Jamer 7 Huq, E. 150

Hagen, Aina Landsverk 1–12, 105–7, 135–48, 177–9, 181, 184, 185, 252 Hale, J. 79 Hanssen, G. S. 181 Haraway, Donna 27 Harboe, Lisbet 105–6, 109–21, 252 Harris, M. 19, 22 Harvey, D. 114 Hastrup, K. 111, 119 Havik, K. 62 healthcare 260 Heaphy, L. 48 Heimdal secondary school 238, 242, 245–7, 248 Heiskanen, E. 239

identification, film-making 150, 158–60 identity, homelessness 85 Ihde, Don 77 inclusion/exclusion: ‘After Belonging’ 164–76; infrastructure 113–14; public life 105, 106–7; Ryerson University 195–204 indoor climate 32; mould and microbes 62–75 inequality 252–3; gender 198–9; social urbanism 113, see also equality; see also migrants/refugees infrastructure 105; PUIs 113–14; UVAs 109–19 Ingold, Tim xiii–xvii, 8, 13, 17, 59, 69,

Fokdal, J. 136 Forde, Cyril D. 1 Foucault, M. 99 Frandsen, A. K. 63 Franz, J. 149 Friberg, C. 214 Friedmann, J. 150 Fubiak see Furuset Library functionalism 123 Furuset Library 122–32 futures 253–6, 261–2

Index 267 73, 136, 173, 185, 211, 212, 235, 237, 240, 251, 256 integration 41–2, 95, 114, 118, 124, 132, 153–4, 170–3 islands 90–103 Jacobs, Jane 2 Jacobs, K. 49 Jalas, M. 239 Janda, K. 242 Jepsen, Marie Blomgren 32, 48–61, 252 Jericho walls 94 Jewkes, Y. 95 Johannessen, Runa 33, 90–103, 252 Kahn, A. 149 Kaplan, R. 143 Kaplan, S. 143 Kauschen, Gesine 230 Kenzari, B. 91 Kirkebæk, B. 100 Kissoon, P. 165 Klarskov, K. 91 Klinenberg, E. 131 Klingman, A. 213 Knight, L. 144 Køge Kyst 226, 228–9 Koolhaas, Rem 15, 22, 49 Korody, N. 167 Korosec-Serfaty, P. 85 Latour, Bruno 15, 21, 22–3, 49, 63, 65, 73, 183, 225 Lauritsen, A. N. 92–3 Law, J. 151 Lawson, B. 62 Lawson, V. 151 Le Corbusier, 31 Leach, N. 165 Lefebvre, H. 136, 173 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1 libraries 106; mixed-use design 122–34 Lien, M. 3 light: cultural aesthetics 217–19; domestic 55; UVAs 109 Lindholm Island 90–2, 97–101 Löfgren, O. 56 Lofland, L. 53 Loos, Adolf 214 Losmann, Carmen 234 Louw, E. 123, 128, 131 McKinsey & Company 260

McNiff, S. 144 McQuirk, J. 110, 113 Maggio, R. 151 Magnussen, M. 92, 97 Malinowski, Bronislaw 4, 7, 239 Malpas, J. 49 Marchand, Trevor 251 Martin, Tomas Max 33, 90–103, 252 Marvin, S. 112, 114, 171, 239 material turn 3, 111, 119, 183 Mauss, Marcel 1 May, V. 138 Mead, Margaret 4 meeting place concept 122–3, 124–6, 131 Melhuish, C. 208–10 Melhus, M. 3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2, 183, 195–6, 202 microbes 62–75 microscales 62–75 migrants/refugees 107, 161; ‘After Belonging’ 164–76; Lindholm Island 90–2, 97–101; Oslo library 124, 128 Mikaelsson, Oskar 155–8 Miller, D. 57 minor architecture 159 Mischke, J. 260 mixed-use design, libraries 122–34 mobility, ‘Modes of Movement’ 168–70 modelling 189 modernism 2, 158 ‘Modes of Movement’ 168–70 Mol, Annemarie 66, 73 Moore, Henrietta 1–2 Moran, D. 91, 95, 101–2n1 Morgan, Lewis Henry 1 Morreall, J. 184 Mosse, D. 111, 119 mould 62–75 Mountz, Alison 99, 100 Møystad, O. 136 Muschamp, Herbert 112 narrative dialogues 135–48 narrative embroidery 141 Nasar, J. L. 138 National Graphene Institute (NGI) 17–19, 20 neighbours 81, 83, 85, 124; balconies 32, 48–61; noise nuisance 32, 35–47 neoliberalism 114 Newell, P. 181

268

Index

Nielsen, Søren 35–6, 37, 39, 42, 46n2, 178, 224–36 noise nuisance 32, 35–47 non-humans 1, 3, 6, 8, 13, 16, 19, 21–2, 26, 65, 91, 149, 182, 183–5, 190 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 2, 136 Nordic Research Network for Architectural Anthropology 4, 5–6 normality principle 91–2, 95, 96–7 Norris, J. 78 Norwegian Library Act 122 Norwegian Planning and Building Act 138–9, 181 Novoselov, K. S. 18 NRK 237, 242–5, 248 Nuñez-Janes, M. 150 Oekonomia 234 Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) 14, 15, 18, 20, 22 Øien, Turid Borgestrand 32, 62–75, 252 Oldenburg, Ray 122 oligopticons 22–3 OPEN transformation (OT) 164, 168–75 ‘opening up’ 171–2 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 5 Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) 107, 164, 166–9, 174 Osuldsen, Jenny B. 106, 135–48, 185, 252 the other 2 Otto, T. 4, 254 Our meeting place: the E-hall Emmaboda 158–60 outcast archipelago 98–100 Pallasmaa, Juhani 36–7, 41, 45, 62, 145 participant listening 139–40 participation 4, 177–249; collaborative housing development 224–36; fatigue 181; ‘opening up’ 171–2; pilot buildings 237–49; planning 106; PUIs 113–14; user evaluation 241–2; UVAs 113, 117; youth and urban development 181–93 The people’s house as a meeting place 152–4 perception primacy 183 Pérez-Gómez, A. 214 personhood 37

Petersen, Sandra Lori 32, 35–47, 252 Peterson, M. 132 pilot buildings 178–9, 237–49 Pink, Sarah 9–10, 69, 73, 183, 251–63 place attachment 166 place-making 166 pluralism 150 post-humanism 6 post-humanist turn see material turn pragmatism 3, 13, 225 ‘primitive hut’ 2 prisons 33; walls and islands 90–103 privacy: balconies 51–3, 60; homeliness 83–5 private/public, balconies 55–60 Proyectos Urbano Integral (PUI) 113–14 public life, urban space 105–76 qualitative approaches 2–3, 24, 26, 49, 64, 71, 78, 86–8 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred 4 Raffnsøe, Lau 35–6, 37–9, 42, 46n2 Rasmussen, Mia Kruse 32, 62–75, 252 reciprocity, ‘opening up’ 171–2 reflexivity 150 Reiter, K. 95 Rendell, Jane 78 renderings 207–23 Rice, Tom 41 Rinkinen, J. 239 Rishbeth, C. 158 robotization 259–60 Rodeo Architects 123, 124, 131 Rodman, M. 240 Røe, P. G. 210, 214 Rogaly, B. 158 Rogers, C. R. 146 Rose, G. 151, 208–10 Rosten, M. 136 Ruby, J. 152 Rudningen, G. 140, 184 Rudofsky, Bernard 2 RuimteVeldWerk (RVW) 164, 168, 171–5 Ruud, M. E. 126, 128, 140 Ryerson University 194–205 Rykwert, Joseph 2 safety, homeliness 83 Saglie, I.-L. 181 Salazar, J. F. 254, 255 Sandercock, L. 149, 150, 151, 152, 158

Index 269 Sanders, E. B.-N. 146 scale, microscales 62–75 Schliehe, A. K. 101–2n1 Schneider, T. 161 Schön, D. A. 13 Scott, F. D. 172 scouting 188 Seamon, D. 78 Selskabet for Billige Boliger (SfBB) 226, 230–3 sensory experience 37 Sheridan, A. 99 Shove, E. 65, 240 Sillitoe, P. 7 site-writing 78 situated knowledge 27 Skærbæk, M. 91 Skov, Rasmus Stahlfelst Holck 35–6, 37, 39, 42–3, 46n2 SLA 208, 211 slow architecture 20–1 slow space 141 Smith, K. 40 Smith, R. C. 4, 254 social concepts 194–206 social control 117 social mechanisms, rendering 219–21 social media, balconies 49–50, 56–7, 59 social sustainability 4 social transformative change 150–1, 154, 160–1 social urbanism 110, 112–14, 116 Society for Applied Anthropology 4 socio-cultural practices 13, 150; site analysis 140, 144; urban design studios 207–23 socio-material dynamics 9, 32, 105 Sollien, Silje Erøy 178, 224–36 Sonne, K. 48 spatial agency 161 spatial belonging see belonging spatial difference 149–63 spatiality 252–3, 261–2 splotting 135–48, 185, 188 stakeholder collaboration 117 Stampe, Zenia 97 Stappers, P. J. 146 Stender, Marie 1–12, 31–3, 48–61, 78, 105–7, 111, 119, 150, 165, 233, 252 Stengers, I. 20 Stenslund, Anette 178, 207–23, 253 Støa, Eli 107, 164–76, 177–9 Støjberg, Inger 91

Stoner, J. 159 Storstrøm Prison 94 storytelling, film-making 150, 151–4, 160 Stovner Library 122, 123, 124–7 Strathern, Marilyn 40 Strebel, I. 17 Sumartojo, Shanti 259 sustainable architecture 1, 4–5, 17, 178, 190, 237–49 Sustainable Developmental Goals 4 Sylvest, M. 62 symbolic boundaries 53 Tainio, P. 239 Tamari, T. 145 technological pilot logic 238, 239–40, 247–8 Teder, M. 166, 172 temporal belonging 136–7, 143 thick description 3 Thilmany, Drew Nathan 178, 194–206 Thorshaug, R. Ø. 164 Till, J. 21, 63, 161 time, homelessness 86 ‘tolerated stay’ 91, 97, 102n3 Tolstad, Ingrid M. 136, 141, 143, 178, 181–93 Topouzi, M. 242 Torffvit, Felicia 152–4 Torshov asylum-seekers’ reception centre 164–76 town-planning cinema 149 trailing 187 transport, Medellín 105, 113, 114 Tshishonga, N. S. 181 Tsing, Anna 225, 234 Tuana, Nancy 37, 43, 45 Turner, J. 91, 101–2n1 Turner, V. W. 118 the unbuilt 256–7 Unidades de Vida Articulada (UVAs) 109–21 United Nations: Convention on the Rights of the Child 181; Sustainable Developmental Goals 4 urban design studios 207–23 urban development, youth participation 181–93 urban renewal, rendering 214–15 urban space 9, 105–76; ‘Unidades de Vida Articulada’ 109–21

270

Index

urban youth 135–48 user evaluation 241–2 user/citizen participation see participation Valencia, Horacio 109, 114, 118 Van der Linden, V. 63 Vandkunsten Architects 226, 228, 230–1, 233 Vellinga, M. 1, 2 vernacular architecture 2 Vestby, Nina 141 Vike, H. 8 viscous porosity 32, 35–47 visualization 23–6, 225; renderings 207–23; splotting 136–48 Wagner, Laura B. 45 Wallman 52 walls 31–103; noise nuisance 32, 35–47; viscous porosity 32, 35–47

Wang, L. 7 Weirup, T. 48 Weizman, E. 91 welfare 6, 169, 171 welfare state 91, 100, 101 Whitney, D. 138 Woods, Ruth 178–9, 237–49, 253 world-making 17 Y-House project 182–3, 184, 185–91 Yaneva, Albena 3, 8, 13–29, 225, 251 Yordi, S. 240 youth participation, urban development 181–93 zero emission buildings 237, 242–8 Zuboff, S. 90 Zumthor, P. 62, 111